249. Victorian Narcos: Doomed Envoy to China (Ep 3)

Hello and welcome to Empire with me, Anita Arnan. And me, William De Rimpool. Previously on this podcast, we did an episode with Nandili Das about a mission that was sent from Great Britain to the Great Mughals. And in this mission, Britain wanted to impress upon the great Mughal Empire just how great it was. And they sent these presents that they thought were fabulous to the Mughal court.

And um, well, frankly, poor Thomas Rowe found out very quickly that all his presents were crap and the Mongols just couldn't get. To make it worse, the Portuguese had come up with really good ones, didn't they? Really good presents, and I mean half of them were broken, there was a carriage they got shattered on the way over and this has got echoes of that but we're not talking about India today we continue to talk about China because we're the we are concerned with opium and the opium war so just just tell us where we're picking up the baton from last time. So we had two episodes at the start of our Victorian narco series and we set up the fact that in the 18th century the British discovered tea.

and that it went from something that a few smart ass sort of courtiers in London were sipping as a fashionable item to being the mainstay of the entire British public. And this had dramatic effects geopolitically around the world. It led horrifically to the Caribbean slave trade in order to grow enough sugar for people to put in their tea. in the Caribbean slave plantations. But, and this is the focus of what we're doing on this series, it also led to a massive trade deficit with China.

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