In Tea: Consumption, Politics, and Revolution, 1773–1776, James Fichter revisits the familiar subject of tea in the road to the American Revolution. While the tea that protesting colonists famously dumped into Boston Harbor on December 16, 1773, is enshrined in American lore, it was not the only tea laden with taxes imposed by Parliament's Tea Act that made its way to Britain's mainland North American colonies. Some shipments were turned away; another, wrecked. Two of the shipments survived, however, and were drunk in the colonies, and these shipments are the impetus for Fichter's study, which illuminates the complexities and contradictions that pervaded the colonies on the eve of revolution.

Engaging primarily with T.H. Breen's iconic Marketplace of Revolution (2005), Fichter argues that actual consumption and political arguments about consumption were distinct from each other. In fact, he explains, the political boycotts of East India Company tea did little to curb consumption, either before or during the American Revolution, and, if assessed by that criterion, “the tea ban was a failure” (2). Symbolically, however, the non-consumption of tea was critical to the Patriot cause, at least until the outbreak of hostilities and later Declaration of Independence made support for the war effort the new political litmus test. Viewed from this perspective, Boston becomes less important, and the Patriot enforcement of non-importation less severe—to allow a more flexible approach to drawing support for Congress and the Patriot cause. Moreover, the line between tea protests, which were not widely popular outside specific areas like Boston, and the cause of continental independence becomes less direct. Later generations, Fichter concludes, “added to the myths around tea protests” (259).

Tightly focused on the 1773–1776 period, Fichter builds his case in a dozen thoroughly researched and carefully argued chapters. The first two look at the history of tea smuggling and the 1773 tea parties in Boston, which were destructive, and in Charleston, where Patriots successfully used legal means to seize and resell the tea. The next two chapters explore the immediate aftermath, including the failed attempt to avert the brewing crisis by reimbursing the East India Company for the tea that had been dumped into Boston Harbor. Chapters 5 and 6 are Fichter at his best, in an exhaustive study of the Patriot propaganda about tea—from planted news stories to ballads. The next chapters examine how Patriot propagandists attempted to disparage tea as both unhealthy and feminine; tea was decidedly the female caffeinated beverage of choice—both in terms of acquisition and consumption—throughout the Anglophone world. Chapters 10 and 11 demonstrate how ineffective the formal prohibition of tea consumption was and detail how it was (purposefully) only lightly enforced. Few recorded violations, Fichter reminds readers repeatedly, were a consequence of limited enforcement, rather than of widespread adherence to the tea ban.

Some might quibble with the narrowness of Fichter's topic. Certainly, the title, Tea, allows expectations of a greater contextualization than what appears in the book. After all, tea was a global commodity—a trade in which Britain's mainland North American colonies were but a small subset of an imperial exchange that was itself a modest slice of a commodity whose production and trade were controlled by China. The political, social, and gendered aspects of consumption Fichter explores may have transpired in North America, but they had British imperial contexts, which in turn had global ones. Erika Rappaport's A Thirst for Empire (2017) and Markman Ellis, Richard Coulton, and Matthew Mauger's Empire of Tea (2015) are but two of many recent works that examine tea during this period as a global commodity, albeit largely in a British imperial context. To this list should be added Jane T. Merritt, The Trouble with Tea (2017), which Fichter laments as having been too recently published for him to fully engage. In consequence, Tea: Consumption, Politics, and Revolution, 1773–1776 will appeal almost exclusively to historians interested in colonial America and, to a lesser extent, the British Atlantic world.

Nevertheless, the depth and breadth of Fichter's research on his chosen subject ultimately make for a case that is nearly impossible to dispute. Appendices, notes, and the bibliography constitute roughly one-third of the book, with the appendices for comprehensive estimates of tea sales and consumption, complete with source notes, being the best available. Combined with an extensive bibliography that details the available manuscript sources on the American colonial tea trade, these appendices make Fichter's work a fantastic starting point for anyone embarking on a project related to colonial American consumerism or propaganda. Ultimately, Tea: Consumption, Politics, and Revolution, 1773–1776 is an important contribution to the field. It serves as a pointed reminder of how disparate pre-revolutionary America was, as well as how hard contemporary propagandists worked to portray it as otherwise.