Fichter on the Fate of the Tea

We’re one month out from the sestercentennial of the Boston Tea Party, so we’ll be consuming an increasing amount of that topic.

The anniversary has brought a new study of British North America’s tea crisis: Tea: Consumption, Politics, and Revolution, 1773-1776 by James R. Fichter.

Fichter is a professor of international history at the University of Hong Kong, closer to where the Chinese tea began its global journey than to where it went into the salt water. He is also the author of So Great a Proffit: How the East Indies Transformed Anglo-American Capitalism and editor of British and French Colonialism in Africa, Asia and the Middle East: Connected Empires across the Eighteenth to the Twentieth Centuries.

Tea looks at the data on consumption and sale of tea in North America, showing that people continued to consume it even as it became freighted with political meaning. It was a source of caffeine, after all.

In fact, Fichter points out, of the five ships carrying East India Company tea that landed in America, one way or another, two cargos were eventually consumed on the continent. Champions of the traditional narrative might respond that none of that tea was drunk by Patriot Americans under Crown government as initially intended. Details are in the book.

Earlier this month, Fichter chatted long-distance with the Emerging Revolutionary War team. The recording of that discussion can be viewed on Facebook and on YouTube.

Fichter will also be in Boston on 16 December as one of the speakers at the Grand Lodge of Massachusetts’s Tea Party Symposium. You can now use that link to register for a seat in advance.