While much has been written about tea utensils as signs of politeness, by comparison very little has been discussed about the box of tea, an indispensable article in the East India Company’s China trade. Still less has been written about the smallness of the box, which facilitated the movement of tea across ocean and land and shaped the aesthetics of protest in North America. Might the box of tea enable us to reassess how the material culture of an emergent British empire was fundamentally an empire of small things? This chapter analyzes smallness as the hallmark of a British colonial aesthetic sharpened by the complexities of the China trade. It examines boxes of tea as maritime merchandise before turning to botanical containers and tea caddies as sites of sensory engagement. Smallness, this chapter contends, emerged as a paradigm of intimacy that embedded an article of botany and commerce into the ebb and flow of domestic life. Like porcelain tea utensils, the small box played its part in tea ceremonies, while securing the careful management of a luxury product.

In the remarkable story of the chance discovery of the Elizabethan astrologer John Dee’s papers in 1672, a humble household chest belonging to a married couple plays a starring role. The seventeenth-century antiquary Elias Ashmole recounts how one day the chest was moved, and in a secret hidden drawer the chest’s owners came across Dee’s papers alongside a little box, some books, and prayer beads. In Ashmole’s account, this chest, a seemingly ordinary piece of household furniture, turns out to be a miraculous repository of other boxes, whose contents open onto England’s Elizabethan and Catholic pasts. The Introduction considers this extraordinary episode in the light of an essay by Primo Levi, who proposes that ‘building receptacles’ is a distinctively human activity. In the literary and material cultures of early modern England, the box is one of the most ordinary and necessary of human-made objects. As Boxes and Books in Early Modern England will explore, the box is also an evocative meeting point between matter and metaphor, influencing the material and mental environments of early modern writing in numerous ways.