A Social History of Tea - Expanded Edition
This is the secret side the social history of tea and it has now been revealed in The Social History of Tea in Britain and America. I hope to be only the first of many to bow with thanks and praise to authors Jane Pettigrew and Bruce Richardson.Here is history as it should be written. In a spell-binding way the story skips merrily along while seeming to skip nothing; it moves quickly but never seems to hurry. We linger in the boudoir of Catherine of Braganza while the tea steeps no longer than whilst you can say the Miserere Psalm very leisurely. Any lover of quaint and curious lore will spend happy hours taking instruction from these authors. I daresay the saga of the subjugation of the English-speaking world by the leaf of this Asian shrub has never been better told, and I say so as one who has studied the matter.This achievement is all the more remarkable considered as an Anglo-American collaboration. Jane is the (very) English author of the well-known Social History of Tea in Britain published there by the National Trust. Bruce, her American publisher at Benjamin Press, has added American social history to Jane s classic account, blending not only their voices but their points of view. To illustrate: Bruce is surely America s leading historian of the Boston Tea Party, serving as tea authority for the BTP Museum, amongst much else, but Jane s collaboration requires fairness to British policymakers: By 1773, the East India Company faced a surplus of 17 million pounds of tea...more than all England could drink in a year...debts were mounting and the Bank of England refused them any loans...If the East India Company collapsed, the banks and the British treasury would follow. Too big to fail has now become a familiar concept.With the 20th century everything grew bigger, faster and scarier. Phenomena like the automobile, telephone, Prohibition and back-to-back World Wars changed everything. The glamour of tea gowns, tea dances, tea leaf reading and fancy hotel teas wore off by the half-century and in both UK and US tea quality sank beneath the economics of the teabag. Jane and Bruce have played major roles in the successful rescue effort which we now term our Tea Renaissance but I find too much to praise and will stop here. You re sure to enjoy their secret history. --James Norwood Pratt