Number of words: 541

The seed from which this story begins is that of the tea bush T (Camellia sinensis), which produces most of the world’s tea. The oldest tea leaves go back 2,150 years and were found in the tomb of China’s Jia Ding Emperor. Beginning as an elite practice, tea drinking advanced quickly through China and became widespread by the early middle ages.

Chinese tea is said to have been introduced to England by the wife of King Charles II, Catherine of Braganza. The bride’s native country. Portugal, was the first European nation to enter the Indian Ocean; its network of bases and colonies included Macao, in southern China, which was leased to the Portuguese in 1557 by the ruling Ming dynasty By 1662, when Catherine of Braganza’s marriage was celebrated, the Ming were in the last stages of their overthrow by the Qing dynasty. but the status of Macao remained unchanged. This meant that at the time of the wedding, Portugal had been consuming Chinese products for over a century, so the practice of tea drinking was already well-established among the country’s upper classes In her dowry Catherine brought with her two things that would prove to be of world historical importance: a casket of tea and a set of six small islands that would later become Bombay (now Mumbai).

Tea drinking caught on quickly in England, and by the early eighteenth century, even before Britain established its empire in India, Chinese tea was already an important article of trade for the British economy. In the decades that followed, the value of Chinese tea for the British increased even faster Throughout the eighteenth century, even as the British were conquering immense swaths of territory in North America and the Indian subcontinent. Chinese tea remained the British East India Company’s prime source of revenue, much of which was used to finance British colonial expansion: During the eighteenth century, writes the historian Enka Rappaport, ‘tea paid for war, but war also paid for tea” By the late eighteenth century, tea had become so much the national drink that the Company was required by Act of Parliament to keep a year’s supply always in stock.

The degree to which the fortunes of the British Empire were enmeshed with tea seems astounding in this post-industrial age is it really possible that the country that pioneered the Industrial Revolution was financially dependent, through the very period when it was industrializing, on a plant reared by humble peasants in the Far East? But so it was. As the British Empire entered into battles in Europe and North America, writes the historian Andrew Liu, ‘the state increasingly relied upon raising tea duties to pay for war.”

The importation of tea was for centuries a monopoly of the East India Company, and the customs duty on it was for a long time one of Britain’s most important sources of revenue. The duty ranged from 75 per cent to 125 percent of the estimated value, which meant that the customs duty on tea fetched higher revenues for Britain than it did for China, which charged an export duty of only 10 per cent.

Excerpted from Pages 12 to 13 of Smoke And Ashes: A Journey Through Hidden Histories by Amitav Ghosh