During its 300 or so years in Britain, tea has made the transition from the exotic to the ordinary. Initially arriving as a Chinese mild stimulant, by the 1860s it was so prevalent that it could be written that “the great Anglo-Saxon race are essentially a tea-drinking people”. The national drink had a dark history: the taste for sugary tea fuelled the British empire; it underpinned the slave trade; and led to the Opium wars. But an academic paper last month found that the cuppa was much more central to England’s own development than previously understood.
Historians like to ask why the Industrial Revolution took place here in the 18th century and not elsewhere in Europe or Asia. Answers have ranged from religion to culture to politics. Several historians argue that sugar played a critical role in fuelling workers. Could it be that sweet, boiled water infused with a mildly addictive plant produced a healthier as well as more energetic population just when England needed labour? That appears to be the case put forward by Francisca Antman, an economist at the University of Colorado.
It is not a new thesis in academic circles, but Prof Antman provides the first quantitative evidence that tea drinking powered the Industrial Revolution, by increasing the health of workers. Her study reveals that the practice of boiling water for tea lowered mortality rates by 25% in lower water-quality parishes.
This “accidental improvement” in public health, she argues, occurred just as people were moving into cities, where the crowding together would otherwise have unleashed devastating epidemics. Instead, the country possessed a healthy pool of labour needed for industrialisation. The country’s population tripled in roughly a century after 1750, creating a bigger domestic market for goods and amplifying the impact of the technological revolution.
One of the key moments that shifted tea from a luxury good enjoyed by the elite to a mass market drink came, the Antman paper argues, in 1784 when the tea tax was cut from 119% to 12.5% at one stroke. By the end of the century, even the humblest peasant drank tea twice a day. Tea’s distinct properties helped it become the nation’s favourite. Only a few leaves were needed to make a decent pot and leaves can be reused, thus decoupling the link between income and consumption. The East India Company also muscled out a rival – coffee – by pushing its tea in the home market. Tea gardens made the drink a cultural custom, as did the sanctity of the worker’s tea break.
Thus the paradox, Prof Antman argues, “of why England experienced a decline in mortality rates over this period without an increase in wages, living standards, or nutrition can be explained in part by the widespread adoption of tea as the national beverage and the commensurate increased consumption of boiled water”. Perhaps some enterprising academic will one day pin our present economic woes on the current turn towards coffee. The sale last year by Unilever of its tea brands shows how unsentimental companies can be. While the past is known, the future can only be read in the tea leaves.
