Tea Production in the Empire
Tea Production in the Empire
It is said that tea drinking began in the Szechuan nearly 2,000 years ago (Grigg 286). Early 19th c. records suggest that at one-point China had total monopoly of the global tea trade. Tea was planted and harvested in China. This means that regulating a prince point and distribution was operated by China as well. As an empire on the colonialist rise, with more upper-class people having access to better goods and English navymen in need of a boost, demand for tea rose as well. By the 1850s, a conglomerate of British businessmen sought after an opening in the market—a place where the English could develop their own tea industry. They found space in India and used the East India Company as the apparatus. Sara Rose in For All the Tea In China (2009) writes:
“For nearly two hundred years the East India Company sold opium to China and bought tea with the proceeds. China, in turn, bought opium from British traders out of India and paid for the drug with the silver profits from tea.” (Prologue)
India was used as a liaison between markets. For the English, tea and opium took priority in the East and their control of the sugar trade developed out in the New World, in places such as Barbados and Jamaica. Sugar, tea, and opium were fundamental to the success of England as a global economic power in the Victorian Era.
We see in the first episode The Autobiography of Jane Eyre (the web series) that there is a brief mention of how the character portrayed as Jane theorizes that her body is made up of an excessive amount of the tea she drinks, she says “I think at this point I am made up of 40% Earl Grey, and 20% Chamomile, and 10% North African Mint.” This is no coincidence.
As England continued to gain influence over the world, tea consumption followed with it. Earl Grey is a popular English tea typically reserved for those who wanted to and/or are considered posh and upper-class. Charlotte Brontë’s consideration for what kind of tea she is drinking barely mentioned, but the fact that Brontë’s Jane only drinks tea when she is around authority figures like Miss Temple (67), Rochester (109), and Mr. St. John (308) suggests that by proximity she had, one way or another, access to very specific foodways as she moved up in the ranks of geniality.
To situate Jane Eyre as somehow who drinks Earl Grey, Chamomile, and North African Mint elevates this adaptation as a critique on access, excess, and mass market globalization.
Work Cited:
Brontë, Charlotte. Jane Eyre.Norton. 4th Edition. New York. 2016.
Grigg, David. “The Worlds of Tea and Coffee: Patterns of Consumption.” GeoJournal, vol. 57, no. 4, 2002, pp. 283–294. JSTOR,www.jstor.org/stable/41147739.
Rappaport, Erika. A Thirst for Empire: How Tea Shaped the Modern World.Princeton University Press. 2017.
Rose, Sarah. For All the Tea in China. Penguin Publishing Group. 2009.