British Imperialism and its Legacies: Thea sp. (Tea)
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Glasgow Museums has a collection of plants collected from other countries. The specimen of a tea plant NHB.1882.31.cqm came from a donation made by the Philosophical Society of Glasgow in 1882. Its location data states ‘Garhwal, Lobah garden’ and is dated 1843. Garwhal is in Uttar Pradesh (northern India) and the collection includes many specimens from this area and time (including Moradabad and Kumaon), with several linked to experimental gardens of the colonial East India Company.
The specimen represents the complicated story of the popular drink that is deeply embedded in Britain’s colonial history; its origins and legacies exemplify some of the worst impacts of colonial exploitation.
Tea plants, evergreen shrubs from eastern Asia, are known to have been used in China for about 2,000 years. It wasn’t until the 1500s that early missionaries and traders brought the drink back to Europe, where it became a fashionable drink. However, it didn’t become the popular widespread drink of today until the 1800s, when tea was imported in quantity from large estates in India.
The original teas brought over were Chinese ‘green tea’. This was a desirable and expensive commodity, and one of the key contributors to the trade deficit that British traders tried to address through the cultivation of opium in Bengal, which was then smuggled into China and sold to the Chinese. Attempts by the Chinese to ban this damaging trade resulted in military action by the British and, later, other European powers, in the Opium Wars between 1839 and 1860. Britain’s superior military power resulted in defeat and humiliation for China, the ceding of territory (including Hong Kong), the imposition of large reparation costs, and the forced creation of trading ports such as Shanghai, to enable greater access for British merchants. The serious and debilitating impact of opium addiction on the Chinese people is well documented.
During this time merchants attempted to smuggle tea seeds and plants out of China for cultivation and to break the Chinese trading monopoly. The discovery of related tea plants in Assam, in north-east India, resulted in trials to establish cultivation in India. In 1832 the Scotsman Hugh Falconer (1808–1865), employed as a surgeon by the British East India Company, became the superintendent of the experimental garden at Sarahanpur (now the Horticultural Experiment and Training Centre) in Uttar Pradesh in north India. In 1834 he was commissioned to research the potential of cultivating tea. The gardens experimented with various tea strains and the resulting ‘black teas’ quickly became competitive with the imported Chinese green teas. This success enabled a hugely profitable enterprise for the colonial government, which encouraged cultivation by offering Europeans land in Assam for the creation of tea estates to grow tea for export. Later tea estates became established in southern India, Sri Lanka (Ceylon), and other colonial lands, such as in East Africa. Today tea is grown even more widely, including in Scotland!
The new colonial-controlled tea estates exploited indentured labourers who grew and picked the tea. Slavery had been banned in the British Empire but conditions for these labourers was little better, and for many, conditions are little improved in the present day.
It is likely that Glasgow Museums’ specimen and other specimens in the collection came to Glasgow from the connection with William Jameson (1815–1882), a Scottish physician and botanist educated at Edinburgh University. He went to India in 1838 and became superintendent of the Saharanpur Botanical Garden in 1842, and is linked to the expansion of tea plantations in northern India.
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