Chapter Nineteen A North Europe World of Tea: Scotland & the Tea Trade, ca. 1690- ca.1790 Andrew Mackillop At first glance, Scotland may not seem an obvious context for exploring the trends and tensions which characterized the importation, distribution and consumption of tea in eighteenth-century Europe. As a small, relatively underdeveloped kingdom on the outer edge of the North Sea world, Scotland had little direct experience of Asia and indeed had liquidated its own short-lived East India Company as a precondition of union with England in 1707. Yet it is Scotland’s marginality to the early phase of Europe’s direct contact with Asia from circa 1500 to circa 1700, when juxtaposed with the country’s sudden inclusion thereafter within the monopoly market of the United English East India Company (EIC), which makes its interaction with Asian products so potentially illuminating. Scotland experienced the centuries of the Eurasia trades as one of extremes, moving from relative insulation from Asia commodities as late as around 1700 to a position where, by the 1770s, many commentators felt that Scottish society risked being fatally undermined by a welter of influences from the East. All European countries experienced their version of this angst over the supposedly corrupting and enervating characteristics of Asian luxury, as well as the shift toward ideas of ‘new’ luxury which imbued commodities and their consumption with a range of virtuous, civilizing, modern and beneficial attributes. As is well known, tea was among the most obvious of the many exotic goods sweeping across Europe, driving innovative forms of elite and mass consumption while transforming imitative production methods, social practices and cultural expectations. In most respects, Scotland followed rather than set these European trends. It experienced its own increasing levels of legal trade and consumption in tea, a parallel smuggling economy of noticeable size and efficiency, and an intense debate that sought to realign older, moralistic concepts of luxury in positive ways to better reflect
Chapter Nineteen A North Europe World of Tea: Scotland & the Tea Trade, ca. 1690- ca.1790 Andrew Mackillop At first glance, Scotland may not seem an obvious context for exploring the trends and tensions which characterized the importation, distribution and consumption of tea in eighteenth-century Europe. As a small, relatively underdeveloped kingdom on the outer edge of the North Sea world, Scotland had little direct experience of Asia and indeed had liquidated its own short-lived East India Company as a precondition of union with England in 1707. Yet it is Scotland’s marginality to the early phase of Europe’s direct contact with Asia from circa 1500 to circa 1700, when juxtaposed with the country’s sudden inclusion thereafter within the monopoly market of the United English East India Company (EIC), which makes its interaction with Asian products so potentially illuminating. Scotland experienced the centuries of the Eurasia trades as one of extremes, moving from relative insulation from Asia commodities as late as around 1700 to a position where, by the 1770s, many commentators felt that Scottish society risked being fatally undermined by a welter of influences from the East. All European countries experienced their version of this angst over the supposedly corrupting and enervating characteristics of Asian luxury, as well as the shift toward ideas of ‘new’ luxury which imbued commodities and their consumption with a range of virtuous, civilizing, modern and beneficial attributes. As is well known, tea was among the most obvious of the many exotic goods sweeping across Europe, driving innovative forms of elite and mass consumption while transforming imitative production methods, social practices and cultural expectations. In most respects, Scotland followed rather than set these European trends. It experienced its own increasing levels of legal trade and consumption in tea, a parallel smuggling economy of noticeable size and efficiency, and an intense debate that sought to realign older, moralistic concepts of luxury in positive ways to better reflect
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