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The Department of history is proud to announce that Professor Emerita of History Jane T. Merritt’s book The Trouble with Tea: The Politics of Consumption in the Eighteenth-Century Global Economy has now been translated and published in Chinese.

This book explores the development of a global economy during the eighteenth century and the connections between consumption, markets, and their political meanings.  Using a single product, tea, I trace the impact of that luxury item on commercial trade, the political economy, British imperial policy, and the political response of American colonists.  Although it examines how economic and political relationships played out in the “Atlantic World,” in truth, I venture into what David Armitage defines as a “Circum-Atlantic” history that encompasses transnational links between Atlantic world consumers and Asian trade goods.  The core of the book’s argument questions the given among economic historians that consumer demand drove merchants to provide an ever-increasing supply of goods, thus sparking a Consumer Revolution in the early eighteenth century. 

Tea presents a different picture.  Instead, political concerns about the British economy and corporate machinations of the English East India Company in the 1720s and 1730s produced an over-supply of tea that the Company then funneled to North America in hopes of finding a market.  American consumers only slowly habituated themselves to the beverage, aided by the availability of Caribbean sugar.  Still, American merchants and consumers took to tea by mid-century.  The 1740s and 1750s saw a rise in smuggling as American merchants sought economic value in an easily transported and saleable commodity.  By the 1760s and 1770s, however, tea had become contentious, pushing Americans to call for non-importation of British goods in protest of imperial tax policy.  The protests culminated in 1773 when citizens in Boston, Philadelphia, New York, Edenton, North Carolina, and Charleston destroyed or forcibly returned East India Company tea commissioned for sale in North America.  Colonial actions signaled the power of consumers, who, when politicized, took action to reject British rule.  Americans, however, did not reject luxury consumption or tea, per se; they simply wanted quicker, easier access to foreign commercial markets, which they established in the early national period.  By the 1790s, Americans became one of the major direct importers of tea and individual states and the federal legislature quickly adopted tax duties on this repatriated beverage to cover the costs of war and protect a rising commercial empire.