Monopoly and the chartered companies
European tea importing was for a long period organised through chartered monopolies, most consequentially the English East India Company. Monopoly pricing, high duties and the resulting large-scale smuggling shaped who drank tea and at what price, and adulteration of tea with other leaves was a documented and widespread problem in that period.
Taxation and its political consequences
Tea duties were politically significant well beyond their revenue. The destruction of East India Company tea in Boston in 1773 is the best-known instance, and it was a protest about taxation and monopoly rather than about tea. British duties similarly drove smuggling on a scale that made the legal trade difficult to sustain.
The trade imbalance, and what was done about it
Sustained European demand for Chinese tea produced a substantial outflow of silver. The response — selling Indian-grown opium into China — led to conflict and to treaties imposed by force, and then to a deliberate effort to establish tea cultivation outside China altogether. This is not background to tea history; it is the central commercial fact of the nineteenth century, and `tradition-tea-and-empire` records it in more detail.
The modern shape of the trade
Most tea today is sold through auction systems and moves as a blended commodity rather than as a named origin: Kenyan CTC is drunk in enormous quantity by people who could not name it. Speciality tea sold by garden, cultivar and harvest is a small proportion of volume and a much larger proportion of the writing about tea — a distortion worth being aware of when reading anything about the subject, including this catalogue.