Upon opening the lid, the word “Madras” (present-day Chennai, India) is immediately apparent, scrawled in large print at the bottom of an invoice dated September 1, 1801. Looking down into the base of the chest, “Madeira” can also be found in the lower right corner and, tucked into the lower corner at the base of the left wall, “the Cape of Good Hope.” Finally, peering over the edge of the front wall reveals a list of familiar Massachusetts ports: Ipswich, Salem, Hingham, Newburyport, New Rowley, Lynn, Plymouth, and Beverly. Aiming to flesh out its scant text and material remains, I explored the chest as a small portal into American tea commerce and its global entanglements at the turn of the 19th century.

In 1801, Madras had a newly solidified status as a British colonial city following years of warfare that engulfed the region for much of the second half of the 18th century. Amid this near-constant state of warfare, the British East India Company fought continuously to expand its hold over South India. One of the first charges listed on the invoice pasted inside the chest is “Cooleys for covering 200 Chests Tea.” A derogatory term usually associated with coerced migration from Asia to the Caribbean, “coolie” was an ambiguous category under which Asian workers were racialized around the world.

Society under colonial governance was rife with unequal, brutal conditions for local workers, including coercion and corporal punishment. In 1797 the Madras Governor in Council officially invested the British port captain with the right to whip subordinates and to carry out “ritualized floggings […] repeatedly performed on the beach and other public places.” Such practices haunt us from between the lines of this invoice, which records payment for tasks that would have fallen under the supervision of the port captain: packing cargo, carrying it to the beach and ferrying it to ships in smaller boats.

Besides tea, the cargo listed on the invoice includes cotton textiles that had long been central to India’s economy. The textiles named on the invoice — “Pungum Cloth,” “Salampores,” and “Nakanas”— were broadly categorized as “Guinea cloth” after the "Guinea coast" that stretches from present-day Ghana to Equatorial Guinea. The term was used for cotton goods that sold well in the region, most characteristically woven with blue-and-white stripes or checks. European and American traffickers in enslaved people capitalized on the demand for Indian cotton piece goods in this long-established market. It is likely that this cargo was bound for West Africa, meaning the voyage of the tea and cloth from Madras was bound up with the transatlantic slave trade.

Cotton cloth doesn’t only appear in the chest’s writings: Holes worn in the paper along gaps in the wooden slats reveal tiny blue and white checks peeking out from the depths. Turning the chest over reveals that three strips of blue and white checked cotton were used to cover gaps in the wooden base. This casual repair using the very same type of cloth that facilitated the trading of human lives is a visceral reminder that enslaved labor formed the basis of the world economic order that emerged in the 19th century.