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Literary Review
A bewitching brew
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Green Gold is about the historical impact of a familiar commodity. But history moves according to more complex rhythms than consumer behaviour, says PAUL FREEDMAN.
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GREEN Gold: The Empire of Tea, like The Devil's Cup: Coffee, the Driving Force in History by Stewart Allen and Mark Kurlansky's Cod: The Fish that Changed the World, is about the historical impact of a familiar commodity. There are similar treatments of salt, coal, nutmeg and perfume, and even Simon Garfield's Mauve: How One Man Invented a Color that Changed the World (2000). The idea that innovations in taste should affect history more than the wars and intrigues of rulers appeals to today's reading and consuming public. Most of the commodities or inventions are extolled by their advocates as the key to modernity in providing energy or mass nourishment, or encouraging sobriety. And, true to form, Alan Macfarlane ascribes much of the progress of the past few centuries to the preference for tea in modern Britain. The result is a vivacious discussion of tea and the putative consequences of its popularity, with particular attention to its cultivation in the Indian province of Assam from 1839.
Green Gold begins with an evocation of life on the tea estates by Iris Macfarlane, Alan Macfarlane's mother, who lived in Assam from 1946 to 1966. Her chapter, entitled "Memoirs of a Memsahib", describes a colonial world of languid privilege, a fever-ridden environment in which clubs, tennis and servant troubles loomed large. Mrs. Macfarlane was unusual among tea planters' wives in her desire to learn more about life in India and to bring some alleviation of illness, poverty and illiteracy. She is engagingly rueful about what she could accomplish in the face of both British and Indian indifference.
The lush, damp beauty of Assam is the setting for the expansion of tea into 19th-Century India, a development that took on aspects of a speculative gold-rush as the extraordinary levels of tea consumption in Britain made China's control of the world supply increasingly irritating. Despite a slow start, the Assam tea industry by 1900 had nearly destroyed Chinese exports and greatly enriched the Assam Company, which had owned the estates and shipped the tea. As with sugar, the wealth of a few and the mild pleasure afforded to consumers by tea were built on the misery of impoverished and mistreated labour.
In some ways tea is an ideal and extremely profitable plant. It produces new leaves every six weeks and can be grown in diverse climates. It is lightweight, and to make a decent infusion requires only small amounts. On the other hand, to grow and gather it involves great effort and delicacy (to this day there is no substitute for human labour at harvest). Its preparation for export also requires many steps in drying, ageing and roasting, although here British machinery was able to reduce what had been an extremely high processing cost. Labourers for the Assam tea estates were imported, first from China and subsequently from more populous and impoverished regions of India. The conditions of transport to Assam and housing in the worker's settlements were appalling. The harsh regime resembled the worst British factories, except that it took place in a stifling and disease-ridden climate. Macfarlane describes both the terrible lives of the "coolies" and the evasive response of the Assam Company and the Indian Tea Association in face of occasional scandals and reform efforts. Thomas De Quincey called tea "bewitched water", an expression Macfarlane uses to refer to both the attraction of tea in Britain and the grim consequences for Asians caught up in the arduous process of bringing it to market.
For many mildly (or not so mildly) addictive modern commodities, the attraction is itself dangerous. Gin (the subject of two recent books, by Patrick Dillon and Jessica Warner), both cheered and ruined lives in the 18th Century; tobacco is a solace for boredom and anxiety but has some health drawbacks. Tea, according to Macfarlane, is different. Its effects on consumers are, in his estimation, uniformly positive. Not only does tea relax tension and sharpen the mind, its popularity turned people away from drinking cold water, the greatest enemy of pre-modern public health. By boiling water to make tea, the bacteria in polluted water were neutralised. Tea is a beverage of sobriety, combating both belligerence and fatigue. Especially when drunk with sugar it nourished and increased the endurance of the British industrial worker and soldier. Macfarlane believes it to be responsible for what he calls four of the greatest developments in world history: the rise of China's population and power during the Sung dynasty, the population density and urbanisation achieved by Japan in 18th Century, the first Industrial Revolution which took place in Britain just as tea was gaining supremacy after 1730, and the formation of the British Empire. Britain's precocity and energy are supposedly the products of the discipline and hygienic advantage conferred by drinking tea as opposed to ale, wine, water, or that overrated, overstimulating beverage, coffee.
It is true that the water supply of pre-industrial Europe was polluted, but as the great cholera pandemics of the 19th Century demonstrate, water continued to spread disease during the Industrial Revolution. The potato probably had more to do with positive population trends in the 18th Century than tea, but, more importantly, history moves according to more complex rhythms than those imposed by consumers. Even if tea were indeed the virtuous drink of an industrious sobriety, something other than rational health benefits must have been the spur, otherwise tobacco and opiates would have fallen into desuetude.
Reductionist arguments that modern progress arises out of consumer behaviour are attractive but misleading. To argue that tea drinking created favourable conditions for revolutions in industry and colonisation runs up against similar problems as the hypothesis that the Roman Empire fell because of lead used in pottery. After all, Russia has been a tremendous consumer of tea, yet this hasn't helped its industrial efficiency. The highest per capita consumption of tea until recently was in Iraq. Britain has continued to drink large quantities of tea, in good times and bad. The drama of tea is not that of a discovery that changed history, but rather a chapter in the comparative history of globalisation, the entrancing and sinister story of how a mildly comforting beverage affected taste, class, colonisation and consumption.
Green Gold: The Empire of Tea, Alan Macfarlane and Iris Macfarlane, Ebury, p.308, £12.99. 0 09 188309 1
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