Module 2 Liu Reading Notes PDF

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The Liu reading discusses the expansion of tea....

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The Birth of A Noble Tea Country Reading Notes Overview: ● The article shows the origins of the business of British tea in India. It uses a colonial and semi-colonial perspective from British, India, and Qing China. The establishment of the tea business in Assam was linked to East Asian conflicts waged to open up markets for opium and other commodities. ● The first modern, capital-intensive tea plantation in India was only one of the many outcomes of the extensive trading circuits that covered Asia and Europe, driving dramatic changes in northeast India and the southern coastlines of Qing China, among other places. The following were initially created during the early 19th-century decades of emerging British rule in Assam: currency, land ownership, wage labor, and a large investment in transportation to the capital city of Calcutta. ● During the 1830s and 1840s, the British Assam Company and its government former leader, the Tea Committee, taken the tea plant Camellia Sinensis from southern China and cultivated it in Assam, a complex process that involved gathering tea seeds, plants, and workers from southern China, Southeast Asia, and northern India in order to cause Indian tea production. ● The rise of Assam, as well as the related histories of tea and opium, was made possible by Asia's geographical integration of capitalism. Contemporaries of 19th-century colonialism were well aware of these circuits, which showed geography through economic activity rather than physical or political boundaries. ● These locations were not, however, connected solely on a materialistic level. Assam and Canton were also caught up in governmental debates over political economy and the British government's role in governance regulation. To put it another way, ideas moved as well. I.Canton And Free Trade ● When the British received the Bengal diwani, or the right to collect tax from the Mughal Empire in 1765, Assam was controlled by the 500-year-old Ahom kingdom, which had only just united its power by battling off Mughal armies. ● The Burmese invasion wars (1817–24) brought the company closer together. The British invaded with the declared goal of protecting their own lands by

defeating the Burmese, who eventually fell in 1826. ● Prior to the Burmese invasion, the Assamese people of Assam engaged in major trade activities. Raw cotton, lac dye, silk, and metals were all frequently exported to Bengal. **Sugarcane, indigo, and tea were some of the first ideas for tax income crops.** ● The East India Company's tea imports increased from 16 to 33 million pounds between 1784 and 1833. The Company and the Canton merchants came to a settlement on the spur of the moment. Both the British and the Canton sides, on the other hand, made huge profits from their respective businesses. ● According to Sudipta Sen, the British occupation of Bengal was based on the dual logic of free trade and government control. In 1834, Bentinck argued that "our Empire" needed to "annihilate the Chinese monopoly" by using tea grown in its colonies. The 1842 Treaty of Nanjing, a turning point in the history of unequal treaties, solved the cohong monopoly problem by creating five treaty ports and giving Hong Kong to Britain. II.Assam,1836-1850 The Land: Utility and Science ● British officers were responsible for moving tea production to South Asia which represented the ideological history of liberal utilitarianism, which was key to both land distribution in Assam and wars in China. The complicated rule of rent, which Malthus claimed to have discovered in 1815 and was later refined by Ricardo, impacted Mill's thinking. **In a nutshell, the law stated that land value, or rent, may be determined using scientific methods.** ● Mill was concerned that, because of the law's scientific accuracy, it might be misused if it's not strictly controlled. Although Mill's utilitarianism was established in England, his theories were first tested in India, where governmental powers were more vast and lands were seen as an important element of society. The utilitarian school promoted a scientific view of nature in which value was defined as an identity thing that sprang from the soil and needed unbiased study. ● A scientific group was sent to Assam, India, in 1836 to study local plants and evaluate the feasibility of building plantations. Bruce was promoted to Superintendent of Tea Forests in May and tasked with growing the plants on a low budget. G.J. Gordon, an opium dealer sent to Canton to buy tea plants and hire teamakers, wrote on October 3 that his "Chinamen" had arrived.

The Seeds and Teamakers: The Second History of Circuits of Exchange ● Bruce framed his experiments in terms of major and future reproduction because he was concerned with long-term profit. Tea plants, for example, do not naturally improve with age, thus they "would be almost useless for Tea, as the best Teas are produced by young leaves from young trees." As a result, large areas of land would be cut and burned every three years. ● However, he needed more seeds and men before he could get to that stage. The seeds were easy to get by. Bruce received the first big cargo of 1,609 plants in 1837, which was "healthy" and some of which were "sickly." ● The Chinese plants were around three feet tall on average, while the Assamese plants were "four or five times their size." He waited for the plants to develop seeds before comparing the Assamese and Chinese samples and planting them in different environments. ● For cultivation, Bruce looked at the factors: rain, soil, and shade. For example, plants moved in the sun and rain would usually survive; plants moved from shade to sun in the rain would die more, any plants moved from shade to sun in "unwelcoming soil" with a lot of rain would "not be alive the third year." ● Surprisingly, despite a century of trade with Canton, merchants had no previous knowledge of how or where tea was grown, thus Bruce's book was possibly the oldest British knowledge of Chinese teamaking ever. ● Fujian's Wuyi Mountains grew into a specialized manufacturing region. Tax policies were condensed into silver payments under the Ming, which pulled huge amounts of metal from Japan and Peru into a growing economy and population, driving trade in pottery, silk, and tea for silver. This vast coastal trade, like opium during the Qing, had far-reaching consequences for central economic change. ● By 1840, the Wuyi tea region supplied 90% of the thirty million pounds of export tea bought by British ships. Its growth followed the pattern of long-distance trade and global markets, which pushed scattered home businesses to create more. Local sources provide more proof of commercialization. As early as the 15th century, gazetteers kept track of tea-related stories. Records from the neighboring Jiangxi also corroborate the narrative. ● **Without the Chinese, or rather, the British manufacturing of semifermented and red tea, the British tea plantations in Assam would not have been possible.**

Bruce had sent the men to Assam to teach him how to make tea the Chinese way, but the creation of darker teas had already been affected by British taste in the wider scheme. The Labor: Batches of Chinamen and Aborigines ● Bruce and the Company approached workers in the same way they approached seeds: they imported as many men as possible, but they also valued efficiency, so they chose effective but cheap workers. Local people were traded in the same way that tea seeds were. ● The Company stated that it will use all resources available to members of the British colonial empire in its search for teamakers. Acchi, a guy who landed on a British ship in the 1770s, was the first Chinese person in colonial India. ● Acchi, Lumqua, and Ekan were English-speaking Chinese who worked as middlemen for Chinese labor groups traveling through India. Prior to the Assam Company, traders, miners, and shipbuilders had been leaving Qing China in large numbers to regions like Vietnam, Cambodia, and Siam for over a century. He'd be in charge of communications as well as paperwork such as registration, marriage, birth, and death. The similarities between Southeast Asia and Calcutta give some evidence for their incorporation into a wider colonial business world. ● The lineage and locality-based kongsi was the most common organizational form. The kongsis were free of the local governments, and in certain cases, more powerful than them. To weaken the hierarchy, the taukeh frequently exploited workers by imposing low salaries and high prices, as well as putting them in debt. Savings never fully developed as the workers hoped with the arrival of opium and its addictive drain on income. Ekan's ability to quickly obtain so many employees for the Assam Company is explained by the established hierarchy. ● Officials disputed the relative importance of Indian and Chinese workers in the same way they debated the worth of Assamese and Chinese tea plants. Unlike plants, though, and unlike workers, the Indian's disadvantaged position became a value. However, the indigenous worker, like the Assam plant, needed to be improved. Bruce mostly worried about laziness and opium addiction, which he believed would result in a flood of people fleeing to Assam - and Opium fever. ● The contradiction of seeking to develop consumers of British goods while also exploiting them for their work was highlighted by the Assamese addiction. Although preconditions for widespread addiction existed in the considerable

usage of opium in Indian civilization, according to John Richards, [p]aradoxically. "The Indian subcontinent was spared the disasters that wreaked havoc on China and Southeast Asia." The British required Indians to be good producers in order to benefit through colonization; whereas, the traders needed the Chinese to be good customers in order to profit from the trade. ● Although the Assamese refused to allow their women to work on the tea plantations, costs might be reduced if entire families of workers were moved. Families, not just single men, began to move to the plantations in the 1860s. ● Plantation officials in India forcefully hired workers from Assam's Chotanagpur region of Orissa to replace New World slaves in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Bruce was well aware of the hazards of reducing worker productivity by tiring them. The terrible treatment of workers was well documented in late 19th-century government documents when British inspectors were dispatched to investigate the plantations' circumstances. III.The Real Value of Tea ● **The Assam Company's aim was to import a costly product from abroad and mass-produce it using land that had previously been considered a waste resource.** In the end, the best mix for the company was Assamese soil, Chinese plants, and imported workers from Orissa and Bihar. ● ****The 19th-century Assam tea business exemplifies the complexities of the socioeconomic conditions that made industrial product manufacturing such a profitable form in the 19th century. It also shows the limits of the timeless, scientific approach to political economy that underlies Bruce's and his colleagues' discourse.**** ● **The Assam plantations were the result of large land acquisition in India, peasant indoctrination and recruitment from Orissa and Bihar, and battles in Canton for the right to a monopoly.** While they were inspired by local populations, climates, and terrain, they also borrowed management, recruiting, and organizational methods from the world....