As tea has become modern, it has been reduced to a dependable but superficial experience in which the beverage is of average quality at best resulting in an overwhelming disaster, says a new book.
'Empire of Tea: The Asian Leaf that Conquered the World' by Markman Ellis, Matthew Mauger and Richard Coulton explores how the British 'way of tea' became the norm across the erstwhile British Empire.
In the last half century, tea has become increasingly popular around the world, and increasingly the subject of global multinational business systems.
"As tea has become modern, it has become quotidian and immiserated. Tea has been reduced to a dependable but superficial experience in which the beverage is of average quality at best.
"The hot drinks industry has worked hard to discipline tea into a branded consumption experience; corporate tea is a consistently dark and strongly flavoured liquor, its dully unvarying flavour profile repeated time after time," the authors say.
According to them, this "recipe has been overwhelmingly successful for the producers but is has also been an overwhelming disaster for tea itself, which has had to sacrifice much in order to remain so popular".
Furthermore, they say, although tea companies are profitable, they operate in mature markets with little room for growth.
"The tea industry is beginning to recognise this conundrum. Its analysis indicates that to make more money, it needs to educate consumers, to reconnect them with wider and deeper practices of tea drinking and with knowledge about tea's history," the book, published by Speaking Tiger, says.
Tea became a defining symbol of British identity in a period when it all came from China and Japan: it was not until 1839 that the first 'Empire' tea from Assam found its way to the London markets.
So although the history of Britain's obsession with tea is often associated in the popular imagination with the 19th-century plantations of colonial India and the dramatic races between tea clippers, these aspects of its story were the effect - rather than the cause - of the widespread demand for tea, the authors say.
"Moreover it was Britain's appetite for this Asian leaf that led to its international adoption among its former colonies, becoming by one measure the world's most popular beverage after water. Victorian Britain was an 'empire of tea', but it was also a territory that had been conquered by tea during the preceding 150 years," they write.
After making its way to 17th-century London, where it
became an exotic, highly sought-after commodity, tea's powerful psychoactive properties have being mesmerising British society. Now the world's most popular drink after water, tea was one of the first truly global products to find a mass market, with tea-drinking now stereotypically associated with British identity.
Becoming central to everyday life, tea was embroiled in controversy, from the gossip of the domestic tea table to the civil disorder occasioned by smuggling, and from the political scandal of the Boston Tea Party to the violent conflict of the Anglo-Chinese Opium War. Such stories shaped the contexts for the imperial tea industry that later developed across India and Sri Lanka.
"The hot infusion of the oxidised and prepared leaves of Camellia sinensis was an extraordinary innovation when discovered by British drinkers in the 17th century. There was no language to describe its flavour, and few directions about how to consume it. Encountering tea for the first time was a creative and experimental process of curiosity and habituation.
"Grasping for analogies, a physician described tea as being 'somewhat like Hay mixt with a little Aromatick smell, 'tis of a green Colour, and tastes Sweet with a little Bitter'. It was also remarkably expensive: up to 60 shillings per pound for the best quality, ten times the cost of the finest coffee," the book says.
