10 page Book Post #2

Ben Howson
World History per. 3
11/17/14


In the next 10 pages, in the book, For All The Tea in China, pick up at a different topic then what we left off with. It starts off by talking about the East India Company, who they are, what they do, and basically the process of them taking the tea, packing it up, and then distributers buying the tea from them, and distributing it into England. It also goes in to talk about the wages of the workers, and how they were not taxed, and it was a pretty good life long job to have back then. It then starts to talk about the United Company Of Merchants of England to The East Indies (John Company), and how they had a really great company, that had maintained manly 300 profitable years in trade with the East. It goes on to talk about Queen Elizabeth, and that she granted her royal charter to the East India Company in 1600, and how for the first 100 years of its existence it largely bought spices and fabrics and sold them in London. The company sold shares, and the stockholders received a dividend on profits, but this operation ended up being extremely successful for England. During this, the John Company became the de facto government of many of the lands in which it did business: It could acquire territory, mint money, command armies, sign treaties, make war and peace, and even develop its own judicial and taxation systems. This ended up making the stockholder of the John Company extremely rich and powerful, even to the point of a government. Very like today the businesses would and did anything that they could to get ahead of the game, meaning that all of the tea companies were very competitive between one another. For example the East India Company, had its stamp on every single case that was shipped to England. Eventually Parliament started to recognize, this, so they passed many laws, including the law agains monopolies. Even though they passed these laws, at the time, people didn't really understand why this was, and that it was really quite a silly rule, and became very mad that such a rule was passed. They thought that it was really unfair, because they had to work so hard to get where they were. Not only that, but the government was going to start collecting taxes. The tea companies were so enraged that they decided to ignore these laws, but this didn't go well for them, because the Parliament released new laws that ended up effecting the tea companies even more. While the other tea companies were struggling, a new tea company arrived, and had a great idea, that would put them ahead of every one. Since all the laws were put on China, they realized that the Himalayas had even better tea growing conditions, and the worst tea there was the best tea in China. It goes on to talk more about them bring in tea from the Himalayas, and Bring it into England. At this point the 10 pages end.

Here is a picture of tea picking in the Himalayas.