Tagged: history
The Opium Tax Behind Assam's Workforce
Colonial officials already believed Assamese peasants were too lazy for garden wages, so in the early 1860s they taxed the peasants' own opium to force the point. It failed, and set off a revolt besides. This is the tax that decided who did not end up picking Assam's tea, and the paper trail that admits why.
Who Picks Assam: The Garden Workforce, From Indenture to the Daily Wage
Assam's tea was built on a labour force the British carried in from central India under contracts a worker could be jailed for breaking. This is who grows and picks the cup, how they came to be in the valley, and what the work pays now.
How Assam Tea Began
Assam tea was not discovered. It was commissioned. The East India Company already held the valley, lost its China tea trade in 1833, set a committee to ask whether tea could be grown inside the Empire, and sold the first eight chests in London in 1839. Here is how those moves, and the people behind them, made an industry.
Maniram Dewan, the First Indian to Plant Assam Tea, and the British Who Hanged Him
Maniram Dewan ran the Assam Company's tea operation, then quit and planted the first Indian-owned commercial tea gardens in the 1840s. In 1853 he petitioned the British in writing and was dismissed; in 1858 they hanged him. Here is the plain record.
Before the Committee, a Kingdom Tore Itself Apart
The 1834 Tea Committee took British Assam for granted. It was earned by a 57-year Assamese civil war that killed roughly half the kingdom's own people, then a jealous governor who let a foreign army in to settle a private grudge. Here is the precondition the founding story leaves out.
The History of Assam Tea
The complete record of Assam tea: the wild assamica plant noted in 1823, the British annexation that opened the valley, the first eight chests sold in London in 1839, the Assam Company, the CTC machine that put Assam in the world's tea bags, and the region that grew into the largest tea producer on earth.