In this slim but densely packed volume, Jane Merritt seeks to make more broadly accessible an emerging interest in connections to Asia among historians of early America. The Trouble with Tea adds to a growing cadre of work by such scholars as Huw Bowen, James Fichter, Peter Marshall, Rosemarie Zagarri, and the present author. Merritt argues that tea “caused trouble” as it fostered commerce, imperial expansion, moral qualms, and tax revenue, which all profoundly shaped British, colonial, and early American political transformations (p. 3). Making major regional and even global transformations accessible through a single commodity is no minor challenge, and The Trouble with Tea illustrates both the potential payoffs of this task and some of the troubles that historians face in its pursuit.
The middle chapters of the book, where Merritt is in her element as a historian of colonial America, are an impressive and rare combination of erudition and readability, tracing the complex and often contradictory interplay of consumption, business, and politics. In particular, Merritt works carefully through the many competing arguments and actions surrounding tea during the Patriot debates of the 1770s. In one of many effective and engaging turns of phrase, after recounting the moral arguments long invoked against tea drinking Merritt writes that such “habits of censure, however, could not suppress habits of consumption” (p. 104). Historians can tend to make too much of public political and moral arguments and Merritt shows—through several detailed and well-explained tables that quantify extensive tea consumption in America even near the height of the famous boycott campaigns preceding the Revolution—that people did not necessarily do as they said.
Merritt's work on merchants negotiating nonimportation similarly challenges easier narratives about political cohesion. Merritt shows that many merchants supported nonimportation not for political reasons but to prop up prices in the face of temporarily glutted colonial markets. Using customs data, she demonstrates that colonial merchants actually imported more tea legally from Britain in the five years before, during, and immediately after nonimportation, from 1766 to 1770, than in the preceding five years. Even John Hancock, famous signer of the Declaration of Independence, imported considerable quantities of tea and other goods from Britain in 1769 and 1770. Colonies, meanwhile, turned against each other, with merchants in Philadelphia blaming those in Maryland, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island for flooding their markets with tea and evading nonimportation.
Merritt also recounts the British side of the American Revolutionary tea crises in 1773, which stemmed from a crisis caused a world away by the East India Company (EIC). This is a story better known in the British than the American historiography for the period. The EIC was a massive global corporation begun in 1600, governed by changing charters, increasingly conquering India, and deeply embedded in English and British politics and state financing. In charting the effects of events in India and the instability of the EIC finances on American Revolutionary discourse, Merritt does, however, tend to rely on arguments about fears of taxation without representation and ideas of free trade, a term whose use in the last two chapters needs more explanation. The book would have benefited from engagement with newer work on fears of constitutional tyranny following the Bengal famine and fears of a multiracial and multiethnic empire that British global conquests animated among many Patriots.
Strikingly, Merritt shows that the politics of tea in America did not end with protests against the EIC and Parliament in 1773 but had numerous other valences extending into the age of the Early Republic. As war began with Britain, not only did American men and women destroy tea, but they quickly began to debate and legislate the appropriate price of tea—even rioting frequently to ensure that it was accessible. The Trouble with Tea also explores the rise of independent American trade to China, showing that by the 1820s Americans were paying taxes of over 100 percent on large quantities of imported tea. Here, Merritt might again have reckoned more with scholarship that has complicated older narratives about the easy emergence of America's so-called free trade to Asia. For instance, as Kariann Yokota has argued, the voyage of the Empress of China, which Merritt points to as kicking off American trade to China, relied on substantial French support.
Claims that a particular commodity had a greater transformative role than other commodities are a hazard of commodity biographies. Arguing that tea was “the main commodity that fueled codependence between company and nation” in Britain, or that it “drove the engines of American commerce,” leaves out so many other viable candidates, not least of which was cotton cloth, the similar importance of which is argued for by Sven Beckert and Georgio Riello (pp. 17, 151). EIC and fashion historians have carefully documented that the EIC was built in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries almost entirely on, first, the pepper trade and, then, the cotton and silk fabric trades from India and that during this period the company became essential to the English state and essentially a state itself. Carew Reynell, whom Merritt quotes as worrying about exports of silver in the late seventeenth century, was worried not about silver going to China for tea, as she suggests, but about it going to India for cloth (p. 29). As Merritt later notes, tea did not become 50 percent of the EIC exports from Asia until the mid-1760s. Additionally, the East Indian fabric trade—as Robert DuPlessis, Kate Haulman, and others have shown—was formative for colonial American fashion, imperial relations, and political economy throughout the long eighteenth century, including being essential to the procurement of enslaved people upon which the British Atlantic economy depended. Similarly, the importation of cotton and silk cloth from India alongside Chinese tea was important for Early Republican global trade, and raw cotton drove American exports from the early nineteenth century.
Nevertheless, when hewing closely to the consumer and business politics of tea consumption in eighteenth-century America, The Trouble with Tea will be of great interest to cultural, political, and business historians as well as those looking for new, nuanced, and accessible teaching materials on the global inflections upon and divisions within the American Revolution.
