British Empire

Empire, Trade, and Consumption

As Niall Ferguson and others have noted, empire began as a race for natural resources between the major European states and developed into an enterprise founded on the pursuit of trade. The British Empire introduced new markets to the British commercial sector but also provided an abundant variety of exotic goods and merchandise to the British marketplace. In many respects, the Britain of the eighteenth century had a set of conditions peculiarly suited to governing such an empire. For one thing, in a process accelerated by the union between England and Scotland, Britain had its networks of government, regulation, and trade centralized in the capital of London, which even then stood apart as a truly “international” city. Also, the population of Britain was rapidly moving from agriculture to manufacturing, often beginning with a transitional pattern we would now recognize as seasonal working, before finally shifting into full-time factory work.

All of this meant that by the first decade of the nineteenth century, Britain had a greatly expanded and more economically productive population. While the establishment of a mercantile class of professional traders was crucial for exploiting the opportunities that the imperial holdings presented, still more fundamental was the extension of a regular income across a greater spread of the population with a corresponding increase in spending power. The latter stage of the British Empire was therefore coincidental with the expansion of the consumer base in Britain, meaning that, as it developed, the British Empire became progressively tied in with the creation and satisfaction of consumer needs. The viability of the imperial project depended on extracting commodities from overseas territories and marketing these commodities to consumer bases, both in Britain and elsewhere.

One of the most notable of these emergent commodities, one that straddles both periods of empire, is tea. From the seventeenth century, prohibitive taxation levied on tea from China made it a luxury item. Beginning in the nineteenth century, however, the availability of mass-produced tea from imperial holdings in India, coupled with increased speed and reliability of transportation through the introduction of the high-speed clipper ships, began to make tea an accessible commodity. An organization known as the East India Company was instrumental in establishing tea as a mass crop in India and held an early state-approved monopoly on its export. Another significant factor in establishing imperial produce within everyday habits of consumption was the British habit of taking tea with sugar; a commodity imported from other, slave-dependent British colonies in the West Indies.

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