Alice Loxton

Wow.

They are indeed.

The Tea Wars.

Now, I'm taking us forward into the 1800s when tea had become so popular that Britain was willing to go to war for it.

At this point, China is still the only country that produces tea.

And of course, the British Empire is at its height.

So it's a time of expansionism, trade, globalism, all happening apace.

And there's this company that's been set up.

It's called the East India Company.

And there are a few of these, but in this instance, we're talking about the British one.

It started out as a merchant company, but over time, it basically became an extension of the British state.

Absolutely, because in order to meet British demand for tea, the East India Company was determined to try and buy some more.

But there was a problem, because the Chinese would only accept silver in exchange for tea, and the East India Company did not have a

enough silver.

And the way that they dealt with this problem is rather looked down on today, shall we say, to put it politely.

Because what they did was they took opium, which was being produced in parts of East India, an area of the world that they controlled at that time, and they amped up the production massively.

So opium comes from poppies, it's massively addictive.

So the East India Company then sold this opium illegally to Chinese merchants in exchange for silver, which then allowed them to buy more tea to bring back to Britain.

And this did lead to a huge problem in China of opium addiction, which you can understand the emperor wasn't very happy about.

The opium wars, indeed.