Sugar Page 8
Poorer members of society made do by wrapping their sugar in paper provided by a shopkeeper, although even they were sometimes able to acquire their own sugar bowls, the chipped, cracked and damaged versions handed down by their superiors, normally via servants. Eventually, even the previously exalted status symbol – the sugar bowl – like second-hand clothes and footwear, found its way into the poorest of homes.
Around the fashionable tea and coffee services there evolved major social routines of drinking sweetened tea and coffee. Such rituals were at their most striking in spa towns (most notably Bath), and at those watering holes close to Europe’s major cities, and they became a retreat and an escape from the dirt and noise of hot summer days in a city. The bric-a-brac for all this – tea and coffee sets – could be bought by the end of the eighteenth century at shops specialising in tableware. In London, Josiah Wedgwood’s shop was perhaps the most famous, where its location and design, allied to his new marketing techniques in Britain and abroad, elevated his products to become a global phenomenon. Alongside his teapots, cups, saucers and plates, Wedgwood’s sugar bowls graced the tables of the prosperous from Russia to Portugal, from North America to the Caribbean. His cheaper wares, specifically aimed at the middle strata of society, ensured that even modest homes boasted the appropriate tableware. And none was complete without the ubiquitous sugar bowl.
Today, we don’t even notice sugar bowls filled with sugar; they are a standard and unremarkable feature in most households, cafés and restaurants. The simple (or costly) sugar bowl had emerged as an item of everyday life, courtesy of the development of shops and shopping.
Again, though, those who coveted and purchased their decorative sugar bowls did so oblivious to the plight of those enslaved Africans who were fuelling the industry, and who had originally cultivated the sugar in distant tropical lands. Sugar had established its importance for the way it sweetened a variety of foodstuffs, making even the blandest of dishes more appealing, but, above all, it had become the agent which made hot, bitter beverages palatable to Western taste. What, after all, could be more British than a sweet cup of tea?
6
A Perfect Match for Tea and Coffee
THE RATE OF coffee consumption in the modern world is truly astonishing. One estimate in 1991 was that seventy-six cups were drunk for every man, woman and child on the planet.1
Yet coffee’s popularity was established on a global scale only three centuries ago. Moreover, it owes much of that popularity to sugar. Or perhaps we should think of it the other way round?
Sugar became popular as the natural partner of hot beverages – coffee and tea (and, to a lesser extent, chocolate). All are consumed in their native regions as bitter drinks – China and Japan in the case of tea; the Horn of Africa in the case of coffee; and Mexico for chocolate. Early European visitors to China were told how tea was sometimes drunk with a little added milk and, occasionally, with a small amount of sugar when this Liquor proves bitter to the taste’. Sugar, though, was marginal and unimportant to Chinese tea-drinkers.2
That changed when tea and coffee took hold in Europe and North America as the popular drinks of millions of people. In the case of tea, the graphs of tea (imported to Europe from China) and of sugar (imported from the Caribbean) matched each other, marching virtually in step from the late seventeenth century onwards. The result was one of the most extraordinary social and cultural formulae we can imagine – tea shipped 10,000 miles was blended with sugar that had been shipped 5,000 miles. And that sugar had been cultivated by Africans who themselves had been shipped across the Atlantic against their will. Behind the humble cup of sweet tea there lay a remarkable global trade – a worldwide transfer of goods, commodities and peoples (with all the necessary commercial underpinnings of finance, insurance and commerce) – which brought together regions and peoples of far-flung corners of the globe. The purpose was to please and to satisfy the tastes of Europeans and their emigrant offspring who settled distant colonies.
Tea, coffee and chocolate appeared in Britain at much the same time, in the mid-seventeenth century, and each was scrutinised and evaluated by contemporary men of science, all part of that remarkable wave of curiosity about exotic items from the far reaches of the world. Flora and fauna, food and drinks, animals – humans even – all fed into the Western world’s scientific (and commercial) coming-to-terms with the world at large. Here was an example of the early efforts to transplant and relocate people and plants to different parts of the world, to see if those transplanted entities could be cultivated commercially in regions newly settled by Europeans. This was the story of sugar, coffee and chocolate and, later, tea, when it was transplanted from China to India. Beginning with royal and aristocratic society, it quickly became apparent that tea, along with sugar, could be sold to elite circles, whatever science, especially medical science, had to say about tea. And the prevalent thinking about the properties of tea varied greatly: is it good or bad for health? Can it be used as a medicine for particular ailments? Tea-drinking was a social fashion which gave tea its crucial lift-off.
The Dutch led the way, and their long-distant merchants sold tea to British merchants, who made it available in England. Tea was sold in London by the 1650s; Samuel Pepys first drank it in 1660, and his wife took it as a medicine in 1667.
Pepys also began to drink coffee regularly during that period. The coffee shops which began to spring up in London around that time often sold tea alongside coffee. Unlike coffee, which was relatively cheap from its early days, tea remained expensive. When the East India Company sent some of its tea to the King as a gift in 1664, the company knew that he would recognize the tea as a special luxury. It remained a luxury item throughout the seventeenth century, and consequently remained the preserve of only the wealthy or prosperous elites.
Tea services were also imported from China, and formed the essential and generally beautiful and refined equipment for serving tea, but they were also expensive. By c. 1700, London and the emerging spa towns boasted a number of ‘tea shops’ – some of them run by women. Both there, and in private homes, tea remained a fashionable and costly item, not helped by heavy import duties, a fact which prompted the rapid growth of a new industry which thrived throughout the eighteenth century: smuggling tea to avoid the import duties.
Curiously, to modern eyes, throughout the late seventeenth century tea-drinking was more widespread and popular in the Netherlands than in Britain, largely because the Dutch (unlike the English) had direct trading links and agreements with China. In Britain, coffee, not tea, had been first to establish itself as a popular drink. As coffee shops proliferated across London, they provided men with a meeting place that lacked the raucous booziness of the alehouse. As a result, they became an important location for a number of social, economic and political gatherings. The coffee shop was a place where men smoked pipes of tobacco, itself recently established as a popular and commercially viable product imported from plantations in Virginia and Maryland. But they were also a place for politics, for the conduct of business, or simply somewhere to discuss news, from home and abroad, via newspapers and prints which became an important feature of the coffee house. Customers heaped spoonfuls of sugar into their coffee to sweeten its naturally bitter taste.
From the start, coffee-drinking was a communal activity, an occasion for male sociability and companionship. Tea-drinking, on the other hand, remained much more domestic and private (and costly), to be enjoyed alone or with a small group of friends or family gathered round a table in the home. John Locke was one who disliked the coffee shop for all the reasons others loved it; he disliked its garrulous sociability, and wanted instead to be alone with a hot drink. He asked friends to send tea from Holland, which he then brewed to entertain his guests. Better still, he sat alone, with his books and papers, savouring a solitary cup of tea.3
The transformation in British tea-drinking took place after 1704 when the restructured United East India Company opened up direct trade to Ch
ina. There followed a rapid and astonishing growth of trade to China. Before 1700, perhaps a grand total of 150,000lb of tea had been imported from China, but in the next five years, more than 200,000lb were shipped.4 Tea, only recently a costly drink, now began to become ever more commonplace, praised left and right by scientists, medical experts and by fashionable commentators. Social life now revolved around tea-drinking rituals. In time, tea even found a place in working life, with the growth of the familiar ‘tea breaks’. British people, high and low, came to love tea; they consumed it in huge and growing volumes and they wrote lovingly about it.
Shiploads of tea from China landed in London, the tea-chests freighted with Chinese porcelain, and the leaf tea itself proving to be a perfect ‘packing’ material to safeguard the transport of delicate items on their long voyages from Asia. To avoid theft, the tea chests were quickly moved to dockside warehouses, some of which could store 650,000 crates. By 1767, there were some 7 million pounds of tea in storage; by the 1820s, that had risen to 50 million pounds. Tea had become such a massive business that thousands of London’s labourers were employed simply shifting tea between ships, warehouses and merchants around the country.5
Quite apart from the different quality of tea on offer, there was a great variety in the types of tea. From the highest, most fashionable and costly brands, down to the roughest of leaves – the fag end of the entire system – tea not only transformed the face of London’s dockside labour force, it utterly changed the habits of British people everywhere.
Tea-drinking had slipped its moorings among the upper classes and found a new home among the poorest of common people. By c. 1800, even the very poor had come to regard sweet tea as one of life’s essentials. Social investigators studying the diets and the finances of the nation’s poor were perplexed to discover that even the most wretched of the poor expected two commodities – tea and sugar. This was to be a recurring theme in studies of the poor from that day to this. Sugar, once a luxury for the wealthy, had become a necessity for the poor. But how had that happened?
It did not stem from improved living standards. In fact, the poorer the individual or family, the more resolute was their attachment to sugar. This taste for sugar seems to have been driven especially by two factors. The first was the sheer volume of imported tea and sugar, which drove down the price of both, helped by a massive smuggling industry that thrived until the duties on tea were finally slashed in 1784. What had, say, in 1700 been accessible only to the rich had, a century later, become available to the poor and was sold in local shops for a matter of pence.
The second factor seems to have been driven by domestic servants, who formed one of the largest single occupational groups at the time; they acquired the habit for sweetened hot drinks from their employers and friends. Men and women who served at table, who worked below stairs, who prepared meals and who served the tea, those who filled the sugar bowls, senior domestic servants who ordered and managed the kitchen accounts, all were among the first working people to encounter tea and sugar. Allowances for tea and sugar began to replace the ration for beer traditionally granted to servants and, gradually, sweet tea replaced beer as part of their food allowance.6 Household accounts reveal which servants were allocated tea and sugar along with the meals and food provided for their daily sustenance. Sweet tea, twice a day, had become the norm in the servants’ quarters by the mid-eighteenth century. Servants also simply took both tea and sugar, tasted it, and liked it, behind their employers’ back. Why else did fashionable ladies keep their tea secure in a locked chest? Temptation was kept under lock and key to prevent servants sampling the goods for themselves. Social satires, poems, plays, paintings – all provide sarcastic glimpses into this world. The tea-drinking rituals of the better-off – the styles, fashions, pretensions – were both idealised and then mocked.
So, too, was the way these habits slipped down the social scale – servants aping their betters – to be followed later by other working people following similar routines. It was, after a fashion, the democratisation of culture. Over the course of a century, sweet tea thus became the habit of the common people. It spread not simply from rich to poor, but from town house and rural retreat across the entire country. No longer urban or privileged, the consumption of sweet tea became a national pastime. As Engels was to note in the 1840s, ‘Where no tea is used, the bitterest poverty reigns.’7 All this may seem so obvious because the story is recognizably true to this day.
There were, it is true, great varieties of tea-drinking: weak tea versus strong, one brand of tea rather than another. The overall pattern, however was clear; the British people needed their tea – and they needed it sweetened with sugar. They learned how to mix it, how to get the most out of the leaves they bought, often even reusing them, time and again, until all colour and taste had been leached from them. It became a national addiction that raised a really puzzling issue: why had a nation become so attached to consuming two commodities produced at the far ends of the world? Wasn’t it strange, in the world where travel and transport took months, that the British (and Europeans at large) demanded goods which their forebears had managed without and, indeed, had not even known about? In 1800, as in 1900, it was asked, ‘What could be more British than a sweet cup of tea?’
All was made possible by the Honourable East India Company, founded in 1660, after the Dutch, but soon becoming the most powerful of all European companies trading to Asia. It thrived on tea from China. Having shipped some 20,000 pounds of tea in 1700, sixty years later it transported 5 million pounds of tea. (The Government suspected that as much again was smuggled in to avoid duties.) The Dutch East India Company’s tea imports peaked in 1785 at 3.5 million pounds.8 By the end of the eighteenth century, an estimated 20 million pounds of tea had been imported legally into Britain.
By any reckoning, these are astonishing figures, but they need to be harnessed to the comparative data for sugar. In the words of Sidney Mintz, the success of tea ‘was also the success of sugar’.9 It was a story not merely about European consumers, but about the complex links between Europeans and their various colonies and distant trading outposts. Hostile observers failed to notice that sweet, warm tea gave a feeling of enhanced well-being, although it lacked the nutrition, say, of the traditional beers. To make this formula work, tea-drinkers needed Africans to grow their sugar.
To sweeten their drinks and foods, Europeans were importing sugar on a staggering scale. In 1600, Brazil was the only American exporter of sugar. Fifty years later, Barbados exported 7,000 tons. By 1700, ten colonies in the Americas exported 60,000 tons of sugar, half of it from the Caribbean. Yet within a lifetime, even this astonishing figure was surpassed. In 1750, 150,000 tons of sugar left the slave colonies. On the eve of the American War in 1776, it stood at 200,000 tons, 90 per cent of it coming from the Caribbean.10
Not all of this was to be mixed with hot drinks, of course. Much went into the transformed diet of Europeans – into desserts, breads, porridge, puddings. But sweetest of all was tea. What became the most defining, most British of concoctions – sweet tea – was a result of Europe’s entanglement with distant societies and distant peoples. Sugar and tea had transformed the physical face of distant colonies and countries, and they also created one of the most characteristic social habits of the British people.
Tea-drinking, however, attracted fierce criticism from a string of eminent commentators and writers, from Jonas Hanway to William Cobbett. Some thought it bad for health, some viewed it as a diversion of scarce resources, while others dismissed it as a pointless luxury – the poor seemed merely to be aping the habits of their superiors. More perceptive critics however appreciated the importance of tea and sugar in enhancing Britain’s domestic and global trade and power. It underlined Britain’s greatness through its trade to Asia, its colonies in the Americas and, as a critical link tying everything together, it confirmed the nation’s maritime strength. This was all reinforced, of course, by unparalleled military power at sea.
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Along with most of Western Europe, the British had initially turned to coffee, not tea. Native to East Africa and the Arabian Peninsula, coffee-drinking had long been at home in a number of Islamic communities. Coffee shops, a feature of Islamic cities from the Yemen to Algeria, from Iraq to Istanbul, were venues for male sociability, for business discussion and relaxation. Trade and travel between Western Europe, Turkey and Egypt brought coffee, and coffee shops, to Europe. Venice had its first coffee shop in 1629 and others quickly followed in Europe’s major port cities. Amsterdam not only had a growing number of coffee shops, but had access to plentiful supplies of sugar from the city’s refineries which processed the sugar shipped from Brazil and, later, from Dutch Caribbean colonies. Like tea, sugar and tobacco, coffee also entered Western Europe via apothecary shops, but whatever its alleged medical virtues, coffee established its niche – as it had in Istanbul – as a personal and social pleasure for menfolk gathering at their favourite coffee shop.