There are many things to study when it comes to tea. Even if we’re just looking at tea history, we can choose to focus on tea in China, tea in Japan, tea in England, tea in America, tea in India, etc. I’m still looking for books on the history of tea in various countries, but today, I’d like to introduce three books that you can read if you’re looking to find out more about the history of tea in the UK and America!
All three of these books cover the history of tea in the seventeenth to twentieth century, but they all have a different focus. I’d recommend reading all of them, but if that sounds like too much, you can just choose what appeals to you. Here are the books:
A Social History of Tea by Jane Pettigrew and Bruce Richardson
Read this if: You want to know more about how tea developed in America and Britain, and what role it played regarding the ties between both countries.
Topics Covered:
- 17th Century: First tea in England, East India Company, America’s Thirst for Tea, Tea Jars & Caddies
- 18th Century: Teas for Sale, Tea Smuggling, Tea Etiquette, Too Big to Fail, Boston Tea Party
- 19th Century: An Empire Built on Tea, Thomas Lipton, Afternoon Tea, Glasgow Tea Movement, Tea & Suffrage
- 20th Century: Teabags, The Tea Room Movement, Rise of American Tea Brands, Tea Dances, Speciality Tea
- 21st Century: The American Teasmith, Tea & Health, The Starbucks Effect, Culinary Tea
A Thirst for Empire by Erika Rappaport
Read this if: You want to know about tea in the context of the British Empire. This book also looks at the development of tea in India, the marketing of tea in South Africa, and how colonialism affected tea’s position in various British Empire countries.
This is the most international book (in terms of coverage) of the three, and the thickest. I first read it in the library and loved it so much I bought a copy so you know there’s a lot of information in this.
Topics covered:
- Part 1: Setting the Early Modern Tea Table, Temperance and the making of a sober consumer culture in the 19th century (and what that’s got to do with tea), the origins of the tea industry in Assam, Advertising food safety in a global marketplace
- Part 2: Manufacturing Imperial tastes in Victorian Britain, Building foreign markets (the triumph of Indian tea and the building of tea markets in India and America), the politics of Imperial Consumption (aka the Empire Kitchen), Tea in the Great Depression, and Tea during the War
- Part 3: Tea as the British Empire declines, and the Legacy of the British Empire and the role of tea in the 1960s.
Empire of Tea by Markman Ellis, Richard Coulton, and Matthew Mauger
Read this if: You are only interested about tea in the UK and you want to focus on tea and how it specifically affected the culture in Britain (tea poems, anyone?)
Topics Covered
- Early European encounters with Tea
- Establishing the Taste for Tea in Britain
- The Tea Trade with China
- The Elevation of Tea
- The Natural Philosophy of Tea
- The Market for Tea in Britain
- The British Way of Tea
- Smuggling and Taxation
- The Democratization of Tea Drinking
- Tea in the Politics of Empire
- The National Drink of Victorian Britain
- Twentieth Century Tea
Overall
If you want to learn about tea in the West and you want to learn as much as possible, you can get all three books. As you can tell from the topics covered, the authors provide a different perspective for their books. But if you only want to focus on a certain aspect of tea’s development, or a certain country (or countries), feel free to just read one of these. You’ll definitely get a good overview of how tea became to be a part of British culture (and in the case of America, how it stopped being part of their culture)
