The Trouble with Tea: The Politics of Consumption in the Eighteenth-Century Global Economy

How tea's political meaning shaped the culture and economy of the Anglo-American world.

Americans imagined tea as central to their revolution. After years of colonial boycotts against the commodity, the Sons of Liberty kindled the fire of independence when they dumped tea in the Boston harbor in 1773. To reject tea as a consumer item and symbol of "taxation without representation" was to reject Great Britain as master of the American economy and government. But tea played a longer and far m...