droosan: What subby might look like:

[3.bp.blogspot.com image 320x240]

I literally JUST* finished watching Connections for the first time. You've made me happy droosan.

*About half an hour ago actually...

Gordon Bennett: Next you need to move on to "The Day the Universe Changed." Fantastic series and IMO better than Connections.

On it. Cheers mate.

Flint Ironstag: In England nothing is more important than a nice cup of tea. Hell, the success of the entire British Empire was probably down to tea.
"Where does tea come from?" "India", "Righto, lets invade"



Not quite, but you're surprisingly close. It was originally from China (ya know, all the tea in china?), and the process there was incredibly expensive. Small farmers harvested it from family plots, and it was sold through layers and layers of merchants before arriving at Hong Kong, where it was shipped out. Prices were astronomically high as a result- it was a delicacy for the very rich. That shipload of tea we unceremoniously dumped into Boston Harbor? That was a year's supply for the colonies. And it was fished out later by locals, because even a bit soggy, it was still usable (at the time, it was compressed into very solid blocks, so the majority of the tea would have been usable. Tea boxes had locks.

Of course, this couldn't persist. The East India Company wanted more tea to sell, and they wanted it cheap. The trouble is, they didn't even know what it was. They didn't know it was a leaf. It came from china through these traders, that's all they knew.

So they sent spies into china to find out what it was, and to see if various plots of land in India (where they were already controlling for the spice trade) were suitable, where they could set up their own farms. As a sidenote, many of the plots they were considering already were covered with tea bushes. But yeah, that's when they put in place the plantation system in India. 1820's ish. They also tried a few other methods to lessen the costs, like trading tea for Opium. Trouble is, the Chinese government had banned Opium, and didn't particularly like the fact that the Company was smuggling it in. The Company told them to fark off, and when the Chinese government tried to enforce it's law, the East India Company, without consulting the British government, went to war.

They did that multiple times, and it eventually resulted in the total crushing of the Chinese economy, and the collapse of the Qing Dynasty, which resulted in the economic ant political turmoil that led to the Chinese Civil war and the Communist Revolution.

So, yeah. The Brits wrecked geopolitics on a global scale because they wanted cheaper tea.