Tea Advisor
Aspects of Tea Production
From the very first imports the tea trade between China and Britain was a monopoly of the East India Company until 1834, and was hugely profitable. The East India Company's main activities were, however, in India. It was there that the Company had transacted most of its business, and then made the extraordinary transition from being a trading company to ruling a nation.
The Company had established its first 'factory" at Surat on the coast of western India in 1619. During the remainder of the seventeenth century and into the eighteenth it established more trading posts in India, some of them well fortified. There had been clashes with local princes, and sometimes these had resulted in bloodshed, but the Company remained a purely commercial venture.
Much of India in the mid eighteenth century was under the nominal control of the Mughal Emperor at Delhi. This regime, severely weakened by attacks from both the Marathas of western India and from the Afghans, was in decline. Several of the Emperor's princes had declared themselves independent, and others only made nominal homage. One of the latter was the nawah of Bengal in east India, where the Company had a factory at Calcutta. An attack on this factory by the nawah, who was incensed that the Company was fortifying its factory without his permission, resulted in the temporary expulsion of the British. Retribution followed. The Company sent an army under Robert Clive, which in 1757 defeated the nawah. A puppet nawah, who had colluded with Clive, was put in his place.
The new nawah, Mir Kasim, became appalled by the excesses of the Company's British servants, who used private armies to enrich themselves. Clive, when he returned from a visit to England, reported that 'such a scene of anarchy, confusion, bribery, corruption, and extortion was never seen or heard of in any country but Bengal, nor such and so many fortunes acquired in so unjust and rapacious a way.' Mir Kasim broke with the Company, and put together a Mughal army to fight it. In the ensuing battle the Mughals were totally defeated.
Tea | By Roy Moxham
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