Coffee was England’s first love, but tea took the lead some time in the mid-1700s.
I’m talking about caffeinated beverages here, mind you. Prior to coffee, the intellectual culture in England was… well, drunk most of the time. Coffee houses changed all that.
My co-author from another mother and I described it this way in An Ode to Coffee:
I’ve long been fascinated by an intriguing possibility: that the Industrial Revolution was ultimately fueled by coffee. Once this stimulative nectar had reached London by way of Pasqua Rosée, an Armenian-born servant of a British merchant, it was as though a starting gun had been fired: the race was on.
“Penny universities”—coffee shops—began to spring up everywhere in the city. Think about that terminology for a second here: these were places to gather and think. The contrast with pubs, the dominant mainstay, could not have been more stark.
Tea, by contrast, took hold a bit more slowly at first. If you’ve ever made these two drinks at home yourself, you can probably guess at least one reason why: tea is just way easier to make.
Besides, the East India Company was busy bringing plenty of supply to Britain, while smugglers lowered the price even more, making tea available for more and more everyday Britons. This included women and children, who generally weren’t considered proper consumers of the much stronger coffee.
None of this would work without sugar, though. Ten times as many tea-drinkers would arise once the price of sugar dropped for everyday Britons—and drop it did.
Blood and systematic torture were exchanged for lower tea prices as hundreds of thousands of kidnapped Africans were forced to produce millions of tons of pure cane sugar, first from Barbados, then from Jamaica and the rest of Britain’s Caribbean possessions.
By the early 1700s, the phrase tea party had already appeared in print. American colonists were certainly already using it in everyday conversation, but when protesters who didn’t want a king wanted to show their disdain for a ruler who did not allow them to have a voice, the most available way to protest was, of course, to dump tea into Boston Harbor.
Some 90,000 pounds of tea were utterly ruined. This was worth something like £10,000 at the time—around £2 million in today’s terms. The East India Company wasn’t about to sit on its hands after this, and neither would the British government, led by that same king.
When colonists and Englanders talked about this incident, they certainly didn’t call it the tea party. That name came about retroactively, during the 1830s. This was also a shocking act, fully intended to be a giant middle finger to George III, and nobody really knew how violent the Crown’s reaction would be. Instead of playfully joking, the colonists generally referred to the act as “The Destruction of the Tea.”
Soon enough, no king would rule over America.
What's interesting about tea, is that it's also a fermented product.
“Penny universities”—coffee shops—began to spring up everywhere in the city. Think about that terminology for a second here: these were places to gather and think. The contrast with pubs, the dominant mainstay, could not have been more stark."
Definitely true. The reigning men of letters of that period tended to associate there; John Dryden hung out at a place called Will's that was known for that. And the all-mighty insurance company Lloyd's of London was originally a coffee house where wealthy people in the shipping trade conducted business.
"The Destruction Of The Tea" is a far more accurate term than "Boston Tea Party". But, thanks to Lewis Carroll and "Alice In Wonderland", I tend to associate the term "tea party" with the antics of the Mad Hatter and the March Hare (and thus, insanity, since neither of them was clearly in their right mind...).