From Plant Hunter to Tea Thief: How Europe Reframed its Nineteenth-Century Tea Collectors - a paper presented to the European Tea Culture Institute Conference in Bremen in May 2026.
by Lisa Honan CBE, Tea Historian
In modern retellings of tea history, Robert Fortune often appears as the man who “stole” tea from China. The phrase “tea thief” is now familiar enough to sound almost factual, as though it had always been attached to him. Yet nineteenth-century sources did not describe Fortune in those terms. On the title page of his Three Years’ Wanderings in the Northern Provinces of China (1847), his travelogue that reached a wide Victorian readership, he styled himself “Botanical Collector to the Horticultural Society of London,” language that put him within the respectable world of scientific acquisition rather than criminal appropriation. English Heritage still describes him primarily as a gardener, botanist and plant collector, even while noting his role in transferring tea plants and tea knowledge from China to British-controlled territories. (Royal Horticultural Society (2025)
This paper examines how three nineteenth-century Europeans acquired tea seeds and practical knowledge in China and transferred them to new cultivation zones, and how those actions have since been reframed within European historical memory, and are part of a wider recasting. The three figures are the Dutchman Jacobus Isidorus Lodewijk Levien Jacobson, George J Gordon, and the Scot Robert Fortune. All three are later said to have “smuggled” tea seeds from China. Only one, however, has been widely recast as a symbol of imperial extraction. Fortune, as the “tea thief”. But by the time Fortune travelled to China in 1848, Gordon and Jacobson had already been attempting to obtain and cultivate tea for several decades. This contrast in their later representation is the focus of this paper.
The three men are linked by a common act. Each obtained tea seed in China and helped move the seed beyond Qing control to new areas where tea cultivation could be attempted, adapted and commercialised. Jacobson’s China-sourced seed and tea expertise were established in Java in the late 1820s under Dutch auspices. Gordon’s Bohea seeds entered Calcutta in 1835 and were raised in experimental nurseries in the sub-Himalayan west of India before being sent onward to Darjeeling and Assam. The following year, Gordon returned again from a further trip to China, with seeds. These were raised in nurseries in Calcutta and the plants were distributed to Upper Assam, Dehra Doon, Kumaon and elsewhere. Fortune’s mission, by contrast, is associated with the transport of Chinese seed in Wardian cases. The seedlings were examined in Calcutta and then moved into the Himalayan belt between western Nepal and the Kashmiri border.
The broader argument is not simply that Fortune has been misdescribed or that he is now known as the only man who stole tea from China. It is that Europe has selectively rewritten its own commodity history. Efforts to establish tea cultivation in India were already underway by the 1830s, following the identification of indigenous tea in Assam in 1823, and involved multiple actors and overlapping experiments. The movement from “botanical collector” or “plant hunter” to “tea thief” is part of a wider modern tendency to recast older acts of botanical transfer in the language of theft, heist or biopiracy.
Robert Fortune is not alone in this broader pattern: in rubber history, Britain’s Henry Wickham’s transfer of rubber seeds from Brazil in 1876 to Ceylon, Singapore and Malaya has been reframed as a “rubber heist” (Beinart & Middleton (2004) Similarly, nutmeg was moved from the Banda Islands to Mauritius and Réunion in the 1770s under the French administrator Pierre Poivre; cinchona was transferred from South America to India and Java in the 1850s through the work of British agents such as Clements Markham and Richard Spruce; and cloves, long restricted under Dutch monopoly in the Moluccas, were later transplanted beyond that system to Zanzibar and the western Indian Ocean through a combination of French and Omani expansion in the early nineteenth century. Some have more recently been recast in the language of “heists” or theft, while others have remained within the older vocabulary of “introduction” and “cultivation".
Yet tea presents a particular case. Europe has come to moralise one man’s seed-gathering journey far more readily than those of others engaged in similar activity. Fortune’s enduring presence in print allowed his actions to be re-read in changing moral contexts. Jacobson remained an expert rather than a villain, while Gordon largely vanished from view. The focus on Fortune cannot therefore be explained by the act alone, but by how it has been remembered.
The paper is structured in eight parts, including this introduction. It first reconstructs the nineteenth-century world of botanical transfer, showing how plant acquisition was then framed as science, improvement and imperial advancement. It then turns to Jacobson, the first of the three figures, whose Dutch case complicates the dominant British-centred story; to George J. Gordon, the quiet man whose practical significance outweighed his documentary footprint, and finally to Robert Fortune, who wrote himself into history. A short section on the afterlives of their seed routes brings the discussion to the present, before the paper considers when and why the language of “tea thief” emerged. It concludes by asking why tea memory has focused on one supposedly thieving collector rather than others, makes a brief comparison with another commodity - sugar - and ends with conclusions about how and why Europe remembers its tea history unevenly.
The nineteenth-century context: botanical transfer as science and empire
To understand why Fortune was not called a thief in his own time, it is necessary to consider what nineteenth-century Europeans believed they were doing when they moved plants across borders. In the language of the time, this was not impropriety but improvement. Botanical transfer belonged to the worlds of horticulture, natural history, acclimatisation and imperial science (Drayton, 2000; Batsaki et al., 2016). Plants were collected, classified, exchanged and tested. Gardens, nurseries and botanical gardens in London, Calcutta, Saharanpur, Bogor in Java, Pamplemousses in Mauritius, and elsewhere formed part of a wider European network that functioned as laboratories of empire. The general assumption was that useful plants ought to be made to travel.
The vocabulary is visible in the descriptors attached to the people involved. Fortune was a “botanical collector”. Jacobson appears in English-language histories as a “tea expert”. Across the wider European culture of natural history, similar figures were described as naturalists, botanists, collectors, horticulturalists or plant hunters. The language signalled expertise, not wrongdoing. Fortune continues to be described in these terms in institutional contexts: today the Royal Horticultural Society refers to him as a plant collector, and English Heritage uses similar language.
Botanists and plant collectors were not merely serving a market already fully defined by merchants. Often they were ahead of it, experimenting with cultivation and transfer because they believed in the utility of moving species into environments where they might thrive. Scholarship on the early incubation of tea plantations in India stresses that tea experiments in places such as Calcutta and Saharanpur had a momentum of their own. Joseph Banks, President of the Royal Society, in the 1770s was already suggesting that tea might be cultivated within British territories. This was well before commercial and East India Company (EIC) priorities fully converged around tea as a major imperial crop.
That point matters because it complicates the idea that all such activity was simply a mercantile grab driven by EIC Directors. It was certainly entangled with commerce and empire, but the impulse often came through scientific interest, horticultural ambition and the prestige attached to discovery. Many of the men involved held formal roles within imperial or commercial institutions, including the EIC. Botanical work was often pursued alongside or through those posts. One such figure in the EIC’s service was Brian Houghton Hodgson, Resident in Nepal in the 1830s, whose official duties were diplomatic but who also undertook significant work in the study of Himalayan flora and fauna.
Technology also helped make transfer more practical. The Wardian case was invented in 1829 (Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. (n.d.a). It was a sealed glazed container that protected living plants from salt air and drying out during ocean voyages. The Wardian case was rapidly adopted across European botanical networks, including British, Dutch and French systems, and helped to normalise the long-distance transfer of living plants. By the time of Fortune’s expeditions, the use of Wardian cases made the movement of plant material more reliable and scalable than earlier seed-based attempts.
Yet the movement of seeds from China was not legal. Qing regulations confined foreigners to designated treaty ports and prohibited their travel into inland tea-producing districts. Export of valuable plant material and technical expertise was also forbidden. Actions that breached these restrictions can properly be described as smuggling, in the sense of illicit movement across a legal boundary. But this is not the same as theft. In the cases of Fortune and Gordon, seeds were explicitly purchased, and there is no evidence that Jacobson’s means of obtaining them differed. The illegality lay in their export, not in their acquisition. The distinction matters, because it is precisely this difference that later narratives have blurred.
What nineteenth-century Europeans thought they were doing, then, was introducing cultivation, extending useful knowledge and improving imperial agriculture. What they were also doing, from the Qing perspective, was undermining a regulated and protected economy. Both are true. But only one vocabulary dominated in nineteenth-century European sources. To call these men plant hunters, collectors or tea experts would have made sense in their own world. To call them thieves would not.
Jacobus Jacobson: The Tea Taster
Jacobus Isidorus Lodewijk Levien Jacobson worked under the Netherlands Trading Society, the state-backed organisation founded in 1824 that succeeded the earlier Dutch East India Company (VOC) in managing Dutch commercial interests in Asia. The Dutch had long been central to the European tea trade, supplying tea from China to Europe from the seventeenth century. By the late 1820s, however, their involvement was beginning to move beyond trade towards cultivation.
Jacobson was part of that shift. Trained as an expert tea taster, he was concerned with the evaluation of tea quality and its alignment with European commercial expectations. Between 1828 and 1833 he made six journeys to China in order to obtain tea seeds, plants, skilled workers and technical knowledge. These were transferred to Java, where experimental cultivation was established in upland regions including Cisurupan, Wanayasa and Raung. The trials proved successful, and by 1835 processed tea from Java was being shipped to Amsterdam. The early experiments were followed by gradual expansion over the mid-nineteenth century, as tea cultivation in Java developed into a significant colonial industry. In this sense, Dutch engagement with tea moved from trade to cultivation earlier than the British efforts of the 1830s.
What is striking is how Jacobson is described. In historical accounts, he appears as an expert tea taster or technical specialist rather than as a traveller or collector. His role was grounded in expertise, linking Chinese production with European markets. This framing is consistent with the kind of writing he himself produced: rather than a travel narrative, he left technical material in the form of a handbook intended for specialists (Jacobson, J. J. L. L). There is no suggestion in this language of theft or wrongdoing. Seeds were obtained and removed from China in breach of Qing restrictions on the export of plant material.
Modern descriptions of Jacobson have largely retained this technical framing. He remains associated with experimentation and plantation development rather than moral controversy. His writing did not circulate widely beyond specialist audiences, and he did not become a narrative figure in the way that some others did. As a result, his role in the transfer of tea from China has not been reinterpreted in more dramatic terms. His case therefore shows that significant acts of botanical transfer could be described in neutral, technical language at the time and continue to be understood in that way.
George J Gordon: the quiet man
George J Gordon is the least publicly visible of the three men considered here, and yet Gordon played a foundational and important role in the transfer of tea. Even basic biographical details about George J. Gordon remain elusive. He appears in records associated with the East India Company and with the Calcutta-based firm McIntosh. The surviving evidence suggests financial difficulty before his tea-related work, and hints at links to the wider commercial world of opium and possibly indigo, though the record is too fragmentary to state this with confidence. His nationality, too, remains uncertain in the sources consulted here.
And yet Gordon’s impact was considerable. Working as the Secretary of the East India Company’s Tea Committee in Calcutta, he travelled to China in the mid-1830s (Gordon, G. J. 1835a). He returned with consignments of tea seed reported to total around 80,000 (Antrobus, H. A. (1957). One account records his return to Calcutta in 1835 on the opium clipper Water Witch. The Bohea seeds he brought were sown in the Calcutta Botanic Garden, and plants raised from them were distributed to regions including Upper Assam, Dehra Doon and Kumaon.
The significance of those shipments lies in what followed them. Gordon’s seeds entered the experimental infrastructure of Calcutta and from there moved into the sub-Himalayan west of India. Nurseries in Kumaon and Garhwal raised plants that were then sent onward to Darjeeling. This movement from China to Calcutta to the western Himalayan nursery belt and onward to Darjeeling and Assam was one of the key early pathways through which Chinese tea entered British-controlled Indian cultivation. It did not, however, take place in isolation. Indigenous tea plants had already been identified in Assam: Robert Bruce had been shown the plant by Indian nobleman Maniram Barua, and Robert’s brother, Charles Bruce later developed its cultivation. Gordon’s shipments therefore formed part of a wider and more complex process (Neal, S. (2017), in which Chinese seed and the local Assamica variety together shaped the emerging Indian tea industry (Mann, H. H. (1918).
Yet he left little narrative trace. He appears as a functionary, a committee man, an agent, a carrier of seed. He had enormous practical impact but almost no historical visibility. That contrast matters. The history of tea in India cannot be told without him, yet he appears only intermittently in European historical accounts. Gordon’s obscurity is therefore not just a biographical accident; it reflects how historical memory operates. Those who had the greatest practical impact do not necessarily become its central figures.
His obscurity also helps refine this paper’s central argument. If modern audiences were to apply the label “tea thief” consistently to those who removed tea from China in breach of Qing regulations, Gordon would have as strong a claim to it as Fortune. He did not, however, become such a figure. He remained largely invisible. The selective focus on Fortune cannot therefore be explained by the act alone; it has to do with narratability.
Robert Fortune: the man of memory
Robert Fortune presents the opposite case: a figure whose actions were preserved, and later reinterpreted, because he wrote about them for public consumption. As a result we know far more about the man. Born in Berwickshire in 1812 to a relatively modest background, he trained as a gardener through apprenticeship before working at the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh and later at the Horticultural Society of London’s garden at Chiswick. He went on to become a well known European plant collector. Today he is commemorated with a blue plaque erected in 1998 at his former home at 9 Gilston Road, Kensington, London, which describes him simply as a “plant collector.”
That public commemoration is itself revealing. The plaque was installed at a time when academic debates about empire were already well established, and it continues to frame Fortune in the language of botanical collection demonstrating how long lived this vocabulary was. Further, his original public identity was firmly rooted in that terminology. In both of his travel accounts published in 1847 and 1852, he presented himself as “Botanical Collector”. His official and literary self-presentation was therefore respectable, scientific and professional.
When the East India Company contracted him in 1848 to obtain tea seeds, plants and tea-making expertise from China for transfer to India, Fortune was not stepping outside the accepted European world of botanical acquisition. He was operating within it, recognising he was in breach of Qing restrictions on inland travel and the export of plant material. The Company’s interest lay in securing high-quality Chinese varieties and knowledge, at a time when tea produced in India was widely regarded within Company circles as inferior. Like Gordon and Jacobson, he obtained tea material in China and helped move it into new cultivation zones. The Wardian case was central to this process, allowing seeds and young plants to survive the sea voyage in a viable state.
The route of Fortune’s plant material matters. When the Chinese seedlings reached Calcutta in Wardian cases, they were inspected there and then sent on to the Himalayan belt between western Nepal and the Kashmiri border. This did not establish a new area of planting. Earlier consignments associated with Gordon had already been directed into Himalayan and sub-Himalayan nurseries, including Kumaon and Garhwal. Fortune’s material therefore entered an existing experimental landscape rather than creating a distinct one.
Fortune’s journeys themselves have attracted particular attention. He travelled in disguise. He wore Chinese dress, shaved his head and adopted the queue hairstyle, and had sufficient command of the language to operate beyond the treaty ports. These journeys later became central to his reputation, but in practical terms they formed part of an ongoing process of acquiring and transferring plant material rather than a singular breakthrough.
In his own time, this did not make him notorious. Quite the opposite: it made him admired. His books offered a mixture of horticultural observation and travel narrative, and were widely read, running to second and third editions. He wrote not only as a collector but as a witness, supplying scenes and detail in a way that Gordon and Jacobson did not.
This helps explain why Fortune dominates memory. He was arguably the least consequential of the three in terms of long-term plantation development. Jacobson’s work in Java seeded an entire colonial industry; Gordon’s early transfers into Indian nurseries were foundational. Fortune’s contribution, by contrast, was absorbed into an existing system. Even within the East India Company’s own experimental network, his work was not universally admired. Dr William Jameson at Saharanpur, whose approach was more explicitly scientific, remarked that “Mr. Fortune’s suggestions were no novelties to us.” (India. Home Dept, 1860). Fortune’s importance therefore lay less in technical innovation than in narrative presence.
Landscapes today: the afterlives of smuggled seeds
The effects of these early seed journeys can still be seen in tea landscapes today, though not equally. Assam remains one of the world’s major tea-producing regions, shaped by the experiments of the 1830s that combined imported Chinese seed, including Gordon’s consignments, with indigenous Assamica. By 1839, almost ten years before Fortune’s mission, tea from India was already reaching London auctions. Gordon’s early plantings fed into the nursery system that supplied regions including Darjeeling and the Himalayan foothills. Java, meanwhile, still reflects early Dutch plantation development, with its origins traced to Jacobson’s work.
This is not a claim of pure botanical lineage. Replanting and hybridisation have altered these regions. But the legacies of Jacobson and Gordon remain visible in the tea that is still grown today. Fortune’s are harder to trace. The quieter figures remain present on the ground; Fortune remains most visible in narrative.
Inventing the tea thief: memory, morality and modern Europe
When did Fortune become a “tea thief”? The phrase is not Victorian. It emerges much later, in late twentieth and early twenty-first-century retellings. An early marker is the Australian documentary Robert Fortune: The Tea Thief (2001), which frames his journey explicitly through the language of theft. The next major moment comes with Sarah Rose’s For All the Tea in China (2010), which presents the story in terms of espionage and corporate intrigue. From this point, the language spreads readily across journalism and popular history.
This reframing coincided with a broader shift in how empire and the movement of knowledge were being reassessed. By the late twentieth century, postcolonial scholarship had begun to influence wider public discussion, and there was growing attention to the ownership of biological resources and traditional knowledge. The Convention on Biological Diversity in 1992, and the subsequent rise of terms such as “bioprospecting” and “biopiracy”, provided a vocabulary through which earlier episodes of plant transfer could be reinterpreted as extraction rather than achievement. Fortune’s journeys, involving the movement of plants and expertise across political boundaries, lent themselves readily to this new language.
Why Fortune? The simplest answer is that he left a story capable of being retold. He wrote for a wide readership and supplied scenes, detail and narrative: journeys into the interior, disguise, tea districts, and the movement of plants and expertise. Later writers did not have to construct this story from scratch. They adapted an existing narrative to a different moral vocabulary. Gordon and Jacobson left far fewer such traces. The simplification goes further. In many modern accounts, Fortune becomes a catch-all figure through whom the story of tea transfer is told. Because the “tea thief” label attaches to him alone, other elements are folded into his story: he is credited not only with moving plants but with introducing processing knowledge, explaining the relationship between the plant and green/black tea, and establishing cultivation in regions such as Darjeeling. These were not singular achievements, nor were they confined to one individual. Yet the concentration of attention on Fortune encourages a narrative in which multiple strands of development are gathered into a single life.
The result is a compressed account in which responsibility is attributed to one figure. Fortune appears as the man behind the transfer of tea in all its dimensions, while earlier experiments, parallel efforts and the contributions of others recede from view. What is lost is not simply detail but structure: the longer, more distributed history through which tea cultivation in India actually developed.
The contrast is clear. All three men were involved in the movement of tea from China under conditions that would later be described as unlawful. Only one has been consistently recast as a thief. The label therefore reflects not a difference in activity but a difference in narrative availability and visibility.
Conclusion : Europe’s selective memory
The movement of tea from China to India and Java in the nineteenth century was collaborative, commercial, technologically enabled and unlawful in relation to Qing restrictions. It was also described at the time in the language of science, collection and improvement rather than theft. Jacobson, Gordon and Fortune all participated in that world. They removed tea material from China and helped establish the cultivation of tea in new imperial settings. Their actions changed tea history.
Yet Europe has not remembered them equally. Gordon, despite his role in early seed transfer to Calcutta, Kumaon, Garhwal, Darjeeling and Assam, has remained shadowy. Jacobson, despite his foundational place in Java’s plantation history, remains a technical expert in most retellings, not a moralised transgressor. Fortune alone became the figure through whom the story is told. That was possible because he wrote himself into history, because English-language popular culture could easily absorb him, because the wider context was reassessing empires, and because his story offered the ingredients of modern “heist” storytelling.
Is there perhaps even a partial comparison with sugar? Public reassessments of sugar in Britain, especially in the wake of Black Lives Matter, have focused on labour systems, slavery, merchants, plantation wealth and the material traces of those structures in British life. Tea has not undergone an equivalent broad reckoning. Yet tea, too, is rooted in coercive systems. When the East India Company was establishing tea cultivation, systems of unfree labour persisted in parts of India into the 1840s. The Slavery Abolition Act 1833 explicitly excluded the territories of the East India Company. Slavery in India was only addressed a decade later, with the Indian Slavery Act 1843, which removed legal recognition of slave status and prohibited transactions in enslaved people. Tea plantation development expanded within that time, and later rested heavily on penal contracts, restrictive labour regimes and highly unequal conditions.
The scale of labour required to sustain tea cultivation was immense. Between 1 May 1863 and 1 May 1866, 84,915 labourers were recruited into Assam’s tea districts, and over 30,000 had died by June 1866 ((Guha, 1977, p. 18). In Ceylon, the recruitment and movement of Tamil labourers from southern India to sustain tea cultivation left legacies that remained politically and socially consequential long afterward. The tea that Europe learned to treat as a domestic comfort was produced within histories of extraction, coercion and displacement.
Why, then, has tea memory focused on one collector cast as a thief rather than on the system? Part of the answer lies in terminology. “Thief” and “heist” are vivid words. They direct attention to a dramatic act and a single actor. They are much easier to attach to seeds in glass cases than to the longer, more complex histories of plantation labour and land. Part of the answer also lies in effect. Tea remains a comforting drink, a social ritual, a sign of domesticity in much of Europe. Its histories of production are less publicly known than those of sugar, and perhaps less easily assimilated into ordinary moral narratives.
That is why the title of this paper matters. The shift from plant hunter to tea thief is not a minor change in wording. It reveals a selective way of negotiating the imperial past. Europe has begun to revise the story of how tea moved, but it has done so through a charismatic individual rather than through the structures that made tea a global commodity. The result is not false, exactly, but partial. Fortune can indeed be described as having smuggled tea from China. But to stop there is to mistake one memorable journey for the whole history.
Tea culture in Europe still carries embedded histories of empire, movement, labour and loss. Those histories are remembered unevenly. Some become adventure. Some become accusation. Much remains unspoken. To trace how one collector became a thief while others remained experts, and while the plantation system itself stayed largely out of view, is to see not only how tea was moved, but how Europe continues to tell itself the story of its own cup.
.References
Beinart, W., & Middleton, K. (2004). Plant transfers in historical perspective: A review article. Environment and History, 10(1), 3–29. https://doi.org/10.3197/096734004772444397
Convention on Biological Diversity. (1992). Convention on Biological Diversity. United Nations.
English Heritage. (n.d.). Robert Fortune | Plant collector.
Fortune, R. (1847). Three years’ wanderings in the northern provinces of China: Including a visit to the tea, silk, and cotton countries; with an account of the agriculture and horticulture of the Chinese, new plants, etc. John Murray.
Fortune, R. (1852). A journey to the tea countries of China: Including Sung-Lo and the Bohea Hills; with a short notice of the East India Company’s tea plantations in the Himalaya mountains. John Murray.
Batsaki, Y., Cahalan, S. B., & Tchikine, A. (Eds.). (2016). The botany of empire in the long eighteenth century. Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection.
Drayton, R. (2000). Nature’s government: Science, imperial Britain, and the “improvement” of the world. Yale University Press.
Jacobson, J. J. L. L. (1843). Handboek voor de kultuur en fabrikatie van thee. Ter Lands-drukkerij.
Gordon, G. J. (1835a). Memorandum of an excursion to the tea hills which produce the description of tea known in commerce under the designation of Ankoy tea. Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal, 4(38), 95–106.
Gordon, G. J. (1835b). Journal of an attempted ascent of the River Min, to visit the tea plantations of the Fuh-kin Province of China. Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal, 4(46), 553–570.
Mann, H. H. (1918). The early history of the tea industry in north-east India. D. L. Monro, The Calcutta General Printing Co.
Antrobus, H. A. (1957). The history of the Assam Company 1839–1953. T. N. Khosla.
India. Home Dept. (1860). Report upon the present condition and future of tea cultivation in the north-west provinces and in the Punjab. Page 32. F.F. Wyman, Home Secretariat.
Neal, S. (2017). Opium and migration: Jardine Matheson’s imperial connections and the recruitment of Chinese labour for Assam, 1834–39. Modern Asian Studies, 51(5), 1626–1655. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0026749X16000925
Perelsztejn, D. (Director). (2001). Robert Fortune: The tea thief [Paywall Documentary]. La Huit Production; Les Films de la Mémoire; Diane Perelsztejn & Company Pty Ltd.
Rappaport, E. D. (2017). A thirst for empire: How tea shaped the modern world. Princeton University Press.
Rose, S. (2009). For all the tea in China: Espionage, empire and the secret formula for the world’s favourite drink. Hutchinson.
Royal Horticultural Society. (2025, May 9). RHS Plant Collector Archive: Robert Fortune.
Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. (n.d.). The history of tea: From China to India.
Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. (n.d.). The Wardian case: Botany game changer.
Schiebinger, L. (2004). Plants and empire: Colonial bioprospecting in the Atlantic world. Harvard University Press.
Sharma, J. (2009). ‘Lazy’ natives, coolie labour, and the Assam tea industry. Modern Asian Studies, 43(6), 1287–1324. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0026749X08003831
Sharma, J. (2011). Empire’s garden: Assam and the making of India. Duke University Press.
Varma, N. (2016). Coolies of capitalism: Assam tea and the making of coolie labour. De Gruyter Oldenbourg. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110463170
Wenzlhuemer, R. (2007). Indian labour immigration and British labour policy in nineteenth-century Ceylon. Modern Asian Studies, 41(3), 575–602. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0026749X06002538