For All The Tea In China Summary

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For All the Tea in China Response
Sara Rose begins her story For All the Tea in China by saying, “There was a time when maps of the world were redrawn in the name of plants, when two empires, Britain and China, went to war over two flowers: the poppy and the camellia.”(Prologue). The purpose of this book is to explain the growing tensions between Britain and China and how that tension then shaped the world. Sarah Rose stresses the importance of the opium and tea trade to the British Empire in this story. When the Chinese began the process to stop the sale of the opium to its citizens and closed the port of Canton to the India Tea Company, the British reacted with anger. They then decided it might would be a smart business move to create a source …show more content…

Indirectly, tea had a devastating social impact on China, as it led to the huge trade of Opium. As much as ten percent of the Chinese population (over forty million) were regular users of opium. China consumed ninety five percent of the world’s Opium supply. This had a devastating social impact on them because majority of the citizens there were addicted to it. Economically, because of the huge amounts of Opium that were imported into China, they could not export enough goods to equalize, causing the outflow of silver from China to Europe. The political impact in China included government attempts to stop the illegal trade of Opium (due to the social use of it) resulted in the blockading of European trading areas there. Britain retaliated, causing the Opium wars, through which, because of the British victory, Britain gained far greater access to the Chinese market and increased trading privileges. This also lead to Chinese workers being taken to the new world. Doing this introduced cheap labor to the new world. The Company’s need for tea in Europe, and the lack of Chinese interest in other British goods, led to the production of Opium in Bengal (by the British). This Opium was then traded with China in return for tea. By 1750, the East India Company established control over India's opium cultivation. The British exported the opium to China, which

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