by Jeff Koehler
At first it wasn’t looking for tea, but spices: pepper, cloves, mace, nutmeg. Flavorings to enhance food, in some cases, to preserve it, and, frequently, to cover the taste of spoiling meats drove merchants to forge distant trade routes and search the farthest known, and even unknown, reaches of the globe.
Within two months of the charter’s being signed, Captain James Lancaster sailed not for India but for the East Indies—roughly the modern-day Indonesian archipelago—with a small fleet of four ships and 480 men. Two and a half years later, with an outbreak of the plague having carried away nearly 20 percent of London’s population and James I now on the throne, Lancaster returned carrying 1 million pounds of peppercorns from Sumatra in the hold of his flagship, the Red Dragon. Yet the journey was only a qualified success and the Company’s future was not immediately assured. While all four ships made it home—an impressive feat—the expedition cost the lives of 182 men, two-fifths of the crew.2 Unable to get ahold of cloves, Lancaster settled for a less valuable choice. Dumping five hundred tons of black pepper on the market drove down its value by about half, and the Company’s warehouses were overstocked in the spice for the next half dozen years.3
The Company, though, raised funds and quickly dispatched a series of further trading missions to the East Indies. With the third venture, when a haul of cloves alone turned more than a 200 percent profit,4 stakeholders began making healthy returns on their investments. In 1609 the Crown extended the Company’s monopoly. Growth was quick. By 1620, it had two hundred “factors”—agents or representatives—in more than a dozen trading posts5 that stretched from the Red Sea to Makassar on the southwestern tip of Sulawasi, Indonesia, near the Spice Islands. It also counted some thirty to forty “tall ships”—the type later known as Indiamen, with their high, raised poop and weapons—which the Company christened with names such as Peppercorn, Clove, and the particularly optimistic Trades Increase.6
Soon, but not by choice, the Company turned its attention to India. The Dutch had arrived first in the Spice Islands, and the Dutch East India Company, while smaller, exerted enough influence during the early decades of the spice trade to muscle the British out of the region and force them to set up elsewhere.7
In August 1608 an East India Company ship landed on the northwest coast of India at Surat, the principal Mughal port. While his ship returned to England, Captain William Hawkins headed inland to meet the Mughal emperor, Nuruddin Salim Jahangir, who ruled from the distant and splendid Agra. Hawkins, who spoke Turkish—not Persian, the language of the court, but Jahangir’s native tongue—made such a good impression that the Mughal ruler insisted he marry “a whyte mayden” from the palace, an Armenian. Once Hawkins was assured that she was a Christian, he did so, and, as Hawkins later wrote, “so ever after I lived content and without feare.”8
Yet a decade and succession of further envoys would pass before the Company was granted the right to reside and build some “factories,” or trading stations, where goods such as pepper could be bought when the price was low and stored until ships arrived to haul them back to Europe.
Over the next decades, as the Company continued to grow—not in a steadily ascending curve of imports, exports, and revenues, but in fits and starts, of boom years followed by ones with lost or pirated cargo—it garnered broader diplomatic and political support in London as well as presence on the Indian coast. Oliver Cromwell renewed the Company’s charter in 1657, during the short-lived republican Commonwealth of England, and extended its power to fortify and colonize any of its establishments, and to bring settlers, goods, and ammunition to them. In 1661, within a year of the House of Stuart’s being restored to the throne, the Company, granted Charles II, “shall and may, from henceforth for ever … into the said East-Indies … Trade or Traffick.”
The Company completed 404 voyages to the East Indies in the three decades between 1658 to 1688.9 By the end of the seventeenth century, it had established and fortified three main coastal bases in India: the presidencies of Calcutta in the northeast; Madras, some 850 miles to its south; and, on the west coast, Bombay (today called Mumbai). Bombay was not conquered but rented for £10 in gold a year from the cash-strapped Charles II, who had received it in his wife’s dowry. These, although just a trio of spots along the considerable coastline, with a vast interior between them, were a solid start.
The following century was relatively peaceful and focused on trade. Business was steady and so were dividends. “Though commercially astute, the Company’s servants were not trained for politics or war,” wrote the celebrated Delhi-born novelist Ahmed Ali.10 At first they kept away from those twin distractions. But by the mid-eighteenth century, that changed. The Company’s expanding riverside Fort William in Calcutta made the young nawab of Bengal, Siraj-ud-Daulah, suspicious. “You are merchants, what need have you of a fortress?” he demanded.11 When the British ignored him, the nawab marched on the city and, in 1756, managed to briefly occupy it. While unable to expel them from Bengal, the nawab drew British public fury with the infamous Black Hole incident, in which a large (and still-disputed) number of British were jammed into the fort’s small prison and, by morning, nearly all of them had suffocated.
In 1757, a Company force of a thousand British soldiers and two thousand sepoys—Indians, largely from the country’s traditional warrior or soldier castes, trained and uniformed into a disciplined army—led by Robert Clive retaliated and defeated the nawab and his much larger (though largely unpaid and disgruntled) army of fifty thousand soldiers and five hundred war elephants12 in the mango groves of Plassey outside Calcutta to claim the richest and most fertile province in the empire. It was a massive catch. The eminent Raj scholar Lawrence James speculates that Bengal had a population of perhaps 40 million, or about four times that of Britain.13 On the nawab’s throne, the Company placed Mir Jafar—a leader who had switched sides with his soldiers to join Clive—and dictated to him the terms of the treaty, which provided, not surprisingly, a windfall. The Company made a tidy £2.5 million. The British officers took over £1.25 million, with Clive getting £234,000 of the bonanza,14 plus a piece of property in Calcutta that brought him £27,000 a year in rent. Clive sailed home in 1759 some £300,000 richer. It was the greatest fortune ever made by an Englishman in India, and an especially staggering amount for a man who had gone out to India at nineteen on a modest salary of £5 per year—a trip he had to pay for himself as well as cover the expenses during the journey. At thirty-three, Clive had suddenly become one of the richest men in Britain.15
The Company soon reaped even larger rewards. In 1765, it dramatically improved its financial stake when it was awarded the diwani of Bengal, Bihar, and Orissa, gaining, in exchange for a tribute to the emperor in Agra, rights to collect tax revenues. (The tribute part of the deal did not last long. Warren Hastings, India’s first governor-general, soon canceled it.)
The significance of Plassey only became fully evident in hindsight. If Surat was the kernel of the British rule in India, Bengal and its tax revenues became the solid foundation toward gradual rule of the entire subcontinent. The East India Company’s private army ballooned over the next half century from 18,000 to 154,000 by 1805, “far beyond the needs of self-defense,” as one modern historian put it.16 Or of merchants. As the Mughal Empire slowly declined, the East India Company moved into its place.
The Company began by looking for nutmeg, clove, cinnamon, and pepper and, in doing so, grew into the most powerful commercial company ever to exist. It established global cities such as Calcutta and Bombay as well as Singapore and Hong Kong and shaped and governed much of the Indian subcontinent. At one time, it employed a third of the British workforce, controlled about half of world trade, and had the largest merchant navy in the world. It moved from a mercantile organization—the standard-bearer of what Karl Marx labeled Britain’s “moneyocracy”—to being the main political and military power in South Asia. Ahmed Ali likened the new character of the Company, once well versed in both politics and war,
“to that of war lords.”17
But if spices were the Company’s initial commercial impetus, tea became the locus of its financial success, and the cornerstone of its trade strategies.
The Company began by importing tea from China using intermediaries. Its first chest, in 1664, was shipped via Bantam, Java, and classified alongside “rarities of birds, beasts or other curiosities … fit to present to His Majesty,”18 Charles II, though most likely destined for his tea-drinking Portuguese wife. A similar negligible amount followed two years later. In 1669, the East India Company brought its first significant order of 143½ pounds from Bantam. A load of nearly five thousand pounds of tea in 1678 flooded the market for the next few years.19
As imports increased, the Company soon wanted to buy directly from the Chinese. In 1689, it made its first purchase of tea from the port of Amoy.20 Initially limited, quantities shot up within a few decades and surpassed 1 million pounds by the early 1720s. In 1750, the East India Company’s annual imports of tea equaled nearly 5 million pounds, and in 1766 hit 6 million.21 Because of the high taxes levied on tea in Britain, another 4 to 7 million pounds was being smuggled in illegally.22 Dutch and French ships carried some of the contraband that made its way to the English coastline via the Channel Islands, but it was also transported on the Company’s own vessels by officers using their allotted cargo space.
A significant amount was sent on to the American colonies, which by 1760 were brewing tea from more than 1 million pounds of leaves a year.23 Taxes on the tea became the focus of colonial anger, which culminated in the 1773 Boston Tea Party, when protesters dumped some ninety thousand pounds of tea into the harbor. This led to rebellion and ultimately to the colonies’ declaring independence in the face of corporate and governmental greed.
Even with the taxes and high transport costs, tea was the Company’s most important commodity. At the end of the eighteenth century it was more profitable than all other goods combined, accounting for 60 percent of the company’s total trade. (It had also become the most profitable item on a London grocer’s shelf.)24 British demand seemed insatiable. In 1800, the East India Company sold a staggering 25,378,816 pounds of it.25 During the 1809–10 trading season, tea accounted for sales worth nearly £3.5 million. That same season, spices totaled just £150,000, or about 4 percent of tea’s amount. In 1817, tea imports topped 36 million pounds.26
Paying the Chinese for so much tea was a significant—and growing—problem. The British had to buy it with silver, specifically Spanish silver reals minted in Mexico.27 The Chinese wanted nothing else from the British. Notoriously xenophobic and self-sufficient with a highly developed manufacturing industry, the Middle Kingdom preferred its own goods over all others.28 Aside from some cotton goods from India, namely the fine muslins and calicoes woven in Bengal, they wanted little else. The Chinese had no desire for woolens milled in the British Midlands or blue Wedgwood plates and only wanted so many clocks and other knickknacks, and, anyway, most imports sold for a loss.29 “Strange and costly objects do not interest me,” the Qianlong Emperor wrote to his counterpart, George III, after an early and unsuccessful British trade mission to China. “As your Ambassador can see for himself, we possess all things. I set no value on strange objects and have no use for your country’s manufactures.”30
Tea’s trade imbalance deeply concerned the British government. It was draining the country’s silver reserves. The British needed to find a Chinese demand or to create one.31 At last they found a commodity that satisfied both criteria.
When Vasco da Gama reached the southern Indian city of Calicut on the Malabar Coast in 1498, he was greeted rather hostilely by Muslim merchants. “May the devil take thee! What brought you hither?” they wanted to know, the Portuguese explorer recorded in his journal,32 to which he famously replied, “Christians and spices.” When the English arrived a century later, they came searching mostly for spices. But they found another, more lucrative crop being cultivated on the subcontinent under the Mughals that would prove to be a tonic for Britain’s one-way commerce with the Chinese and a means of halting the bullion drain: Papaver somniferum. Opium.
Opium most likely arrived with Arab traders, perhaps by the middle of the ninth century, and was being grown on the subcontinent by the end of the fifteenth century.33 (The Hindi aphim and Sanskrit ahifen, which also means snake venom, derive from the Arabic afyun.) In the 1590s, Abu’l-Fazl, intimate adviser to Akbar—the great Mughal leader who ruled over much of South Asia—and gifted historian to his reign (1556–1605), described the opium production in Fatehphur, Allahabad, and Ghazipur in northern India. Opium was, Fazl wrote, a controlled monopoly of the state.34
When William Hastings was appointed the first governor-general in 1773, he publically opposed the trade. “The drug is not a necessity of life but a pernicious article of luxury which ought not to be permitted. I shall stamp it out,” he told his new bosses.35 He brought the opium trade in Bengal, Bihar, and Orissa under Company control, but quickly changed his tune about stopping it.
Just as the Mughals had, the British saw the trade as a natural right. “Thus the State Monopoly in Opium and the policy which is practically that pursued at the present day, was a hereditary gift to the British successors of the great Mogul Empires,” a Department of Revenue and Agriculture publication stated in the late-nineteenth century.36 The Company simply expanded distribution from the national market in India to China and increased production. The first shipment of Indian opium arrived in the port of Canton the same year Hastings took office.
Nineteenth-century India had two key areas of opium production. Patna, in Bihar along the Ganges, was the capital of India’s main opium industry. Here it was grown and manufactured under the aegis of the East India Company. An important factory was located in Patna, as well as another large one in Ghazipur, to the east of Benares. The second area was in a collection of independent, princely states located largely in the Punjab and collectively referred to as Malwa, which initially shipped from the Gujarati port of Cambray (now Khambhat). The British held the monopoly on the country’s trade and did all they could to thwart competition from Malwa, mainly by encircling the area and charging exorbitant rates to transit across their land. The Chinese considered Malwa opium to have a “higher touch,” according to an 1839 report of the Official Records of the Colonial Office, “but not so mellow, nor so pleasant in flavor as the Patna opium.”37
Along the Gangetic plain, Company agents forced peasants to stop farming traditional food crops, such as winter vegetables, wheat, and dal, and plant only poppies. In the dry, cool weather of late autumn, they scattered opium seeds around their fields. By the new year, plants stood a few feet high and were beginning to bloom. As the heat of the plains intensified in February and March, the pale-pink and blanched-crimson-colored petals fell, and the bulbous seed capsules grew globular and waxy. When the pods were turning from yellow to pale green—that is, quite mature but not fully ripe—workers lanced them using a set of sharp blades mounted in a wood handle. Milky, latexlike sap seeped out from the vertical slits overnight and, in the air, turned a gummy brown. Workers returned at dawn to scrape the resin off the capsules with a curved trowel and place the raw opium into an earthen pot hanging at their waists. The pods remained viable for just a dozen or so days until reaching full maturity, during which time lancing and scraping were repeated a handful of times.
Brought to the factory, the raw opium was processed, molded into spherical cakes six inches in diameter and weighing just over three pounds, and stacked on towering shelves to dry and harden. In autumn, once the rains had passed, the balls were weighed and valued, wrapped in a lattice of pressed opium petals, and packed into mango-wood chests that held about 120 pounds of the drug. These were then shipped a few hundred miles downstream to Calcutta to be sold at auction.
While the Company controlled every aspect of the production and even placed its seal on the opium as an imprimatur of quality, once it was sold to independent merchant
s who operated under Company license, it was no longer the Company’s concern.38 It officially turned its head on what happened after that. Private traders organized transport to Canton, the only port open for foreigners to trade.
But opium was illegal in China. The ships passed through the archipelago at the mouth of the Pearl River Delta, with Macao and its small community of Portuguese on the port side and forest-covered Hong Kong on the starboard, and anchored at Whampoa, still about ten miles shy of Canton, to off-load their cargo. Lithe boats with many oarsman evocatively called “fast crabs” and “scrambling dragons” carried the opium chests swiftly to shore for distribution, up the coastline, and into the interior on caravans of donkeys and camels.
“As tea and opium could not be bartered directly, opium was sold for silver, which in turn paid for tea,” explained tea scholar John Griffiths. “This suited Western merchants very well, for it saved them a long journey in pirate-infested waters with cargoes of silver.”39
To cover the cost of a steadily increasing demand for tea (and silver), opium had to made “a ‘commodity,’” wrote the Australian historian Carl Trocki, “to organize its production with a force of cheap and malleable labor, on land that was already controlled for as cheap a price as possible. It would be necessary to create centralized control over collection and processing of the product. It was also necessary to gain access to the market where it could be consumed on a mass basis.” The British accomplished that.
But they also had to increase demand. Or, as Trocki put it, “It was necessary to create an opium epidemic in Asia.”40
They eventually accomplished that, too.
Opium had been used in China for centuries, but its lethal form of consumption by smoking had only gained a foothold from Dutch traders who laced their tobacco with a pinch of opium and arsenic. Eventually the tobacco and other additives fell away, and by the mid-eighteenth century, opium was smoked alone in long, tubelike pipes. With streamlined production and increased flow of the drug out of India, there were, by the end of the 1830s, upward of 12 million opium smokers in China,41 perhaps 2 million of them addicts.* Addiction riddled every level of society, from the highest officials in the central government on down. The British realized the effects of their contraband and actively undermined efforts to slow, much less stop, the problem. The Chinese court even made a personal, ethical appeal to the twenty-year-old Queen Victoria. It was ignored. But how could it be otherwise?