An Era of Tea
While astute historians have not been blind to the economic interests involved in the American conflict with Britain in the 1770s, they have been less thorough in understanding the global context for the American Revolution, and the pivotal role of one Chinese commodity that made the world turn in 1776—TEA.[1]
Tea consumption, like oil consumption in our day, carried outsized financial, political, and cultural capital. Nobody wanted to be its dupe. Tea could either greatly enhance one’s well-being, prestige, and pocket, or it could dangerously drain not only one’s wealth but a man’s very social standing as a white male, and by association his virility and self-government—not a small matter in era of widespread slavery and colonialism. To survive in the late 18th-century British imperial world, within which Americans lived, it became necessary to have control over tea and the tea trade. Among the many grievances pushing Americans to war with Britain in 1776 was regaining control of the tea trade.[2] A decade later, a few years after the close of the war, Philippe Freneau, a Patriot and so-called “Poet of the Revolution,” wrote a poem celebrating the “First American Ship that Explored the Rout to China and the East Indies” writing:
She now her eager course explores
And soon shall greet Chinesian shores
From thence their fragrant teas to bring.
Without the leave of Britain’s King"
A similar sentiment is expressed on a porcelain jug painted in Canton for John White Swift, the purser of this “First American Ship,” the Empress of China, carried home as a wedding present for his bother. Hand-copied by a Chinese artist in Canton from earthenware originals circulating the Atlantic, the jug depicts White’s ship on one side and on the other the American eagle gripping arrows and an American flag in his talons. Emblazoned around the eagle is the phrase: "By virtue and valour we have freed our country, extended our commerce, and laid the foundation of a great empire."[3] Freneau and the officers of the Empress were celebrating American statehood as expressed through the free trade in tea, not the consumption of tea. But the two were closely connected. Only by mastering the trade could statesmen and citizens alike be kept safe from the potential dangers of consuming tea.
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[1] On economic motivations, see for example Staughton Lynd and David Waldstreicher, “Free Trade, Sovereignty, and Slavery: Toward an Economic Interpretation of American Independence,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3dser., 68, no. 4 (October 2011): 597–63. “Global context” is often limited to the Atlantic, as in Eliga Gould and Peter Onuf, Empire Nation: The American Revolution in the Atlantic World (Johns Hopkins, 2005), especially pt. 3. Several historians have examined the global impact of the Revolution but neglected the global impetus of the Revolution India and East Asia have been neglected in “global” interpretations.
[2] See Frank, Objectifying China, Imagining America: Chinese Commodities in Early America (University of Chicago Press, 2011), especially ch. 5.
[3] See for example Kariann A. Yokota, Unbecoming British: How Revolutionary America became a Postcolonial Nation(Oxford University Press, 2011) p. 104.
