In Robert Icke’s The Doctor, a hugely popular West End play, a kettle was one of the only props in the entire play. The main character Ruth, played by British idol Juliet Stevenson, noted that “Tea was the currency of love in our house growing up”, and how she always keeps the kettle hot because a house where tea is being made is a house full of life and love. In the final moments of the play, the audience is led to believe that Ruth may have taken her own life. This is played out metaphorically in the scene prior, where the kettle itself grows cold, summed up in Robert Reid’s review of the Doctor: “She tells how she’d seen the plastic bag, an ‘exit hood’, out for days without really noticing it, perhaps not letting herself know what it was intended for. How she returned home to find the kettle, a symbol that had been established early on as a sign of security, love and sanctuary, now cold and the bag gone. There isn’t a sound in the theatre now.”. This play reveals the interconnectedness of tea with British life, where tea represents a common household symbol of safety, peacefulness, and a filled, loving home.
Probably half of the plays I attended for the London Theatre class I was taking at some point mentioned tea. Fall semester of my fourth year at Oberlin was spent abroad in London, the perfect study abroad destination for someone who failed to continue learning a language in college. Although there were barriers for me to soak up British culture, mainly because I didn’t attend a London University as I was in the Oberlin-in-London program, I passively and actively immersed myself into British culture. I tried clotted cream and an English breakfast, watched Gogglebox and Peaky Blinders, walked on the left side of pedestrian traffic, and most importantly, I began drinking tea on a semi-regular basis. From my perspective, tea was an integral part of British daily life. It seemed that more people ordered tea than coffee at cafes, and ‘high tea/afternoon tea’ was a common practice, not just an aristocratic 19th century tradition as I had previously understood it to be.
Sitting in my flat on an overcast day, I distinctly remember one instance of drinking tea that coerced me into buying some of my own. A flatmate gave me some of her chamomile tea and an accompanying biscuit, and I reveled in the simple joy of dunking a biscuit in tea and having the moist baked good crumble delicately in my mouth. The tea, with lemon, was soothing on my throat which was hoarse from the approaching cold weather. I had, before London, solely associated tea with sickness, but now I felt that I appreciated the ritual outside of its medicinal properties. It was during this experience that I felt distinctly British – sipping tea and calmly conversing with flatmates around a table. We jokingly resurrected an image of high-society British women sitting around doing the same activity, gossiping about their social lives in pompous clothing and extravagant hairdos.
Illustration of three young women in white dresses, sitting in a garden drinking tea
Something integral to this experience was the tranquil nature of it. Especially compared to coffee, which at least in America is a more ‘grab on your way to work’ and chug down kind of drink. Tea is generally consumed while sitting down, unlike coffee. Tea in England is distinctly tranquil and both signifies and embodies British culture. No one is exactly sure why England shifted so passionately from coffee to tea in the 17th century. As Wolfgang Schivelbusch points out in his book, Tastes of Paradise, “This supplanting of coffee by tea in England still remains an unexplained phenomenon. Surely neither a mysterious transformation in English taste – as has been proposed – nor some purely economic reason was responsible. It remains an unsolved yet fascinating problem in cultural and economic history.” Now, Brits are commonly known for their love of tea, and of their polite societal expectations. A study found that the country’s inhabitants say “Thank you” the most compared to all other countries. A penchant for politeness, surface level or not, was the primary warning for the American students by the British program heads for my study abroad program. They described it as probably the biggest culture difference we’d have to get used to – or at least, should get used to.
Britain has a history of these politeness standards that dates back hundreds of years. This attitude of politeness and refinement cannot be drawn from one source, but a significant factor is their history of colonization across the world. Britain colonized many countries throughout history, and notably only 22 countries have never been invaded by them. This is relevant to British sensibility because British attitudes toward their colonies was one of superiority, to put it lightly. The British empire justified their colonization and brutalization in the way many colonizers do: they saw themselves as saviors of ‘brute’ societies. In his exploration of sugar cane, slavery, and the British empire, Kay Dian Kriz describes this concept as British ‘refinement’ of societies they deemed savage, just as sugar cane in its raw form was refined into crystalized sugar, a valuable good that British colonizers extorted from their Caribbean colonies. Their perceived supremacy over cultures and societies they deemed less than cultivated an aura of sensibility and pride, and paved the way for the upper class polite society.
When tea first snaked its way in England in the early 1600s, it became a drink consumed only by the elite of British society, mainly the monarchs and their associates. Black and green tea were highly taxed so it could only really be purchased by the wealthy. Tea was trendy, and soon became a coveted good. The East India Company began importing tea to Britain in 1664, and by the 1700s smugglers began bringing tea into Britain so lower-class Brits could enjoy the beverage too. Tea was brought in at such high rates that eventually the Prime Minister in 1783 decided to slash the tea tax dramatically. Tea was able to be enjoyed freely by all classes by this time, shifting tea from an upper-class commodity to a beverage shared by all walks of life.
Politeness and sensibility, however, remained a characteristic of all economic classes. This is not to say that every Brit is polite and sensible to the core, but there exists in every Brit a compulsion for decorum, evident by their keenness to say “Thank you” more than any other culture. And not only that – British people joke across the internet about their own socialization of politeness that they recognize as quintessentially British.
Does the spread of tea enjoyment across economic classes show growth in terms of British society? Did this move them further away from their stereotypical aura of holier-than-thou mentality often complained about from an American perspective? One could argue that the spread of tea access into the lower classes symbolized development in reducing class distinction. But the air of respectability remains stagnant in the socialization of British people, which some propose is derived from their history of colonization. This legacy of British imperialism, along with tea, has stood the test of time.
Looking out my flat window in London, I could see more than a few Indian owned shops and restaurants. My flatmates and I liked to, at brief intervals throughout the day, sit in the kitchen by the windows with our hands wrapped around teacups, sipping slowly and people watching. Our neighborhood was cute and populated, and there were always delicious aromas sliding in through the windows and groups of people loitering around the pub across the street. At times I couldn’t help but think about how this classically British beverage was far more Indian than British. The exact origin of tea is fuzzy and different sources lay claim to the birthplace of tea as a plant and as a beverage. The plant is certainly from South East Asia, from either China, Burma, India or Tibet. Massive commercial tea production was spearheaded by China but soon adopted by Britain in India, when India was a colony. So as I sat there, sipping my tea with my British grocery store brand Samosas in the oven, I ruminated in my position as a practicing modern Brit, reaping the spoils of colonization, even in my comforting, everyday activities.
At times like these I questioned the tea-sipping stereotype that crossed my mind when I pictured my British counterparts; the stereotype that was fulfilled everytime I walked into a cafe. Although the UK is one of the highest consumers of tea in the world, tea has been grown and consumed in other countries for far longer. The tradition of tea brewing was integral to Chinese, Indian, Japanese, and Russian cultures, and various Middle Eastern cultures as well for hundreds of years before the UK adopted it into societal ritual. I found it bizzare and illuminating how this product we all had stored in our cupboard and sipped at times throughout the day was for so many years and for so many people, both a religious elixir and the cause of so much pain and destruction.
The East India Company was a British joint-stock company founded in 1600 and an immensely successful trading company, and a main perpetrator of that pain and destruction. Many people know that the company was able to make such extreme profits through utilizing slave labor, with slaves taken mostly from Eastern Africa (Mozambique, Madagascar). The British empire only grew and expanded through this profitable exportation of tea, using enslaved people to avoid labor costs. All this happened hundreds of years ago, but the UK we know today was fueled by the spoils of the East India Company.
Tea, as a legacy of British imperialism, although aspects of the concept crossed my mind occasionally during my time in London, was not something I thought about comprehensively until I returned to America. It wasn’t until I reflected afterward on my own history and my own place in the history of tea that I became captivated by the British tea obsession. My dad’s side of the family has been in America for many generations, according to one of his sisters who had an intense interest in figuring out our family’s ancestry. She claims that we are even related to William Bradford, one of the governors of Plymouth Colony in Massachusetts, even as others in the family are skeptical that we would ever be able to know that. None of the original colonists sipped tea as they sailed to America on the Mayflower, but tea did arrive to Plymouth around 1670 and was available to those who could afford it. If my aunt is right, that means we must have British ancestry as well.
My ancestors undoubtedly took part in the cultural adoption of tea that occurred in America as well. The Boston Tea Party is a perplexing display of revolution – although those heroes of the American revolution did impolitely toss the manifestation of their oppression into the Atlantic, they also tossed in the product of genuine oppression and exploitation of the British colonies. Even though we’re fairly certain our ancestors did not live in Boston, since I now live in Boston I find it funny to conjure an image of them tossing boxes of tea, sent to the shore by the British East India Company, into the harbor. Years of relearning about the American revolution in history classes will do that to you.
References
“Cultural Selection: The Diffusion of Tea and Tea Culture along the Silk Roads.” Cultural Selection: The Diffusion of Tea and Tea Culture along the Silk Roads | Silk Roads Programme, 2023. https://en.unesco.org/silkroad/content/cultural-selection-diffusion-tea-and-tea-culture-along-silk-roads.
Greenaway, Catherine. Afternoon Tea, 1886. Print. https://www.art.com/products/p53781576721-sa-i9384041/catherine-greenaway-afternoon-tea-1886.htm.
Kriz, Kay Dian. Slavery, Sugar, and the Culture of Refinement: Picturing the British West Indies, 1700-1840. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008.
Murray, Lorraine. “East India Company,” 2022. https://www.britannica.com/topic/East-India-Company.
Petter, Olivia. “Britons Say ‘Thank You’ More than Anyone Else in the World, Study Claims.” The Independent, May 23, 2018. https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/britain-thank-you-say-more-world-manners-polite-etiquette-study-a8364806.html.
Reid, Robert. “Adelaide Festival: The Doctor” Review of The Doctor, . Witness. Accessed March 15, 2023. https://witnessperformance.com/adelaide-festival-the-doctor/.
Richardson, Bruce. “History of Tea in Massachusetts.” Boston Tea Party Ships, June 3, 2020. https://www.bostonteapartyship.com/tea-blog/history-of-tea-in-massachusetts#:~:text=Tea%20was%20certainly%20not%20on,colony%20as%20early%20as%201670.
Schivelbusch, Wolfgang, and David Jacobson. Tastes of Paradise: A Social History of Spices, Stimulants, and Intoxicants. New York, New York: Pantheon Books, 1992.
Wikipedia editors. “History of Tea,” February 27, 2023. Zandt, Florian. Chart: Only 22 Countries Never Invaded by Britain. October 15, 2021. Statista. https://www.statista.com/chart/3441/countries-never-invaded-by-britain/.
About the author:
Linnea Colton is an Oberlin College student graduating this spring with a psychology degree, and with an interest in environmental systems. Her favorite format of pasta is linguini, homemade by her mother.
