Friday, January 8, 2010: 3:10 PM
Santa Rosa Room (Marriott)
Erika Rapport. University of California , Santa Barbara . “One of the Prettiest Sights in the Industrial World: Tea Advertising and Purity of Modern Imperialism”
Since the 18th century tea has been repeatedly extolled for his healthy and fortifying qualities. Represented as both a physical and social good, tea has repeatedly been described as a civilizing force. Yet this perception was in fact a response to tea’s associations with illegal activities, such as smuggling and adulteration
In theUS , Britain and its colonies tea’s negative aspects were not entirely abolished, rather they tended to be projected onto racial others, associated for example with the Chinese, Japanese and African-Americans. East Asian teas especially came to be regarded as illicit and unhealthy in contrast to new, “machine made” teas being imported from India and Ceylon . For example, in one of her popular Edwardian histories of British industry, writer Edith Browne lauded Ceylon ’s adoption of mechanization. Newly picked tea leaves were transformed into a saleable commodity virtually without human contact. By contrast, Chinese tea production was “old-fashioned.” “Peasant farmers” made tea in barns, sheds, and outhouses, which were in many cases no more than “a mere hovel.” Browne’s depiction incorporated and popularized the key strategies which the Indian and Ceylon tea trades had used to sell their wares since the mid-nineteenth century.
Advertising and popular industrial histories constructed a technocratic version of colonial modernity in which machine-based forms of production, science and expertise, and the plantation system were cast as the ingredients for good taste and high quality. Indeed, imperialism was cast as a safe form of globalization, one in which commodities could travel long distances and yet remain pure and healthy. Despite the increasingly global source of many commodities, advertising suggested that consuming foreign goods did not imply the incorporation of foreign bodies.
Since the 18th century tea has been repeatedly extolled for his healthy and fortifying qualities. Represented as both a physical and social good, tea has repeatedly been described as a civilizing force. Yet this perception was in fact a response to tea’s associations with illegal activities, such as smuggling and adulteration
In the
Advertising and popular industrial histories constructed a technocratic version of colonial modernity in which machine-based forms of production, science and expertise, and the plantation system were cast as the ingredients for good taste and high quality. Indeed, imperialism was cast as a safe form of globalization, one in which commodities could travel long distances and yet remain pure and healthy. Despite the increasingly global source of many commodities, advertising suggested that consuming foreign goods did not imply the incorporation of foreign bodies.