The Assam Company, and the start of plantation tea
The first commercial tea company outside China, formed in 1839, and the beginning of the plantation model that still shapes how most of the world's tea is produced.
1839
Fixed by record. A surviving record fixes this to the year.
Documented. Attested in the historical record, and sourced to it.
What happened
A joint-stock company was formed in London and Calcutta to develop tea cultivation in Assam, taking over the government's experimental gardens. Clearing, planting and recruitment followed over the next two decades, with heavy early losses and a serious speculative bubble in the 1860s.
Why it matters
It establishes the model: large estates, an imported and controlled workforce, processing on site, and sale by auction into a distant market. That structure is what most of the world's tea is still produced under, and its social consequences in Assam are live rather than historical.
Who was involved
The Assam Company
companyFirst joint-stock company formed to grow tea commercially outside China
Connected events
- The 1820s and 1830s — Tea is already growing in Assam, and being drunk there
- From the mid-nineteenth century, with Mombasa opening in the 1950s — The auction system, and where price is set
- From the 1850s, with legal frameworks running into the twentieth century — How plantation labour was recruited and held
- From the 1870s — Tea manufacture is mechanised
What this touches
Producing countries
Culture and history
Compiled from published sources by people who are not historians of this region or period. Where accounts conflict the disagreement is reported rather than settled.