A
n English student of literature could be forgiven for mistaking these lines for a description of tea, the English ‘caffeine delivery device’ of choice, where an American might scoff at any suggestion it was anything other than a celebration of coffee. For Americans, caffeination is synonymous with coffee. For the English, it has always and ever been tea time. But why do the English typically drink tea and the Americans coffee? The answer is simple. It’s as simple as the last 400 years of British and American economics, politics, culture and class… Attempting to break something of an American boycott of British Empire goods in the late eighteenth century, the British government tried shipping tea straight to America from its eastern colonies—charging American traders a much lower duty than the 100%+ levy payable on tea imported to the British Isles. The measure was classic government aid—aimed at helping the British conglomerate in charge of the trade offload an amassed surplus of tea that was threatening company profits. The pronouncements and actions of the American opposition, culminating in interested parties dressing up as Native Americans and dumping ‘British’ tea into the sea at Boston on December 6, 1773, fuelled a growing rebellion against anything symbolic of British dominion over America.
Words by: Andy Johnson
Protest by patriotic imbibers following the ‘Boston Tea Party’ certainly accounts for some decline in tea consumption in America, and the concomitant rise of coffee drinking, but is it the whole story? Between 1700 and 1750, recorded British Empire cashflow from the importation of tea had skyrocketed by over 300%, and with such a domestic demand as arose over the next hundred years—as the price fell and import volumes from China (and later India) mushroomed—duties on tea for the British Isles were slashed, partly to undercut widespread smuggling. The practice of tea drinking migrated down from the gentry to the proletariat as the price tumbled. Import duties on coffee began to fall after 1760 and Brazilian coffee production, built on slavery, boomed in the early 1800s—boosting American coffee consumption by virtue of its geographical proximity to Latin American sources, and their far lower import duties.
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