Tea: Consumption, Politics, and Revolution, 1773-1776

In Tea James Fichter reveals that despite the so-called Boston Tea Party in 1773, two other large shipments of tea from the East India Company survived and were ultimately drunk in North America. The survival of these shipments shaped the politics of the years ahead and hint at the enduring potency of consumerism in revolutionary politics.



Tea protests were widespread in 1774, but, Fichter argues, so were tea advertisements and tea sales. Such protests were noisy and sometimes misleading per...