The Great American Tea Company

Tea, like in the colonial motherland, was used in America as a form to represent wealth and status. Tea then, like the oddities collected at Barnum’s Museum, is not only an imported luxury but also an imported practice, not only from England but the product itself from south-east Asia. In either case, the thread of claiming something other as appropriating it to their own desires or needs, like in the case of the Moonstone, is further exposed in this item.

In ‘Savages’ into Spectators/Consumers: Globalization in Advertising Posters, 1890s-1900s, Ruth Iskin discusses the role of the advertisement of global products and the profound implications and impact it had on Indigenous people in colonies in the Americas. She examines the exotifying and fetishizing of ‘other’ in the context global trade and commodification, saying “[t]he lower status of the objectified ‘other’ elevates the commodity and the assumed viewer/consumer to higher rungs of the [social] hierarchy” (Iskin). In a discussion of a poster for the French alcohol La Négrita, she notes that the packaging “employs the dark‐skinned figure as a personification that embodies the exoticism of the product, assuring its ‘authenticity’ and providing a stimulating spectacle for Western consumers. Emphasizing the pleasures of consuming such products of a globalizing world, posters market them by evoking the allure of globalization while domesticating the ‘savage’” (Iskin).

These other things – tea, the Moonstone, ‘random ethnological material” – that are adapted into foreign narratives as demonstrations of wealth are simultaneously debasing its inherent value. These misplaced objects-turned-things depend upon the exploitation of others and the ironic conflation of the indigenous holders of things or practices as inferior. Similar to the Moonstone being claimed by the Verinder family as wealth – as Leighton and Surridge say, “the diamond circulates in the novel as a commodity that assumes various forms and values in different cultures”– tea is claimed by America that is by many degrees removed from its original Asian context and meaning and given a new one.

Works Cited

Collins, Wilkie. The Moonstone. Oxford University Press, New York, 1999.

Harper's Weekly: A Journal of Civilization, 21 March. 1868, pp. 129-144.

Iskin, Ruth E. ""Savages" into Spectators/Consumers: Globalization in Advertising Posters, 1890s-1900s." Nineteenth-Century Contexts, vol. 29, no. 2-3, 2007, pp. 127-49.

Leighton, Mary, and Lisa Surridge. "The Transatlantic Moonstone: A Study of the Illustrated Serial in Harper's Weekly." Victorian Periodicals Review, vol. 42, no. 3, 2009, pp. 207-243.