Indian Industry and Englishness: A Visual Link from Producer to Consumer in Bourne & Shepherd’s Tea Photographs

Late nineteenth-century colonial photographs of workers on tea plantations in India–with women in saris gently plucking leaves from lush bushes and men in sarongs operating heavy industrial machinery–are powerful symbols of a chain of production within the British Empire. My paper focuses on a series of images documenting the step-by-step manufacture of tea by commercial photographers Bourne & Shepherd. It questions how these images of labor, mass-produced and widely circulated, support a sense of nation-building that is defined by a new lucrative commodity: British-grown tea. I investigate how a new phase of commercial photography represented this new product, and how these images largely contributed to make industry in the colonies more visible at home, both in the public sphere and in the domestic realm.

Tea was an expensive novelty when it was first introduced to England from China in the mid-seventeenth century but quickly became the country’s national beverage. In the 1880s, tea grown in British colonies began to outsell Chinese-grown tea. Concurrently, advances in technology made photographs inexpensive to print, leading to a vast increase in distribution of these images through multiple channels. Through an analysis of the compositional strategies in Bourne & Shepherd’s pictures, alongside study of their circulation, I demonstrate how the photographs of tea production helped to construct a new vision of the British Empire in which notions of primitivism coalesced with modern industry.