I’m currently making my way through a second, quicker, round of A Thirst for Empire by Erika Rappaport (it’s one of those huge books filled with so much information that one read isn’t enough) and I thought I’d share some of the things that I’m learning.

One of the things that the book talks about is the temperance movement, which I knew about but never really thought about. I especially didn’t think about how tea related to it (or how tea related to anything). But as the book showed me, “many early modern cultures assumed that tea inspired temperance, self-control, and rationality. In the early nineteenth century free traders and evangelicals felt the same way and argued that tea aided temperance, and temperance was a defining characteristic of Britishness.” Bear in mind that tea came to England in the mid-17th century, which means that it was still undergoing a transformation from ‘foreign drink’ to ‘British staple’.

But once people got it into their heads that tea was going to keep people sober (which it will, as long as you’re replacing alcohol with tea and not kombucha), they decided to weaponise it by… hosting really large tea parties. One of the earliest largest parties, held on the Christmas of 1834 at Preston’s Cloth Hall and was attended by 1200 men and women. They used 192 meters (630 feet) of tables to serve them and basically people had tea and sang temperance hymns.

The other parties pretty much followed the same pattern – “mountains of bread and butter” as well as other foods, as well and lots and lots of tea. The aim was basically to convince people that if they gave up alcohol, they would have enough to eat well and society would become better.

And although we (or at the very least, I) associate the tea party with Britain, this temperance tea party started in America. That’s not the only surprise. The book writes that “[i]n all of these locations, it was common for social and economic elites to serve food and drink to their social inferiors, inverting social norms and hierarchies.” My impression is that the social divide was quite wide in that time, which would mean that the elites organising these temperance parties really believed in their cause.

Lastly, the book also floats the theory that afternoon tea did not start with Duchess Anna Maria, but rather with the tea parties in the temperance movement. The evidence for this theory is that the duchess “was an evangelical and she surely knew about, attended, or even hosted temperance teas.” Plus, before afternoon tea was a thing, tea parties tended to happen at night, while temperance tea parties took place during the afternoons and evenings “[a]t least a decade before the duchess turned the evening tea party into an afternoon affair.“

Given the possible temperance roots of afternoon tea, I now see irony in the fact that some hotels and tea salons offer a champagne version. Surely the temperance movement did not envision this when they started hosting their parties.