Jane T Merritt - The Trouble with Tea

This addition to the series Studies in Early American Economy and Society, a collaborative effort between Johns Hopkins University Press and the Library Company of Philadelphias Program in Early American Economy and Society (PEAES), takes readers on a journey of new discoveries about the political economy of one of the worlds most widely used commodities: tea. Jane Merritts compelling study places tea not only in the homes of myriad North Americans but also traces teas role at the center of global events encompassing Atlantic revolutions and imperial contests during the eighteenth centurys closing years. As her story unfolds, readers see through the lens of a commodityits growth, processing, trade, and consumptionhow continents of early modern peoples were interconnected by trade for this highly desirable item.

Many readers are undoubtedly accustomed to placing tea within the narrative of the North American Revolutions approaching declaration of independence from British taxation and political might. In addition to the dramatic tea parties of 1773, waves of colonial nonimportation boycotts of tea and other articles of necessity in the colonial economy sparked deepening tests that challenged the rights of Britain to control the North American colonial economies. The cries of no taxation without representation seemed to be a firm, definitive renunciation of British efforts to undermine hard-won economic opportunities and political rights. Merritt agrees with many scholars of nonimportation movements that tea was one of the powerful instruments of symbolic and political economic protest in the final colonial years. But she takes our understanding much further back in time, and more deeply into global commercial relationships, than interpretations about the immediate imperial crisis permit. She insists on a wider narrative that includes India and Asia as equally important centers of the British Empires trade, as well as