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- [00:01]
Anita Anand
If you want access to bonus episodes, reading lists for every series of Empire, a chat community discounts for all the books mentioned in the week's podcast ad, free listening and a weekly newsletter, sign up to empire club@www.empirepoduk.com at the home Depot.
- [00:20]
William Durrimple
Spring Black Friday is here and we've got 14 days of deals to transform your space. So what are you working on? How about a quick and stylish patio furniture update? And what's outdoor dining without a shiny new grill? Find a wide selection of grills under $300 like the next grill four burner for only $229 at the home Depot. Then add a little ambiance with string lights. Shop 14 days of deals during Spring Black Friday now through April 16th at the home Depot. I was never really a runner. The way I see running is a gift, especially when you have stage four cancer. I'm Anne. I'm running the Boston Marathon presented by bank of America. I run for Dana Farber Cancer Institute to give people like me a chance to thrive in life, even with cancer. Join bank of America in helping Anne's cause. Give if you can atb ofa.comSupportAnn what would you like the power to do? References to charitable organizations is not endorsement by bank of America Corporation. Copyright 2025.
- [01:19]
Anita Anand
McDonald's meets the Minecraft universe with one of six collectibles and your choice of a Big Mac or 10 piece McNuggets with spicy nether Flame sauce. Now available with a Minecraft Minecraft movie meal.
- [01:31]
William Durrimple
I participate in McDonald's for a limited.
- [01:33]
Anita Anand
Time, a Minecraft movie only in theaters.
- [01:45]
William Durrimple
Hello and welcome to Empire with me.
- [01:47]
Anita Anand
Anita Anand, and me, William Durrimple.
- [01:50]
William Durrimple
Now we're starting a new series for you and actually it's got a great title. It was a working title, but I think we should just slap it on the whole thing. Victorian narcos. Has that got your attention yet?
- [02:01]
Anita Anand
I like it.
- [02:02]
William Durrimple
It's a good one, isn't it? But this is a story that really has enormous geopolitical ramifications even to this day. So it involves things that get you high, frankly. Opium. Yes. And if you are of a more staid lifestyle like me, cups of tea. But these things are entwined inextricably in one of the most dramatic periods in history.
- [02:22]
Anita Anand
It's a very, very odd story. It's the story of how the British went to war for the right to sell drugs. I mean, it's so the reverse of everything that you expect and obviously everything that's going on today The War on drugs today is trying to stop drug cartels from selling drugs into the West.
- [02:43]
William Durrimple
That's right. It largely frowns on the drugs.
- [02:46]
Anita Anand
Yes, you're right, it does. Well, this one is cheerleading it, literally. The British fought two mid-19th century wars for the right to sell drugs to China and they got on their high horse and they made speeches in Parliament about how the Chinese had no right to stop them selling drugs. It's a very, very odd story, but the more you investigate it, the weirder and the deeper it goes.
- [03:10]
William Durrimple
Yeah, I mean, so weird and so deep. And also, you know, first, I mean, tea. Let's just. Just for one second, just consider tea. Tea. The importance of tea. So there's a fantastic quote I'm going to read you from Thomas de Quincey.
- [03:22]
Anita Anand
You've got very excited about this quote.
- [03:23]
William Durrimple
I am, because. Because it melds everything together. So Thomas de Quincey famously wrote Confessions of an English Opium Eater. You all knew that. You didn't need me to tell you. But this is a quote from that. Tea, though ridiculed by those who are naturally coarse in their nervous sensibilities, will always be the favourite beverage of the intellectual. So we're also going to chart this sort of love affair that Britain has with tea and why it gives it such enormous economic geopolitical power. This goes to the very heart of why the world looks a little bit like it does today. So for China to have this imposed on them, to have, you know, the British saying, how dare you stop us from selling you opium. Who the hell do you think you are? Led to what the Chinese call the century of humiliation. And that has set the die in Chinese minds, certainly, for this resurgence of Chinese pride, a resurgence of Chinese muscularity which leads directly to. To the creation of the Chinese Communist Party, of Mao, of this isolationist realm that decides it is going to fight back and redefine itself and never again will be told what it's allowed to have in its borders or not. So it is a real imperial story with, as William says, completely unexpected twists and turns.
- [04:36]
Anita Anand
There's a very funny story which I love, which is when George Osborne and David Cameron went to Beijing to try and improve British Chinese relations a decade ago, it happened to be in November and it was Remembrance Day. So they, of course, to avoid getting sort of lectured by the Daily Mail, they arrived with their poppies in their lapels and got off the plane. In Beijing, wearing red poppies means something.
- [05:01]
William Durrimple
Else in China means something else. When you're getting over a century of humiliation, over opium and the poppies that create those things. And you've just come back from Hong Kong, haven't you? I mean, you've just come back from a place where you've seen this and the indelible print that this period of history has left.
- [05:16]
Anita Anand
I have been in Hong Kong researching this, in fact, both tea and the whole story of the Opium Wars. And what struck me, as well as the fact that it's so central to understand modern China and how modern China sees itself now not as some sort of new arivist on the scene as it's sometimes talked about in the Western press, but it is China coming back to its old position as the Middle Kingdom at the center of the world, taking its rightful place as the main power in the world and recovering from this century of humiliation. But what also I think is crucial and fascinating is I don't think any of us really understand how important opium was for the whole British imperial exercise. It wasn't just the two Opium wars and this sort of, you know, strange urge to sell drugs for the hell of it to China. It's at the heart of the whole imperial project. Cities like Bombay, Calcutta and Singapore.
- [06:17]
William Durrimple
Eczema isn't always obvious, but it's real. And so is the relief from Ebglis. After an initial dosing phase of 16.
- [06:26]
Anita Anand
Weeks, about 4 in 10 people taking.
- [06:28]
William Durrimple
EVGLIS achieved itch relief and clear or almost clear skin. And most of those people maintain skin that's still more clear at one year with monthly dosing. EBGLIS Lebrikizumab LBKZ, a 250 milligram per 2 milliliter injection, is a prescription medicine used to treat adults and children 12 years of age and older who weigh at least 88 pounds or 40 kilograms with moderate to severe eczema, also called atopic dermatitis, that is not well controlled. With prescription therapies used on the skin or topicals or who cannot use topical therapies. Eglis can be used with or without topical corticosteroids. Don't use if you're allergic to ebglis. Allergic reactions can occur that can be severe. Eye problems can occur. Tell your doctor if you have new or worsening eye problems. You should not receive a live vaccine when treated with ebglis. Before starting Ebglis, tell your doctor if you have a parasitic infection searching for real relief. Ask your doctor about ebglis and visit eglis.lilly.com or call 1-800-LilyRx or 1-800-545-5979 this episode is brought to you by Indeed. When your computer breaks, you don't wait for it to magically start working again. You fix the problem. So why wait to hire the people your company desperately needs? Use Indeed's sponsored jobs to hire top talent fast. And even better, you only pay for results. There's no need to wait. Speed up your hiring with a $75 sponsored job credit@ Indeed.com podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Ryan Reynolds here from Mint Mobile with a message for everyone Paying Big Wireless way too much. Please, for the love of everything good in this world, stop with Mint. You can get premium wireless for just $15 a month. Of course, if you enjoy overpaying. No judgments. But that's weird. Okay, one judgment anyway, give it a try@mintmobile.com Switch upfront payment of $45 for.
- [08:10]
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- [08:16]
See full terms@mintmobile.com are there now and.
- [08:19]
Anita Anand
Are as large and as rich as they are because of the trade in opium. And it had multiple effects. It not only covered the balance of payment problem with the British, who were buying so much tea by the early 19th century that they were massively in debt to the Chinese. And opium not only wiped that out, but actually gave the East India Company and the British government a positive balance of trade. But what it also does is that it sort of rebalances world trade so that for the only time in all of history, silver and gold are flowing from China and the east to Europe for almost the whole of world history up to that point from the Roman times onwards. All those episodes we did on the Golden Road, my book, and the story of how Roman gold used to pour into Indian pockets. That's the beginning of, you know, 1500 years of Western money ending up in Indian purses and Chinese purses. But this whole episode with the opium reverses that and changes it. But it also, in a very weird way provides the British government with money because they tax the tea. And it's the tax on tea, as we're going to hear more in this episode, which finances British imperial expansion elsewhere. So in every way this is a much, much more central and important story than you'd expect.
- [09:38]
William Durrimple
Let's start with the old hackneyed phrase, which is, you know, I wouldn't do that for all the tea in China. So let's start with the actual origin of tea and its relationship with China. So we know that the oldest tea has been discovered by archaeologists going back 2,150 years and it was found in the tomb of a Chinese emperor. Tell us more about that.
- [10:00]
Anita Anand
Tea is indigenous to Southeast Asia and to China. The monsoon rains provide the sort of dousing that you need to get tea growing. And the warmth and the wetness of that part of the world suits the tea tree. And very early on people begin to trade in it. And while, as you say, you know, there are tea leaves found in imperial tombs dating back 4,000 years, this is very early in man's history. And in my trip to Hong Kong, I saw teapots that still survive completely intact from about 250 BC. But from that period it's a major item of trade in China. And there are trails leading to tea going to places like Tibet and Burma and Mongolia. And in the Tang period, which is the kind of, you know, the golden age of imperial China, it becomes a massive pan Chinese drink. It's the archetypal drink associated perhaps bizarrely and not necessarily as you'd imagine, with scholarship and with poetry. It was all part of a thing. If you were the Confucian scholar, you'd yearn for the countryside. You'd love to be next to some waterfall in a forest, in the mountains, drinking a cup of tea and writing poetry. That was the sort of, that was the ideal, that was what brilliant young men wanted to do.
- [11:21]
William Durrimple
But the other thing that is interesting about tea in China is that it's not just the way we drink tea. I mean, even in those earliest days, it was part of ceremonial ritual, wasn't it? I've been lucky enough to do a tea ceremony when, when I was here. Have you? Yes, yes, yes I did. I mean, it's very elaborate, you know, there's a lot of, you know, silence and you've got to be solemn and it's a reverential act of drinking tea.
- [11:46]
Anita Anand
Well, people took it very seriously. It wasn't just, you know, having a cup of tea. As early as 780 there is a book called the Classic of Tea written by a scholar called Liu Yu. And he describes how tea stimulates the mental faculties, promotes a temperate lifestyle and provokes the liveliness of poetic feelings. That's a quote which is not exactly how we think of a cup of tea. We think of having something mid morning to restore you. But it's a far more high minded and sort of scholarly business if you're an 8th century Chinese intellectual.
- [12:21]
William Durrimple
What I find fascinating about this, and this reminds me of our coffee episode that this predates any notion of the fact that there is caffeine or an active ingredient in this. But both those who discover, you know, those goat chewed coffee beans and also, you know, sort of the leaves from the tea plant, they do recognize this alertness that it gives you, or almost give it sort of this spiritual aspect because it changes the way you think and look at the world. And that is caffeine. That's got to be the caffeination of the drink. I'm really interested though in the way that the taste spreads. Because if you give a young child, I have a young child a cup of tea for the first time and you know, we douse ours with milk and sugar, but just a cup of tea straight, it is bitter and you know, a small child will always reject it and go, what's that give me juice. At what point do people say, actually this is gorgeous, I like this more. This is a gorgeous drink. When does that happen? How does the taste start spreading around?
- [13:15]
Anita Anand
As you said, it's turned into a great sort of tamasha, as they say in India. It's a great ceremony. And even today in Hong Kong, last week, buying my tea, I was given a whole sort of A4 instruction for how the different kinds of teas, whether it was a lapsang or it was jasmine pearls or an oolong, how all these different things should be only have hot water in them for one or two or four minutes and then you've got to withdraw the tea leaves. You know, sort of dunking a tea bag in for half an hour like you might do in a British cuppa. And very early on also, as well as being associated with poetry, it's associated with Buddhism for some reason. It's regarded as something cleansing, purifying and goes very well with the whole Buddhist faith. It's as a Zen Buddhist drink that it spreads to Japan in one direction and then with Buddhism that it spreads to Mongolia. And there the Mongols are the first people to add milk and cream to it, which the Chinese would have regarded as an atrocity, sacrilegious, as a sacrilegious way of treating your tea. And then by the 10th or 11th century it reaches Persia, where it's the Persians who add sugar for the first time in a sort of crystalline form.
- [14:32]
William Durrimple
As with many things that we talk about on this series, there'd be Jesuits. I have read that it is the same conduit, this sort of spread of tea through the missionaries. You know, you just mentioned Japan and there were Jesuit missionaries in Japan and are they the ones who take this discovery and then move it around the world, where people start adding their own taste enhancers to it.
- [14:55]
Anita Anand
Exactly that. There's this character, Matteo Ricci, who is a famous Jesuit missionary in Japan. And he is the first European to write about watching a tea ceremony. He meets a tea master called Sen Raku, who's a kind of Zen Buddhist tea drinker. And it's all part of his ritual. So Matthia Ricci records this as Jesuit recording something spiritual. But very soon his more commercially minded compatriots realize that this is something that can be traded. And not only the Portuguese, but the Dutch get onto it pretty quick.
- [15:28]
William Durrimple
Before you can trade it, you've got to get it out of the hands of the Chinese because don't they grow it? I mean, the thing is, the Dutch aren't growing it. Others don't have the plants, do they? So, I mean, how can they even countenance the fact that they might grow this stuff and start selling it around the world?
- [15:43]
Anita Anand
So the place where that sort of transference happens is the island of Java in Indonesia. And the Dutch have got Batavia. One story we will definitely do on this podcast at some point is the whole story of the Dutch wars over spices. Our friend Giles Milton, who did our Smyrna episode, oh, he's fabulous, wrote a wonderful book called Nathaniel's Nutmeg about this. But when the Dutch are opening up their markets in Batavia, which is the port of modern in Jakarta today, they have Chinese traders coming in selling tea in these Dutch owned markets. And that's how the Dutch get onto it. And it is the Dutch, counterintuitively, who first bring it to India. And we hear about it in Surat, which is a port we've talked a lot about on this pod. It's the great Mogul port. It's the port where Thomas Row turns up and falls out with the Mogul governor and where his chaplain gets into a fight. Is that the story?
- [16:41]
William Durrimple
It's his cook, isn't it? Cook.
- [16:43]
Anita Anand
This is cook. You're right, this is cook.
- [16:44]
William Durrimple
Gets into a massive punch up.
- [16:48]
Anita Anand
Very undiplomatic start to his mission.
- [16:51]
William Durrimple
Not good, not good. But also there's a really lovely thing here because there are two pronunciations of t in the world. Like so from India we call it chai, but you also have tea and in Germany it's te. So this is the bifurcation when the Dutch get involved that you have this different pronunciation that's launched into the world. I mean, just, just talk a bit about that because I Love this story.
- [17:13]
Anita Anand
So I didn't know until I was researching this that that actually both those words have a Chinese origin and one is from North China and one is in South China. And I think it's te, which goes into the European stream and chai that.
- [17:26]
William Durrimple
Goes east, which is why, you know, sort of Eastern countries, we call it chai, or as you know, you good people like to call them chai lattes. I can't tell you what that does to an Indian sensibility, but it's not a good thing. Not a good thing. Chai latte. But look, so you've got chai for one half of the world because one part of China and you've got tea because of the other traders, the Dutch East India Company, though you say, you know, they're the first to jump onto this and they do say very quickly that tea was easily the most profitable product that they have ever dabbled in, because the money starts rolling in quickly, doesn't it?
- [18:00]
Anita Anand
We've got the first details of a Brit having a cup of tea. Actually happens in Seurat, a character called Peter Mundi, and he travels from Surat, where he first encounters tea.
- [18:12]
William Durrimple
And Surat is in Gujarat, which is a great trading port and very well known for diamond merchants. But also because it's a port, lots of traders come into Surat. It's an incredibly wealthy city in India. So Peter Mundy washes up in Surat and then what?
- [18:27]
Anita Anand
And he says there is a herb with water boiled in it. He says it must be drank warm and is accompted wholesome. And that rather sort of ungrammatical sentence is the first thing written by an Englishman about tea. First of many, many thousands of pages which will be written because it becomes astonishingly central to the British economy. But oddly enough, it's not the British who are even first, second or third off the starting blocks at the beginning. It goes to Portugal, it goes to Holland, even goes to France before it gets to Britain. And in Louis XIV's 17th century France, it becomes a very fancy drink. Parisian physicians call it the impertinent novelty of the age. Cardinal Mazarin takes it for his gout, while Racine regards it as, you know, the perfect drink for an Enlightenment philosopher.
- [19:23]
William Durrimple
Oh, that's interesting. So, I mean, that's, that's early on though. But it's again, so the spiritual is sort of leached out of it now. And it is the medicinal, it is the qualities, you know, again, caffeine, they don't know it's caffeine but it's caffeine. It makes you sort of perk up. And that must be what they're talking about. I mean, I don't think it does anything for gout at all, but, you know, it makes you feel perky. So people thought it was some kind of elixir of some sort, but it's.
- [19:48]
Anita Anand
Something, you know, incredibly exotic. And just like coffee had been regarded as an aphrodisiac because I think they knew that the Turks had it. So therefore it must be something sort of sexy and to do with Hari. So it's regarded as a panacea when it arrives in England. And the person who brings it to England is the Portuguese princess Catherine of Braganza.
- [20:10]
William Durrimple
Just remind me, Catherine of Braganza is the same person who got Bombay as a dowry present.
- [20:14]
Anita Anand
Exactly.
- [20:15]
William Durrimple
And Tamchius, okay, so, you know, she gets a whole city as a dowry present. So Catherine of Braganza, the wife of King Charles ii, she is Portuguese by origin, and the first European nation to enter the Indian Ocean is Portugal, as William was saying. So they have this sort of network of colonies, the Portuguese. And, you know, we talked about Jesuits, so being the sort of slipstream of bringing new things back. But they also have Macau in southern China. It's being leased to the Portuguese in 1557 by, you know, the ruling Ming Dynasty. But in 1662, Catherine of Braganza, she gets married. Portugal has been consuming Chinese products for over a century. You know, chinoiserie. And everything to do with China is exotic and it's funky and it's sexy, as you were saying. So the practice of tea drinking among the upper classes is already there. So Catherine Braganza and her mate will know about the tea. So she brings it as part of this dowry, if you like, when she gets married. A casket of tea. And I love the detail on this. A casket of tea in a set of six small islands that will become Bombay. It's such a great story.
- [21:25]
Anita Anand
There's a very nice story which I think I've told before on this podcast, but which I love, that when the marriage contract arrives in London, the map has somehow got detached. And there's lots of puzzlement in London about where this place, which is. It's spelled Bumbye B U M B Y E when it arrives. And there's great discussion in court about where Bumbai might be. And they decide it must be somewhere in Brazil.
- [21:51]
William Durrimple
Right. But interesting. So they. I mean, it's Bumbai, which is like Mumbai, which is now it's reverted back to the Indian way of saying it. So you can see that whole stem. It was Mumbai or Bombay before the Brits Bombayed it up. Do people value the tea more than they value this weird set of islands that they've lost the map for? Bombayed. I mean, they don't. Do they care very much about that, or are they more excited about the tea casket?
- [22:15]
Anita Anand
Well, we hear a lot about the tea and there's a royalist poet from this period called Edmund Waller, who writes a poem on tea in honour of the Queen's birthday and champions the best of queens and the best of herbs, as he calls it. And this, again, I think, is the first poem in English about tea. And it is more kind of Stuart wives. Another one, Mary of Modena, who brings it to Holyrood palace in Edinburgh in 1680. So the Stuarts, a big early movers of tea leaves up there, they were.
- [22:46]
William Durrimple
But I mean, that fits, doesn't it? That tracks. If you've got a relationship with the Catholic world and the Catholics are drinking, you know, it must be great. Let's take a break now. And after the break, we'll talk about the migration of this tea. So Ebony's in Scotland, Catherine Braganza has brought it here. It's already big among the Stuarts, but how does it filter down to the rest of the British Isles? Join us, then.
- [23:11]
Anita Anand
So, welcome back to our Empire episode on tea. And this is the first episode of our story of how opium came to be at the heart of the British Empire. And as we explained in the first half, it has this weird link to the tea trade. And we were discussing just before the break how tea gets to England and how, first of all, it's Cathode Braganza. But then the East India Company gets on the app pretty quickly and there's a retired or returned East India Company sailor called John Ovington, who takes it upon himself to become a sort of propagandist for tea. And he writes this long tract about how wonderful tea is. A lot of the ideas come clearly from China, because it talks about how it's purifying, how it's healing and how it encourages temperance, which is a great feature in the history of tea because people compare it to alcohol. Remember, this is a period where the Brits are constantly getting drunk, when the Brits in India in particular, drinking alcohol, because it doesn't have amoeba in it in the way that water does. And so Ovington says if the drinking of tea were universal here, as it is in Eastern countries, we should quickly find that men might be more cheerful with sobriety and witty as opposed to loutish and badly behaved. And so you then get the building of Vauxhall Gardens, which becomes this very fashionable walking spot, specifically laid out as a sort of place full of nature, a garden with trees and flowers where you can take tea in this sort of semi rural setting. And Vauxhall Gardens becomes the first big sort of tea garden of the British Isles.
- [24:47]
William Durrimple
But at this point where tea is all the rage and again, you know, the trajectory is the same as coffee, you know, because it is a social thing. You have it with friends, you have witty repartee, it gets that whole, you know, panache that went with coffee in the coffee houses as well. But are they buying all this tea from China? Is it just only China that is selling them the tea that is now so in vogue?
- [25:10]
Anita Anand
Well, not initially, no, because they haven't opened up trade relations with China yet.
- [25:14]
William Durrimple
They're not going to sell. So where are they getting it from?
- [25:16]
Anita Anand
They're getting it from the Portuguese and the Dutch and getting it via Java and via Macau.
- [25:20]
William Durrimple
And they have got it just as a reminder, the Portuguese, because they have Java and Macau, they have tea plants because of the Chinese to ing and froing between Macau, they're allowed to have it because the Chinese are quite protectionist at this point. Point. So how does that sort of transfer work?
- [25:37]
Anita Anand
No, I don't think they're growing it in Java, I think they're just trading it through Java. I think that's the trajectory that tea leaves are being traded.
- [25:44]
William Durrimple
China is still tea central. So that's important. That's important when it comes to the imperial story. It is why other countries are slightly, even now wobbling because they may be getting it through Java, which means they're paying twice, they're paying a broker and they're also paying whoever the broker is paying. So there's a great uplift. And if you were sitting in an exchequer thinking, hang on, how much are we? How much are we paying? What if we had our own? Or what if we had direct trade routes to China? Then, you know, we could cut out the brokers. At least that uplift would be gone and it would be cheaper.
- [26:18]
Anita Anand
So that's exactly it. But initially, I think it's not in search of tea that the British go to China, they go in search of sugar and ginger on their first expedition, which is in 1717, but they buy some tea while they're there. It isn't something that they've set out to buy, but they get some. And it goes so quickly when it arrives in London that the company tells them to get some more. And the orders on the next voyage are, bring as much tea in the ship as you can conveniently stow. And by 1725, which is only eight years later, the company is importing £250,000 of tea into England from Canton alone every single year. And by that stage, it already displaces silk as the primary object of trade with china or porcelain, which is the other thing the 18th century British are keen to get their hands on. And it's an extraordinary story how quickly this exotic foreign drink, which had not been known in Britain at all a century earlier, grows at this astronomical figure, growing by nearly 10,000% in the course of this century. So that by 1805, the company will be shipping 24 million pounds of tea to Britain. It becomes Britain's national beverage. And, as someone in government describes it, practically unnecessary of life. It does that in a matter of 50 years.
- [27:47]
William Durrimple
So by the 18th century, we've got a country that is desperate for a cup of tea, jonesing for a cup of tea. We've got a company that is clearing the underdecks to bring the tea over. Where's money being made here? Like, who's making money and how is it being made here?
- [28:04]
Anita Anand
So initially, it is the company that's making all the money, and they're making so much money that, you know, if you go to one of those lovely National Trust houses that looks like Colin Firth has just been steaming through the lake in a pair of breeches, the chances are that it's made from the British and China trade.
- [28:22]
William Durrimple
So I'm struggling to listen to you now. You've given me that image. But okay, carry on. Fight through it, William. Fight through it.
- [28:28]
Anita Anand
You know where I'm heading with it.
- [28:29]
William Durrimple
I definitely do, but guess, carry on.
- [28:32]
Anita Anand
So the British government then begin to realize that this is something that they can make money out of, and they slap taxes on the import of tea. And the taxes go up from, I think, 15% to 75% to 125%. And by the mid 18th century, it's the main source of revenue for the British government. So there's this very nice little phrase by the historian Erika Rapoport, who's written a wonderful book on the history of tea. And she said, during the 18th century, tea paid for war, but war also paid for tea. It's financing the government, and in a sense, it's the engine now which is provoking further British imperial expansion. And throughout much of the 18th and 19th centuries, the tax on tea accounts for nearly a tenth of all British government revenue. So, you know, all the expenses of Britain at the time when it's most powerful and expanding most vigorously overseas, all over India and so on. It's the tea trade which is underpinning this.
- [29:41]
William Durrimple
It's also making a lot of money for those who are involved in merchant shipping because, you know, such as the demand that if you're able to charge whatever you like for shipping the stuff over, I mean, the taxes are on one side, but if you're making money on this voracious appetite for a product, then you're able to, you know, sort of bolster your own armada of merchant ships as well. So you sort of see a growth in that area as well of Britain and British shipping becoming much more powerful at this time.
- [30:12]
Anita Anand
And there comes a darker side to this, too, because the British like to have their tea with sugar, like you said your sons do. And therefore, as the demand for tea grows, the demand for sugar grows. Where does the sugar come from? It comes from the West Indies, from slave plantations. And so in order to keep the British refreshed and restored, you not only have this entire economy in the east, but you also have a slave economy within enslaved Africans being shipped across the Middle Passage. We did a whole series on this a couple of years ago to the slave plantations in the Caribbean to grow sugar so the British can get their tea. But meanwhile, in the east, just to leave the Caribbean out of it for a second, there is another problem, which is that the amount of money that the British are paying into Chinese pockets is causing a massive balance of payments problem. The west is hemorrhaging money and silver into Chinese pockets. And the British, particularly the British East India Company, which is organizing the strave, have a problem because they've just now beginning to seize land in India. And they are no longer having to pour money into Indian pockets because they now, you know, have taken control by force and by military means. They've seized areas like Bengal, so they don't have to pay as much for their cloth, but they're now losing all their silver into Chinese pockets. And the East India Company outlay on Chinese tea grows towards the end of the 18th century to as much as £9 million a year they're paying into the Chinese treasury. And you will not guess, Anita, who comes up with the solution to this.
- [32:03]
William Durrimple
Go on, surprise me. Shock me.
- [32:05]
Anita Anand
Surprise you. It's our old friend, Alexander Dalrymple. Do you remember him from. We did the episode on Endeavor.
- [32:11]
William Durrimple
Really? Is it really? Is it really?
- [32:14]
Anita Anand
I didn't know this actually until I was reading John Kay's wonderful book, the Honorable Company.
- [32:19]
William Durrimple
So. Okay, well, I mean, we have to then. All right. Who the hell was Alexander Dalrymple?
- [32:24]
Anita Anand
So Alexander Dimple appeared actually in a Christmas episode two years ago where we did the story of the end Endeavor with our friend Peter Moore. Do you remember that wonderful episode?
- [32:34]
William Durrimple
Remember it very well. After our Christmas lunch, which we will never do again. We're not doing that again. That was a bad and unprofessional idea.
- [32:43]
Anita Anand
I think we had rather too much refreshment at our lunch and ended up talking over each other and poor Peter got completely trampled underfoot. But he was telling the story of the Endeavour. And this was where we met Alexander Durand. Alexander was the cartographer and hydrographer of the East India Company. And there's a lovely story that when the Company captured Pondicherry, the French center in India, Alexander brought all the British maps down from Madras to the map room in the French headquarters and they had captured, I think, all the Spanish or Portuguese maps of the whole region. And Alexander put them all together like a jigsaw and realized that there was a large landmass where we now know Australia is. And it was Alexander who wrote this book called the Great Southern Continent and raised money for an expedition to go and find it. And then at the last minute, he wasn't given command of the vessel. And being the harumphy, bad tempered and slightly obstinate, not slightly, very obstinate man that he actually was, he said, well, if you're not putting me in charge of the whole expedition, only in charge of the scientific bit, I'm not going. And he sat on the quay in Leith and. And this other character who's just the, just the jobbing captain called Captain James Cook, went off and discovered Australia in one of the great eras of history, but for which everyone would now know, you know, durable family history far better and the name would be better spelt. And anyway, it's one of the great missed opportunities in my view of world history.
- [34:14]
William Durrimple
But yeah, no, no, we all regret that decision so much because then we'd be able to talk about to remorse so much more than we already do on this, on this bloody podcast.
- [34:26]
Anita Anand
But anyway, the point of the story is that he spent a lot of time in Southeast Asia and mapped the Malacca Straits and so on for the first time for the British and came up with this idea of this triangular trade, that it may be that the Chinese don't want to buy anything from the British. Not even, you know, our clocks and whirligigs and all the clever industrial things. They didn't like anything and, and they might not want anything from India other than a little bit of cotton and a little bit of saltpetre, which they used for their gunpowder. But they did like stuff from Southeast Asia. They liked pepper and spices and they liked opium. And he just put this casually in the letter, but it's the first time any Brit has the idea that you can sell opium to the Chinese. And so it's the beginning of this whole terrible story, I'm ashamed to say.
- [35:11]
William Durrimple
So he's the one to blame. I mean, it's clever, but it leads to an utter catastrophe. How proud do you feel? I mean, seriously, I sometimes worry about you because you offer these things and then, and then, you know, we end that conversation and I feel like we haven't followed through on the therapy. I mean, he does end up screwing a country. What do you think when you suddenly look into this, this sort of.
- [35:37]
Anita Anand
He's only doing it as a three way train. He's not responsible for growing poppies or suggesting that poppies is going to be the, the main thing. But, yeah, no, he plays a role in the story. As you may have noticed, the dribbles are rarely on the right side of history.
- [35:52]
William Durrimple
I think it's extraordinary.
- [35:53]
Anita Anand
Civil war or Ireland, at least a Rising or a Culloden. They're invariably on the wrong side.
- [35:59]
William Durrimple
On the wrong side. But you're not, you're on the right side. Thank you very much. As far as we know, as far as it goes, we'll see what skeletons fall out of that wardrobe a little later on. But look, shall we, shall we leave it there? And then maybe when we come back in the next episode of this series, we shall talk about. Now the idea has been planted like a poppy seed in the soil of opium being a commodity worth trading. And again, this is really important. It's the balance of payments that is everything. A country does not like to see its wealth leached out in one direction unless those people are buying something back.
- [36:41]
Anita Anand
We're recording this on the day that Trump is imposing tariffs to try and sort out his balance of payments problems. So this is a continual issue in history.
- [36:51]
William Durrimple
Yeah, no, I think that's a brilliant analogy. So tariffs, balance of payments. You can see why this is such a contemporary story in many ways. And join us for the next episode when we talk about how the poppy rebalances these economies. And if you want to hear the next episode, Right now, all you need to do is sign up to empirepoduk.com empirepod uk.com Just become a member of the club and you get early releases of these things. So if you really are one of those people who cannot wait, and I know what it's like, do that and you'll have early access. But till the next time we meet, it's goodbye from me, Anita Anand, and.
- [37:28]
Anita Anand
Goodbye from me, William Duranpool.