207 Tea as a common beverage originates in China, and until the 18th century it was widely cultivated only in the Far East. During the 17 th century, the hot drink produced out of brewed tea leaf became increasingly popular, first in Portugal and Britain and from the 1700s also in Holland and Germany. If we look at tea as a popular drink, a number of strong asymmetrical dependencies become apparent. Initially only green tea was drunk in Europe, with black tea becoming available from the 18th century onwards. Both are derived from the same plant but are processed differently. The British East India Company was founded in 1600 in order to compete with the Portuguese and Dutch trade enterprises. Tea was first recorded as on sale in London in 1657 as a luxury commodity. Initially, the Chinese accepted only silver in exchange for tea, representing an enormous drain on the European traders’ finances. In 1660, tea was ten times more expensive than coffee.1 The growing popularity of tea led to an increased consumption and a dramatic rise in tea imports to Europe from China (fig. 1). The demand for ever-increasing quantities of Chinese tea soon became a challenge for the merchants of the East India Company. This prompted the British to attempt to grow tea themselves in order to end their dependency on China.2 They experimented by sending seeds of various tea species, first to Kew Gardens in England and then to selected British colonies which had appropriate soil conditions and climates, including the Americas and the West Indies. But as the sea voyages were too long, the seeds did not germinate. Following this, they produced small seedlings and sent living plants back to Britain. However, the Chinese variety of tea (var. sinensis), which has relatively small leaves, was difficult to transfer to different habitats. Fortunately, at this time, wild indigenous tea shrubs (var. assamica) were discovered to exist in the Himalayas, especially in the area of Assam, in 1823.3 The Indian foot hills, with the states of Assam and Darjeeling, as well as the island of Ceylon, today Sri Lanka, provided ideal settings for the large-scale cultivation of tea. Long monsoon periods of four to five months of light but persistent rains at mild temperatures provided the perfect temperate climate for tea cultivation.4 The first plantations were established in the Assam Valley in 1830. They spread exponentially from the 1860s onwards, when a so-called ‘tea mania’ evolved in Britain. A desire for a constantly available, low-priced, pure and unadulterated, home-controlled source of tea provoked an expansion of the Empire. The aim was to enlarge territory on which tea could be grown and manufactured within British- controlled regions. As a consequence, imports of tea to England from India in the 1880s for the first time exceeded tea purchased from China.5 From the 1830s onwards, tea contributed to building and expanding the colonial British Empire.6 More land was annexed and land grants were given to British planters at extremely low prices.7 Forests had to be cleared to make space for plantations, and the skills for processing freshly harvested tea leaves had to be acquired at first from qualified Chinese tea makers (fig. 2).8 The tea industry grew further during the last quarter of the 19th and the first half of the 20th century, with the labour force and the area under tea cultivation expanding exponentially. Towards the end of colonial rule in 1947, 89 percent of the Assam Valley was controlled by British tea-managing agents based in Calcutta.9 POWER STRUCTURES ON THE TEA PLANTATIONS The tea industry became a major employer of wage labour during colonial rule. As tea leaf had to be plucked manually on often steep slopes, pickers were an essential necessity. The tea leaves were collected in woven baskets carried on the backs of the pickers and strapped to their heads (fig. 3). Chronic labour shortage was a serious problem in all tea estates. Initially, Chinese workmen were employed, but they were expensive and the local hill valleys often only sparsely populated. Therefore, pickers were procured locally from the peasant community of the wider area but increasingly imported from neighbouring Bengal.10 The imported workers, who did not own land locally and had no agricultural responsibilities of their own, were considered more reliable and could be controlled more easily by the British.11 Tea production was export-oriented, and an increasingly competitive world market with constantly fluctuating prices for tea created a very aggressive environment. In order to control the labour force and to prevent the formation of collective labour organizations, protests or strikes, the British established a tight hierarchical power structure in which the tea pickers (coolies) were immobilized within the closely guarded plantation complexes (coolie lines) and prevented from having contact with the outside world. This allowed the largely British plantation owners to set up and sustain a tight structure of dominance over the workers for more than a century.12 The wages offered to the tea-picking workers were seriously inadequate. Living and working conditions were harsh and inhumane, and mortality and desertions of tea pickers were high.13 With a need for labour and their longer-term control came coercion. During the 1860s and the boom in demand for tea in Europe, an indenture system was introduced in India, which bound labourers by legal contracts to work for the tea gardens for a fixed period of time.14 The indentured labourers, who came from poor and vulnerable backgrounds, were economically exploited and treated almost as slaves. The majority of them were—and still are today—women and members of low or outcast social groups, such as Ādivāsīs and Dalits (fig. 4). As workers often travelled and worked in family groups, child labour was also common. Whilst there were permanent workers, many were employed as casual or seasonal labour only.15 Those who tried to Julia A. B. Hegewald
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