Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power by Niall Ferguson Read Free Book Online Page A

world ... This importation consists chiefly of sugars and tobacco, of which the consumption in Great Britain is scarcely to be conceived of, besides the consumption of cotton, indigo, rice, ginger, pimento or Jamaica pepper, cocoa or chocolate, rum and molasses ...
     
    The rise of the British Empire, it might be said, had less to do with the Protestant work ethic or English individualism than with the British sweet tooth. Annual imports of sugar doubled in Defoe’s lifetime, and this was only the biggest part of an enormous consumer boom. As time went on, articles that had once been the preserve of the wealthy elite became staples of daily life. Sugar remained Britain’s largest single import from the 1750s, when it overtook foreign linen, until the 1820s, when it was surpassed by raw cotton. By the end of the eighteenth century, per capita sugar consumption was ten times what it was in France (20 lbs. per head per year compared with just two). More than anyone else in Europe, the English developed an insatiable appetite for imported commodities.
    In particular, what the English consumer liked was to mix his sugar with an orally administered and highly addictive drug, caffeine, supplemented with an inhaled but equally addictive substance, nicotine. In Defoe’s time, tea, coffee, tobacco and sugar were the new, new things. And all of them had to be imported.
    The first recorded English request for a pot of tea is in a letter dated 27 June 1615 from Mr R. Wickham, agent of the East India Company on the Japanese island of Hirado, to his colleague Mr Eaton at Macao, asking him to send on only ‘the best sort of chaw’. However, it was not until 1658 that the first advertisement appeared in England for what was to become the national drink. It was published in the officially subsidized weekly, Mercurius Politicus , for the week ending 30 September and offered: ‘That Excellent, and by all Physicians approved, China Drink, called by the Chineans, Tcha , by other Nations Tay alias Tee ... sold at the Sultaness-head, 2 Copheehouse in Sweetings Rents by the Royal Exchange, London ’. At around the same time, the coffee house owner Thomas Garraway published a broadsheet entitled ‘An Exact Description of the Growth, Quality and Vertues of the Leaf TEA’, in which he claimed that it could cure ‘Headache, Stone, Gravel, Dropsy, Liptitude Distillations, Scurvy, Sleepiness, Loss of Memory, Looseness or Griping of the Guts, Heavy Dreams and Collick proceeding from Wind’. ‘Taken with Virgin’s Honey instead of Sugar’, he assured potential consumers, ‘tea cleanses the Kidneys and Ureters, & with Milk and water it prevents Consumption. If you are of corpulent body it ensures good appetite, & if you have a surfeit it is just the thing to give you a gentle Vomit’. For whatever reason, Charles II’s Portuguese Queen was also a tea-drinker: Edmund Waller’s poem dedicated to her on her birthday praised ‘The Muses’s friend, tea [which] does our fancy aid, / Repress those vapours which the head invade, / And keep the palace of the soul serene’. On 25 September 1660 Samuel Pepys drank his first ‘cup of tee (a China drink)’.
    However, it was only in the early eighteenth century that tea began to be imported in sufficient quantities – and at sufficiently low prices – to create a mass market. In 1703 the Kent arrived in London with a cargo of 65,000 lbs. of tea, not far off the entire annual importation in previous years. The real breakthrough came in 1745, when the figure for tea ‘retained for home consumption’ leapt from an average of under 800,000 lbs. in the early 1740s to over 2.5 million lbs. between 1746 and 1750. By 1756 the habit was far enough spread to prompt a denunciation in Hanway’s Essay on Tea : ‘The very chambermaids have lost their bloom by drinking tea’. (Samuel Johnson retorted with an ambivalent review, written – as he put it – by a ‘hardened and shameless tea-drinker’.)
    Even