A Fortune of Leaf: Tea's Consumption, Tea's Labor

Piya Chatterjee (Scripps College)

A commodity of desire

Two packets of Brooke Bond black tea rest on the supermarket shelf in southern California. Each has a woman on its cover – one is featured in a photograph, the other is an etching. They appear Asian, their heads are covered, their wrists braceleted. Their hands are poised over a flutter of leaves. With a couple of fingers, each woman lifts some leaves. There is a subtle precision in the way that this is noted in the picture – in the stilled movement, the carefully held and bodied point of finger touching leaf. The colorful and carefully made package which sits in this market indexes a final endpoint of the commodity’s journey from a plantation half a world away. At a most basic level, the supply chain is clear: tea is plucked in a distant plantation, perhaps in India; the gathering of leaf is manufactured into brown powder in a tea factory; it is sold and graded by tea tasters and various categories of value enter the national and international markets where tea retailing majors like Unilever buy consignments for large domestic and international markets. Their marketing and advertising departments have already created these attractive boxes which cheerfully sell their famous brands: Lipton and Brooke Bond.

Yet, the lovely, ubiquitous image of women’s labor suggests something more complex and fascinating about this journey from product to commodity, leaf to cup. This is a path, the colorful box suggests, that exceeds the tracing out of a venerable and efficient supply chain that brings that Brooke Bond tea packet, finally, into my home. The women on that packet beckon to histories of encounter between ‘east’ and ‘west’; they suggest the crucial gendered embodiment through which the commodity comes into being. They gesture to complex, fascinating and overlapping millennial histories that connect the fortunes of many kingdoms and nations: of China, Britain, Japan, the United States and India. In important ways, these links give shape to an emerging ‘world system’ of trade that, as Marshall Sahlins has argued [1], cannot be reduced only to the economic compulsions of early-modern trade.