Abstract:This article examines the role of the private merchant firm Jardine Matheson in procuring Chinese tea cultivators for the East India Company's experimental tea plantations in Assam in the 1830s. Where existing literature has detailed the establishment of a Tea Committee by the East India Company to oversee these tea plantations, the focus of this article is on the way that the illicit opium distribution network of Jardine Matheson was used to extract labour, tea specimens and knowledge from China. The colonial… Show more
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