The East India
Company
The East India Company, a group of wealthy merchants,
had been chartered by Queen Elizabeth on December
31, 1600, when England, though victor over the warships
of the Spanish Armada, lagged far behind in trade.
Spain still stood first in the West and Portugal was
rivaled only by the Dutch in the East.
It can truly be said that this company helped build
the British Empire, Granted a monopoly on all trade
east of the Cape of Good Elope and west of Cape Horn,
it had rights normally exercised by governments: to
acquire territory, coin money, maintain armies and
forts, form foreign alliances, declare war, conclude
peace, and try and punish lawbreakers. It would hold
the greatest monopoly in any commodity that the world
has ever known—and that commodity was tea.
Catherine of Braganza, the Portugese bride of England's
King Charles II, is credited with popularizing tea
in her new home. Daughter of a great trading nation,
she had encountered tea early, and Charles had acquired
a taste for it while living in exile in Holland after
his father, Charles I, had been beheaded by the Protestant
revolution led by Oliver Cromwell. Tea came into the
public eye when two of Charles' courtiers returned
from a mission to Holland with some tea and their
wives gave continental-style tea parties, setting
a new fashion.
When Charles II came to the throne in the Restoration
in 1660 the East India Company, anxious to win the
royal couple's favor, presented them with a gift of
two pounds of tea—though it was purchased from a coffeehouse.
It would be nearly a decade before the company started
importing tea directly from the Orient. In 16 84 the
company succeeded in establishing the first English
trading post on China's mainland at Canton. Soon tea
made up over 90 percent of China's exports to England.
Silk and chinaware or other ceramics came second and
third. As tea authorities Joel, David, and Karl Schapira
perceptively observe: "Tea was served as much
for its strangeness as for its taste. Drinking tea
was one way aristocrats of the West could participate
in the exciting voyages of discovery being made in
their age."
The Chinese emperor decreed that the foreign merchants
could dock their ships and trade only at the port
of Guangzhou (Canton), and that they had to do business
through an appointed Chinese factor. The merchants
built a row of two- and three-story "factories"
or hongs (from hangov "business") on a narrow
strip of land along the coast. These had warehouses,
offices, and living quarters. Ships could remain only
through the August-to-March sailing season. Most personnel
went to the nearby Portuguese colony Macao for the
rest of the year. The foreign merchants had to pay
a certain amount to the emperor based on tonnage of
trade, which was collected by the chief official in
charge, the hoppo, a term derived from haigzian bu,
or customs office.
Few people realize how many huge fortunes both in
Britain and the United States were founded on the
tiny leaves plucked in the green hills of China. The
tea trade was also a respectable occupation for younger
sons, and several well-known literary men earned their
living in the service of the East India Company, including
economists James Mill and his son John Stuart Mill,
novelist Thomas Eove Peacock, and essayist Charles
Lamb.
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