Part 2: Through a reading of the works of Horace Walpole, this book shows the ludic as a mode of play unconditioned by any preconceived judgment or intended outcome. As bourgeois taste is increasingly tasked with dispelling the material conditions of risk, uncertainty, violence, and death that underwrite Britain’s growing colonial wealth, it becomes increasingly hostile to funniness – any kind of oddity, proclivity, or quirk that disrupts an engineered sense of safety, stability, and predictability in the lived world. Borrowing from Brian Massumi’s theorization of “ludic play” between dogs, I invoke eighteenth-century philosophy’s interest in “animal spirits” to show how Walpole coordinates his own ludic scenes. Ludic play, I offer, is a technique for strategically disorganizing the rituals and conceits of civility and good taste, retooling them from techniques of disavowing violence to a means of grappling with violence in its most diffuse and ever-present forms.

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.