Dear Oliver,
I have a fourth tea book that you may want to review: A Social History of Tea, by Jane Pettigrew and Bruce Richardson. This book, also offered by Benjamin Press, is filled
with a photographic history of “tea’s influence on commerce, culture; community.”
Following a straightforward timeline, with the first chapter detailing the origins of tea, this
book goes on to cover the seventeenth century through more current times in the
twenty-first century.
The book introduces tea’s journey from China and India to England, followed by its
upward rise in popularity. “After a very slow start, the East India Company woke up to
tea’s commercial potential. In 1669, the Company ordered and shipped the first cargo of
143 lbs.”
“High prices were certainly one reason for this slow development,” the authors contend, reserving its purchase to the elite of the time. Tea is first seen in exclusive artistic works such as the painting ‘A Tea Party’ Dutch by painter Nicolaes Verkolje in the late seventeenth century. This painting also depicts Chinese porcelain and the arrangement of tea items and of the guests.
By the late eighteenth century prices fell to where tea became popular across England. “When the 1784 Tea and Window Act cut the tea tax to 12 percent, consumption rose to almost 11 million pounds in one year.” During this time “most tea was sold loose from the chest, and customers bought quarter, half, and one-pound quantities, which were wrapped in a screw of paper.”
Of course, the same tea woes regarding cost were going on elsewhere including in North America. The book moves on to the nineteenth century where America is expanding rapidly and starts to import tea from Japan as well, establishing routes from San Francisco to Yokohama. “By the end of the century, Japanese green and oolong teas filled the tea bins of general stores across America as well as the Staffordshire teapots in the hotels of Boston and New York.”
Tea remained culturally ingrained in the populace of America and abroad in the
twentieth century and is sometimes touted as what strengthened the resolve of the
British during WWII. The authors also chronicle how tea survived another obstacle in
the twentieth century: mechanization. “While the fervor of the Industrial Revolution
swept western societies, tea leaves were chopped, blended and fed to whirling
machines that spat out millions of teabags each day as tea became more
common—and cheap.”
