Imperial Formations: Tea and the Forging of Colonial Consumers within and beyond the British Empire, 1880s–1930s

Much work on British consumer culture, whether driven by cultural, social or political questions, has respected national borders and situated its history within well-established narratives about the Island Nation. While 18^th century scholars have examined the consumer culture of the Atlantic world, the global marketplace of the Victorian era has not been pursued in great detail. This paper suggests that the tea trade is an excellent place to begin exploring the related histories of the British Empire, the mass market and the global consumer in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries. Beginning in the 1880s competition between a new dynamic tea industry in Ceylon and the more established one in India led to an aggressive search for new markets throughout the world, but especially in the United States, Canada, and South Asia. Planters and retailers began to use advertising, exhibitions, lectures and sell tea in similar ways in these places though their conception of American and South Asian consumers differed dramatically. These efforts nevertheless encouraged the consumption of South Asian teas and South Asian culture on a global scale. At the same time, they fractured the ideal of British imperial unity by carving out new national identities for India and Ceylon as distinct from each other and from any larger conception of the British Empire. This paper explores the nature of these early global advertising campaigns in order to decenter the debate about the impact of empire in the Metropole. It focuses instead on the relationship between the material culture of the colonies, Britain, and the rest of the world and considers the British market empire in the fin-de-siècle within the history of globalization.