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Introduction
The 1830s, a decade of tumultuous Anglo-Chinese diplomatic relations, were marked by British fears about the future supply of tea from China.1Politicians and tea merchants worried that an over-reliance on a single producer that lay outside direct colonial authority would leave Britain's tea supply, and therefore Britain's import revenues and the East India Company's (hereafter EIC) profitability, at risk.2Consequently, the discovery of wild tea plants in the north-east Indian region of Assam provided scope for British-owned tea production and an opportunity to move away from commercial reliance on China. The drawback, as pointed out by Jayeeta Sharma, was that China and tea were 'synonymous' and that metropolitan consumers would be suspicious of new, Indian, tea.3This article will examine one of the solutions that was offered to this conundrum: the recruitment of Chinese tea cultivators to work on tea plantations in Assam.4Sharma's Empire's Garden and Antrobus's much earlier narrative history of the Assam Company have been the main scholarly texts to document this experiment with Chinese labour in India.5These texts offer a detailed insight into the transformation of Assam under British rule, including the role of Chinese tea cultivators, but the focus on the development of the Assam region itself has shed little light on how Chinese labourers were recruited in China. By scrutinizing the process by which these specialist cultivators were procured, we can gain a deeper understanding of developing commercial networks and racial hierarchies in the British empire in Asia in the 1830s. The British merchant firm Jardine Matheson was crucial to the recruitment and transport of Chinese tea cultivators for Assam. As a result, the firm lies at the centre of this article's analysis.
Jardine Matheson are ubiquitous in histories of Anglo-Chinese relations and the First Opium War.6However, the firm is usually presented in the guise of drug dealer, warmonger, or free-trade advocate. Its position as a facilitator of emigration has been overlooked. Despite being a 'state-run' operation under the auspices of the Indian government, the Assam experiment was entirely reliant on this private company's opium-distribution network to source skilled labour. This indicates the transformation of the mechanisms of Anglo-Chinese commercial relations up to the early 1830s. These changes were...