With a delicate tea set, a pot of black tea, plus sugar and milk... The "elegant" English afternoon tea was once a symbol of British culture.
The exquisite tea service represents Britain's passion for global trade. The tea sets used by the British to drink tea originally came from China. When the Ships of the British East India Company brought Chinese porcelain to Europe, they amazed the Europeans in terms of fineness, durability, style, color and quality. These were luxuries of conspicuous consumption, and only the rich could afford them.
As the global trade in ceramics expanded to Mexico, the Middle East, and Iberia in the 16th century, and to England and the Netherlands in the 17th century, potters there followed suit, but for a long time these efforts failed, and they were unable to mimic the look and feel of Chinese porcelain. It was not until the middle of the 19th century that the POTS and teacups produced by potters in Britain's industrial heartland began to replace Chinese tea sets.
The tea of afternoon tea represents the power and imperiousness of Britain. When the British working class also took to tea, the total value of tea imported by the East India Company from China increased a hundredfold from 1700 to 1774, and tea replaced textiles as the company's most profitable trade item.
The East India Company tried English wool, Indian cotton and even sandalwood, sea cucumbers, bird's nests and shark's fin, but silver still flowed to China in large quantities. So they set out to find a commodity that could monopolize the Chinese market.
Soon the East India Company set its sights on opium, which they began forcibly selling into China. By 1835, Chinese demand for opium exceeded British demand for tea, and millions of taels of silver were flowing to Britain every year, leading to a campaign to ban smoking. To maintain the filthy opium trade, the British armed fleet arrived off the coast of Guangdong...
When British people "gracefully" spoon sugar into black tea, these sugar represents the savage and bloody side of the British.
"I never put sugar in my tea because it's nigger sweat." Alan Thomas, captain of a ship in the late 18th century, wrote in his nautical diary. When his frigate took part in an expedition to the West Indies, he was shocked to see sugar being produced.
Between 1500 and 1880, about 10 million Africans were sold to work in the sugar cane fields. Without sugar, there would have been no slaves, notes Eric Williams, a historian. "Sugar is sweet and necessary for human existence," he said. "It is strange that it should cause such crime and killing." He argues that sugar spawned the slave trade, which allowed Europeans to accumulate wealth and in turn provided the capital for Europe's industrial revolution.
Producing sugar was tiring and dangerous work: many people lost limbs accidentally pushing the cane into a roller; Boiling sugar cane juice makes people burn easily; Black slaves were cruelly flogged for the slightest mistake... If Negro slaves stole food because they were hungry, a common punishment was to hang them on the gallows with a piece of bread hanging over their heads, which they could see but not touch, until they starved to death.
Behind the slaves' sweat and blood, the plantation owners grew richer, and the black sugar was taken by ship to the refineries in London, which were all over London and the English port cities. There, sugar cravings were so overwhelming that a German tourist in Elizabethan England noticed that the teeth of Aristocratic English women were rotting from eating so much sugar.
Sugar and milk were mixed in black tea, spun in beautiful porcelain, and the "elegant" English afternoon tea became a symbol of The British culture of the time, with its combination of global trade, brute force and cruel exploitation.
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