The East India Heist

Tea and the Origins of the Department Store

It is widely accepted that the East India Co., which shipped tea in huge quantities from China, was a front for a more lucrative business. This conclusion has been drawn, on multiple occasions and from various sources [need cite], from the obvious fact that no company, no matter how laissez-faire the contemporary world economy, could become so all-consumingly powerful on the basis of a hot drink. What scholars have not been able to establish is for what the Company was a front.

This question intrigued me, and led me to a study of the unrecognized fount of all modern knowledge – the Cabinet of Wonder – and its implications for the early modern department store. The Cabinet of Wonder was indeed no Cabinet at all. Cabinets of Wonder were in fact whole rooms, sometimes multiple rooms, full of natural oddities, mechanical curiosities, exotic inventions and terrible disguises (including, in one case, the famous lemming suit of King Frederick III, collected from his bloated corpse after he leaped into the ocean to prevent the Turks from discovering his true identity). The ostensible purpose of such great cabineteers as Ole Worm (1588-1654) and Elias Ashmole (1617-1692) was the collection and dissemination of knowledge. In this sense the cabinets were the precursors to the modern-day museum. But my research has found a darker and more sinister purpose behind them. They were showrooms, it turns out, not just for the dissemination but for the sale of “objects informative, and thinges wonderful and awe-filled” in the words of one Ashmolean broadside. Through their cabinets, these men amassed huge storehouses of gold and awe, which they hoarded until their deaths. The volume of wonder they accumulated would have been incomprehensible only decades before.

Elias Ashmole was the second of the great cabineteers and, of the two I’ve mentioned, made for himself the greatest fortune. The bulk of his collection came from a naturalist and collector named John Tradescant the Younger, who himself had inherited the collection of his father, John Tradescant the Elder. The collection consisted of books, coins, weapons, costumes, taxidermy, natural objects. There were plum pits carved with religious iconography and the ceremonial cloak of Chief Powhatan. Undoubtedly an impressive collection of stuff, and he had visitors from all over Europe asking to see his fruit stones. But there was a point at which the nature of the requests changed. The moment can be dated to a 1673 letter from a Mrs. Elspeth Churchill, inquiring as to whether she might purchase the Horn of Mary of Saughall. Here Ashmole’s mercenary gaze fell upon an unexploited niche. He wrote in his diary “This is the day, when I shall make a fortune, in horns.” And he immediately went about developing “a process for the manufacture of a hornish similitude,” a process that, he soon discovered, was prohibitively expensive at the going rates for British orphans, but which, if China was the source, became affordable for client and purveyor alike. He understood, too, that if anyone were to discover that what they owned was simply a replica of the wonder that comes with a real human horn, his cabinet would be stormed by a mob of angry early modern aesthetes. And so he began work cultivating an interest in the boiled leaves of the Camellia sinensis plant, which could only be found in China and would provide excellent cover for crates upon crates of one-of-a-kind curios.

As one may guess, his business grew exponentially, with the side benefit of the invention of scones to go along with the bitter tea so many English peoples were forcing themselves to drink.

Wonder was now widely available for household use, and that period saw the development of many companies we’re familiar with today, including Bed, Bath and Beyond (originally “Beds for Bath and Beyonde,” supplying mattresses stuffed with the firm yet supple leaves of the tea plant to upper-class towns like Bath) and Target, whose name arose from its fleet of exceptionally fast galleons aspiring to give chase to pirates – and I might add that the company is still too fast to be pirated, moving both products and stores at unnaturally high speeds – and is not named, as many think, for Pierre Target, who was actually one of the 18^th-century founders of Wal-Market.

Most of these companies went underground for a few centuries, realizing wonder was better produced in secret alchemical laboratories than by the ignorant peasants of China, though tea itself kept flowing. Cabinets of wonder continued in such places as palaces and museums. Some well-known examples from more recent times include Millard Fillmore’s Know-Nothing Bathroom in the mid-19^th-century White House, the Smithsonian Natural History Museum (with a number of excellent gift-shops), and the Museum of Jurassic Technology in Los Angeles.

Of course, in recent years these companies have undermined their original sources of revenue – wonder and awe – by letting the fact of mass-production slip into the public’s consciousness, and have left us with cardboard facsimiles of the experience. These experiences, as we well know, can only, today, be reproduced through the undying espionage of great spies willing to sacrifice love and limb in search of the modern world’s final mysteries. They must dodge the bullets of cynicism and disarm the mortars of doubt to bring us the few wonders we have yet to apprehend, and I only ask that my colleagues continue, like my self, to offer these sources of awe to the parched and desperate public for free, or at least a reduced charge.