How well do we know the Boston Tea Party? Did you know that almost as much tea landed in Charleston, South Carolina--and in Boston--as was destroyed? What happened to the tea that went to Charleston, Philadelphia, and New York? What happened to the tea from the William, that wrecked on Cape Cod? We talk with James Fichter, author of Tea: Consumption, Politics, and Revolution 1773-1776, about the tea's arrival in places other than Boston, and how tea became a symbol and why boycotts were so difficult to maintain. Why was the tea so important? Why didn't the colonists break bottles of Madeira? How old was the tea the East India Company was selling? Where did the tea come from? Who drank tea? This conversation gives us much to think about!
How well do we know the Boston Tea Party? Did you know that almost as much tea landed in Charleston, South Carolina--and in Boston--as was destroyed? What happened to the tea that went to Charleston, Philadelphia, and New York? What happened to the tea from the William, that wrecked on Cape Cod? We talk with James Fichter, author of Tea: Consumption, Politics, and Revolution 1773-1776, about the tea's arrival in places other than Boston, and how tea became a symbol and why boycotts were so difficult to maintain. Why was the tea so important? Why didn't the colonists break bottles of Madeira? How old was the tea the East India Company was selling? Where did the tea come from? Who drank tea? This conversation gives us much to think about!
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Hello, everyone.
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Welcome to the Revolution 250 podcast.
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I'm Bob Allison.
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I chair the Rev 250 advisory group, also teach history at Suffolk University.
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And our guest today is James R. Fichter.
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Professor Fichter is an associate professor in the Global Area Studies program at Hong Kong University.
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Welcome, Professor Fichter.
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Thank you.
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And your first book, So Great a Profit, was How the East Indies Trade Transformed Anglo-American Capitalism.
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You really
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I don't want to characterize the work you do, but you really do specialize in these trade networks in the 19th century, 18th and 19th centuries, and the development of global capitalism.
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But your new book due out any day now is Tea, Consumption, Politics, and Revolution, 1773, 1776, that looks at this event we all know so well, what we call the Boston Tea Party.
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But your book tells us it's actually a much bigger story, and Boston isn't central to it.
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It is.
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That's true.
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When I came to the story, I thought Boston would be the core of it.
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And I thought the Boston Tea Party was the name of the time.
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And it was only really through digging around through the other secondary literature that you start to pick up.
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At the time, it had a different name.
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The Destruction of the Tea, it was often called, if it was specifically called anything.
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But of course,
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you can't give up the moniker of the Boston Tea Party.
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It's the only thing that means anything to us today.
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And so we should continue using the term.
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It's rather like the First World War.
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No one called it that at the time either, but they keep on calling it that now.
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But in working through the material, it was striking to me how much material there was from far beyond Boston, as far as Charleston, which has surprisingly been neglected in the literature compared to other cities, and even farther afield than that.
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Yeah, and your book really begins with Charlestown, South Carolina in December 2nd when the ships arrived, which is a striking development.
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So why don't you just tell us what was going on in Charleston, or Charleston, Charlestown, the name changes during the course of the revolution.
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And it's tricky because if you're thinking about Boston all the time, you think I'm just talking about Charleston, Mass.
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But yes, in South Carolina, the tea arrived there on December 2nd.
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And it had a similar trajectory to much of what was going on in Boston, a back and forth between the importers.
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on the one hand and the Patriot organizers on the other debating what to do about the tea.
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But what was so distinctive about Charleston, or at least what seems so distinctive about it was that the
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the importers didn't quite back down or they didn't back down in the same way as happened in other cities.
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What was so distinct about Charleston was the tea was actually landed.
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Unlike in New York or in Philadelphia, and unlike in the Boston Tea Party, the tea was landed in Charleston safely and securely.
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Sons of Liberty didn't come out all morning to interrupt the safe landing of the tea.
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The sheriff and the customs officers organized it, safely stored it.
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The funny thing about it is, is Charleston's geography is so distinctive.
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They had this great hall where everyone, many of the patriotic meetings occurred in 1773 and four and five.
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And this hall sat above a lower level that was served as a custom house storage space.
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throughout the debates that would occur in the following year or two on Charleston as that city also moved toward a more revolutionary posture, they were literally meeting over the tens of thousands of pounds of tea that had been impounded underneath them.
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And it would rarely come up in official discussion and debate, but it's hard to imagine that these patriot organizers could have
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completely forgotten about this fact.
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Yeah, it's 70,000 pounds of tea.
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It's a lot.
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And the total amount of tea, because ultimately, tea survived in Boston, too.
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And when you add that surviving tea up, it's almost as much as the tea that was destroyed.
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which suggests that the Boston Tea Party, as striking as an event as it was, certainly wasn't the whole story.
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Yeah, yeah.
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It's interesting.
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And you also make the point that not everyone thought, even people on the Patriot side, thought that destroying the tea was a good idea, that this was this great act that is going to unite us.
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Exactly.
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There's a way in which I think because
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The United States is a country today, and it's easy to look at the Boston Tea Party as this cut, this moment beyond which you see that before which you see the British Empire and after which you see the beginning of the making of America, perhaps.
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But yeah.
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You know, the people who were engaging with the East India Company's tea in 1773 were really looking to negotiate imperial authority.
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And on that ocean waterfront was where so much imperial authority was negotiated.
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The surprise shock of the coercive acts of 74, what was in part so shocking about them was that it really did seem like the past decade had been this back and forth negotiation, a rough and tumble one, to be sure at times, but one in which
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the fundamental legitimacy of the empire to decide something wasn't quite in question.
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It was more about exactly how it was going to happen, who was going to decide.
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And the Boston Tea Party pushed beyond what was seen as what other patriots in other cities saw as the normal bounds of negotiation.
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Sure, we can deal with this tea.
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We can push it aside.
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We can send it back.
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We can lock it up without having to destroy it, which seems a step too far for them.
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So this does then trigger something later.
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I mean, it's the coercive acts, the response, as opposed to the event itself.
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Or is it something else that I'm missing?
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It's something else.
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So the Boston Tea Party destroys three ship loads of tea.
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And there were four ships of tea that were sent to Boston.
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And this fourth ship, the fourth vessel, the William, wrecked off the coast of Cape Cod.
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And this tea was ultimately salvaged.
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And in a way that if you're
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It was very sneakily, or if you're a loyalist, it was very cleverly secured in Castle William, in this island castle in the middle of Boston Harbor, where it was safely locked up.
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And in this, it mirrors, Boston starts to mirror Charleston.
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Here you have two ports now, meaningful supplies of tea, about 10,000 pounds in Boston.
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It's a little, you know, you wonder in Boston, because it was a salvage operation,
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if all the pounds that were salvaged were really that great.
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But they were salvaged, and they were stored in this sort of combined operation where the army was in charge of the castle, the navy guarded the water around it, and the customs officers had the keys to the room where the tea was stored.
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This created a sort of hammer and anvil problem because Boston both had destroyed tea and had tea that could be sold.
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And that was unique.
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Other cities all had some sort of definitive response.
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New York and Philadelphia sent it back.
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Charleston locked it up.
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Here, Charleston and Boston had done two things at once.
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And the reason the tea had been destroyed was in part because
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people may well have wanted to consume it.
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It was not simply as a protest, but also as a way to prevent consumers from undermining the patriot movement.
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And so now here was the remainder of this tea, which could any day risk being landed.
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And if it were, and if it were sold,
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Suddenly, the ability of Boston patriots in, say, March or April to speak for the public on this issue would be radically undermined.
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And so this this necessitated a level of agitation and violence that was throughout Boston in the winter and early spring.
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It was very distinctive.
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Yeah.
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Yeah.
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You make this really interesting argument that the whole attempt to ban tea was a failure because it was too popular a commodity.
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And that with the Patriots in Boston and other places had pushed non-importation because they couldn't really do non-consumption.
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They couldn't get people to agree to stop the drinking tea.
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Yeah, there's a very old definition of political legitimacy that predates politics.
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the emergence of American democracy or really most systems of specific systems of rule.
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And it's about, you know, are the people starving most generally and more broadly the standard of living of the populace.
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And it can be dangerous for politicians to be going out and taking things away from people and taking away consumer goods, especially in the 1770s.
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when historians debate to what extent there was a consumer revolution going on at the time.
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Whether or not there was, there's certainly enough evidence to be worth having a debate about it.
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Beyond that,
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you can look at what daily colonial consumer life was like a generation or two earlier.
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People's lives really were mean and short and spare.
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And so to be able to have a little bit extra, to have one extra finer coat, an extra nice dress,
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some Magiera to enjoy drinking, a bit of wine, a bit of tea, a bit of coffee, a few other consumer goods.
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This is what lubricates life and makes it worth living in the cold winter and to make daily life a little bit nicer than it used to be.
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this becomes quite tricky.
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It's hard to see that when we think about consumer protests, and we can be very excited about these protests.
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These are the first major consumer protests, boycotts in world history.
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But the boycotts have another side to them, which is most boycott movements
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Many boycott movements don't succeed.
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People lose interest or they don't have the impact they want.
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And this one was potentially no different because the war happened.
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Suddenly we stopped paying attention to the boycotts.
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We're not worried about it.
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Parliament kindly enforced the colonists boycott of Britain for them with the Royal Navy.
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So there wasn't really...
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any long-term necessity for the public to be engaged in boycotting.
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We're talking with James Fichter, author of Tea, Consumption, Politics, and Revolution.
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Your book also makes this case that we overlook the fact that this was a revolutionary period then between the destruction of the tea and the war as people's minds are changing.
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As you said, the British are enforcing this boycott that the patriots
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and their boycotts hadn't really worked.
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We saw that in the late 1760s with the attempted non-importation.
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of British goods in the wake of the Townsend duties, which hadn't been working.
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And again, they're falling apart.
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And the Boston Massacre really bails out the Patriot movement at that moment.
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And in this case, it's not just the destruction of the tea.
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It is the fact that this then triggers the coercive acts and the change in dynamic, which often we overlook when we're trying to tell the story.
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We think everyone always thought the same way, when instead this is a period of tremendous change.
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I'm wondering, again, when I was doing some work on the Tea Party some years ago, I remember that I was surprised the first real, the Philadelphia merchants, when they heard about the Tea Act, knew the Bostonians are going to cut us out, so we want all the merchants to agree on something before, they thought for some reason that Bostonians were self-interested self-dealers and not the disinterested selfless patriots that we know them to be.
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Yes.
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The merchants that were importing tea didn't really have any ability to have a combined intercity agreement.
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And the broader groups of merchants also failed to really pull that off.
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It is funny, though.
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You begin to see in many of these cities, you begin to see merchants acting collectively, either in response to the ECD company tea imports or...
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in the broader time period.
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So the Charleston, South Carolina Chamber of Commerce emerges at this moment as a specific lobby to speak for the merchant interest.
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And you see an earlier Chamber of Commerce, it's not called a Chamber of Commerce, it's called a meeting of merchants, as began to sit in Virginia in the,
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1769 boycotts, and that also speaks for this much more spread out collective group.
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But this then, right, it becomes a problem because there is no, this sort of, the patriot ability to coordinate even is still quite limited.
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I like Henry Lawrence, I think, calls the Bostonians the Wiley Cromwellians, which is an interesting term.
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I suspect he was not one himself.
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No, I don't think so either.
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And Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, Patrick Henry all think this was a bad idea.
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The destruction of the tea was not the...
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good event that we see it to be, is creating this colonial unity.
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I mean, it is surprising how many people that are sort of leading names of the revolutionary movement, especially people like Patrick Henry, who are perhaps most famous and most people for having said one thing once, also have this other thing to say.
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And this was too radical.
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And in some ways you can say, well, it really wasn't that radical.
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It was a property crime.
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They didn't kill anybody.
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They didn't
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really hurt anybody even, unlike at other times.
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Yes.
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But it was seen as too radical by many other patriot elites and other colonies.
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It was divisive.
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And in fact, the Boston Committee of Correspondents, when you look at their letters with the other committees of correspondence, especially outside of Massachusetts and outside of New England, where they're more likely to be directly corresponding with...
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colony-wide committees in New York or Philadelphia or something.
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And they are apologetic about the Boston Tea Party.
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They get the sense that this is embarrassing.
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And so in the letter, Paul Revere brings the letter from Boston down to New York and it's brought on to Philadelphia that explains what goes on there.
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And there's different levels to the apology.
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On one level,
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they have to pretend they don't know what happened.
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The criminal act, the revolution hasn't happened yet.
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Imperial authority is still there.
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So they can't admit in writing that they've committed a crime.
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Some stuff happened to the tea.
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We don't know who did it.
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But then also they soft pedal the severity of the action in order to make it seem more palatable to other readers.
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And it's funny, even Congress,
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A year later, when Congress is explaining itself in announcing the Continental Association and explaining itself back to Britain, it says it tries to launder the Boston Tea Party as being a more acceptable event.
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Congress says, oh, it wasn't so bad.
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And, you know, the courts were open.
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If people were upset, they could have sued.
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You know, they could have sued.
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Well, no, the courts weren't open.
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The radicals had sued.
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prevented judges from being there.
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They had scared away all potential plaintiffs from civilian courts, from admiralty courts, from criminal courts.
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So there's no way that that can be true.
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But you want to reimagine it, more palatable that way.
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The time, it's funny, in that short window of time, like you're saying, it's a quick revolution.
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in that short window of time, people reimagine what things meant so that even a year later, they reimagine their own past and re-remember it to make it make sense to themselves.
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And this is also why they make such a labored effort to blame Thomas Hutchinson, the governor, who won't allow the ships to go, the customs commissioners.
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It's this bureaucracy that's preventing the tea from simply going back, which is what we wanted.
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exactly the the you know they say we really only wanted to just send it back to britain and they wouldn't let us do it um and and uh you know actually you could have landed it paid the tax and shipped it back to britain at a loss that was technically and legally possible there would have been no buyers for it but it would have been doable but the
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it was not, you know, that need to always blame someone else for it, just to tell that maybe you think it's a blameworthy act.
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Right.
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Well, as Samuel Adams said, you know, putting your enemy in the wrong and keeping him in the wrong is a good rule in politics and in war.
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And that's definitely what we see happening here with the really careful creation of this story around this event.
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So that, you know, we're blameless because we know, as you said, that it is a blameable act that
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And they're also right in that the colonial officials that they're dealing with are probably most obviously and quite probably deliberately dragging their heels.
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This is the way to really stick it to the Boston Patriots.
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No, they're not going to help get the Patriots out of this jam.
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No, they're not going to help send this tea back to England.
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They're going to make it impossible to get rid of and try to, in so doing, bring down
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the rebelliousness of the Patriot movement.
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And it's striking that after the Boston Tea Party, only two weeks later, suddenly that salvaged tea is coming in from Cape Cod and being brought to Castle William and Jonathan Clark, the ECD company consigning in Boston, corresponding with Hutchinson, corresponding with Leslie, Lieutenant Colonel Commanding the 64th in the Castle.
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corresponding to other officials.
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They immediately come up with a plan about what to do when the tea arrives.
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In fact, they create this tidy little legal fiction.
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Their letters discussing what to do when the tea arrives are all written after it's arrived.
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They keep pretending it hasn't arrived so that they can not have to commit to anything that might not be well considered.
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And then they execute their plan in about a day and a half.
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They come up with a plan.
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When they have to move, they can.
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It's interesting.
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So what happens to that tea that lands at Castle William?
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Well, it's locked up.
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And to be honest, I spent the longest time trying to figure that out.
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It was so confusing.
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Ultimately, it's sold.
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And the weirdest thing is that the only evidence we have that it was sold is in the one place that everyone had looked.
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And that was these India companies papers.
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Wow.
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we had all looked in their ledgers for 73 and for 74 and just hadn't thought to look to see if Boston showed up in their mail in 1775.
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It did.
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Uh, and so it's in 75 after Boston is, uh,
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denuded of its rebellious patriots after the Battle of Lexington Conquered, when Gage allows all the patriots to leave and loyalists come in from the rest of the province into Boston.
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So Boston loses about roughly two thirds of its population and more.
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And now Boston is a loyal town.
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There are no more troublemakers in the city.
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There's no more risk of... Before this moment, it had been impossible to form a loyalist militia because the loyalists were afraid to stand up and be counted because they knew the Patriots would count them.
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Now that's not a problem.
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Now the tea can be sold.
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And that's when it's sold, when it's liberated from Patriot rule by the British Army.
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And the...
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So it's tempting to discount this and say, well, yeah, of course, the loyalists bought the tea.
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But yes, that was also the point in 1773.
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The point of the Boston Tea Party was to prevent people who might buy the tea who were not members of the Patriot movement, not believers in the Patriot cause.
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Right.
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Right.
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Because it was a very popular commodity.
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And so this is an attempt to prevent, you know, the Patriot people who might be Patriots are leaning that way to buy the stuff.
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So we have to enforce the boycott.
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We're talking with James R. Fichter, author of Tea, Consumption, Politics, and Revolution, 1773 to 1776.
21:13.937 --> 21:21.182
And I know that actually the city of Charleston, South Carolina is planning a big event for December 2nd, commemorating their, um,
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the events there and there were other actions in other places.
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By the way, do you know what happens to the tea that's landed in Charleston?
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It's also drunk.
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It's drunk in a different moment.
21:34.473 --> 21:47.039
In 1776 and 1777, after American independence, it is decided that what had been the king's property is now because the US is an independent, or rather because the United States are 13 independent states.
21:48.374 --> 21:51.356
becomes reverts to be owned by each individual state.
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And so the state of South Carolina owns the customs facilities and it owns the seized goods.
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So it owns that tea and they sell the tea off.
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The value for the tea, it's a little hard to quite assess the value of it, but it's roughly about the value of some of the fortifications they put up around Charleston in that year.
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And it's meaningful because
22:14.048 --> 22:19.270
At this point, the Charleston government is basically printing money to pay for the war.
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We begin to have this hyperinflation happening across colonies by 1777.
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So being able to sell off assets to pay for the revolution is a much more attractive alternative to just printing money or having to tax your people or raise loans that no one really wants to give them.
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And so it gets sold.
22:39.199 --> 22:43.561
This, of course, is sold in the completely reverse political context of the tea in Boston, right?
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This is sold by the Patriot government.
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And in fact, the Patriot government sells it and collects the revenue.
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Weirdly, the merchants who administer it are the 1773 East India Company consignees who are still there in 1776.
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They haven't been ostracized.
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They haven't been isolated.
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They have...
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negotiated a different kind of arrangement.
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Some of them will become loyalists in the future and ultimately leave and be prescribed.
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But that's more around their military service.
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This is this weird moment where the state takes advantage of them.
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But South Carolina has a very distinctive
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mercantilist and self-interested approach to the revolution and the boycotts throughout.
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That's interesting.
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And it's much different from what happened to the tea consignees in Boston who are ostracized and driven.
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They're also sent out to Castle William because it's not safe for them on the mainland.
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That's right.
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I wonder, can we talk a little bit about, I do want to talk about where the tea comes from and the East India Company.
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But before we do that, can we talk a little bit about the tea that gets to Philadelphia and New York and what happens in those places?
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Yes.
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So the East India Company had sent, as we're saying, four larger parcels of tea.
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The Boston shipment was spread across several vessels from New York and Philadelphia to each one large vessel.
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And the Philadelphia vessel arrives.
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And on Christmas Day, it arrives.
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News of it arrives.
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And because of Philadelphia's geography, you have to go upriver to get to the city.
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They're able to intercept it at the river mouth.
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And to tell them, you know, don't go up the Delaware River to Philadelphia.
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It's going to be a big disaster.
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The ship captain goes up on his own.
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He sees this large mass meeting of the public and they outfit his ship and send him back to England.
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And Philadelphia becomes this template for New York, which is a storyline that runs about four months later.
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I think the New York tea is the weirdest of them by far.
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It just because the New York tea ship is hit by a storm and nearly wrecks and puts it in Antigua.
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And what puzzles me is why he didn't just sell the tea in Antigua.
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Yeah.
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It was covered by the Tea Act.
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He could have simply said, if he had been too wrecked to continue, which was not impossible, right?
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He may have had to unload his tea there if he had been too wrecked to continue.
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But he wasn't.
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And of course, the Caribbean...
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where everyone's buying their smuggled tea.
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So it would have been a great place to sell tea to ship up to North America.
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But he didn't, and he carefully kept the tea.
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He doesn't appear, this ship does not appear in any Antiguan records I've been able to find.
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I think this is the...
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This is the space where people need to really start looking, I think, in the story.
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And eventually, when it arrives in New York, it's part of a prearranged story that they will bring it to New York.
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They previously agreed, the governor has previously agreed, and then carefully makes himself unavailable to ship the tea off and pretend he didn't notice that it arrived.
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The naval officers take the same perspective.
25:48.733 --> 25:51.195
The patriots agree not to be upset about it.
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The consignees agree not to cause trouble.
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Everyone has more to gain by just washing their hands of it and moving on.
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But that's a negotiated settlement.
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Interesting.
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So I know we don't want to focus too much on Boston, but what makes it so different from these other places where negotiation was possible?
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You mean sort of what made the negotiation impossible to happen?
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Yes, exactly.
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Because the T both lived and died.
26:18.622 --> 26:31.989
It was this sort of Schrodinger's cat of T. So the result is that any negotiated settlement would have, a negotiated settlement had always presented the risk of the William T being landed.
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And that wasn't a negotiation that the patriots in Boston could walk away from safely.
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If it gets landed,
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By the time of the Port Act, which is really it's not supposed to be this crazy draconian law.
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It's supposed to just punish Boston for the Tea Party.
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And if they had put a time limit on it, like close Boston for a month and then walk away, it could have been a very different story.
26:59.431 --> 26:59.812
Yeah.
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There is a lot of debate in Boston about will we pay for the T to reopen the port?
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The response to the Port Act is not immediately clear.
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A lot of people are saying, yeah, let's just reimburse the company, which was what the Port Act requires for Boston to be reopened.
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But they can't because they don't just have to.
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reimburse the company for its losses, they have to let the Williams T be landed and sold, accept the T Act to be operating, agree that the imperial tax system is fine, and basically give up all their talking points.
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So there is deliberately structured by the administration
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and by the Patriots in Boston as a existential do or die conflict.
27:43.064 --> 27:53.432
The administration really focuses on Boston deliberately by April of 74 as they say to sort of from their perspective is to cut out the rot, right?
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Right, right.
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I think Walpole the diarist says that the king has Boston on the brain.
28:02.757 --> 28:13.443
Now, one of the stories that emerges or myths, stories that emerges from the Patriots is that Americans, and again, you talk about this definition of American and where does it come from?
28:13.863 --> 28:39.550
and does this unify people and you say it doesn't is also that they gave up drinking tea and switched to coffee and you make the case that americans continued to drink tea even though it was politically suspect yeah i mean i i think the the most obvious way to sort of think our way through the illogic of turning away tea is um uh during the revolution americans became quite good
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at taking the British Army's things and using it against them.
28:44.350 --> 28:56.633
Henry Knox, famously, brings those cannons from Fort Ticonderoga up more or less what will become route I-90 over to Boston and besieges the British positions.
28:56.973 --> 29:00.634
Well, good for him, but he certainly wasn't boycotting British goods by doing that.
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Well, he was seizing, appropriating them.
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Right.
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But if you can appropriate rather than boycott British arms,
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which are much more significant than mere tea.
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Why are we making a fuss over tea?
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And of course, this is because the boycott movement is never just about tea.
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It quickly moves from tea to all imports from and exports to Britain.
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And so why why should we be depriving ourselves of British shirts and British goods if we are using British guns?
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As long as we're using them, as long as we're taking them from them and appropriating them, we take them in war and make them ours.
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Then it's all the more of a triumph.
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And so there becomes this weird.
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way in which tea becomes this thing that we must symbolically oppose and it has this very useful symbolic value but then quickly loses it once warfare begins because it's one more thing we can take from the enemy and line our pockets with and so much of
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Civilian experience of warfare, of course, is looting, giving them one side or the other of that.
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And of course, the privateering that goes on as well.
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Interesting.
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We're talking with James Victor from Hong Kong University about his book, Tea, Consumption, Politics and Revolution.
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And of course, you're writing this from an interesting perspective.
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That is, you're in Hong Kong, which is where the tea came from, southern China.
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I wonder if we could talk a little bit about the East India Company and how it works in getting the tea from southern China to Boston in 1773.
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So the English East India Company had been long been involved in this tea business.
30:43.633 --> 30:44.513
It wasn't the most
30:45.795 --> 30:48.057
It wasn't yet its most successful business.
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And in fact, the Dutch East India Company was in many ways doing better than the English at this time.
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The English company was hampered by British taxes, which made it very expected to consume legally imported tea, either in North America or in Britain.
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And so the entire smuggling network that the East India Company is dealing with in North America is a mere...
31:09.013 --> 31:34.630
know appendage of this broader smuggling network that is smuggling tea from france and the netherlands and denmark and sweden into britain across the north sea in the english channel um and so all of these india companies the english the dutch and so on are all sourcing their tea from the same port uh in china uh from canton and and macau and this is of course strange right how you could be importing things
31:35.103 --> 31:46.088
All these rival companies are buying things from the exact same location and then shipping them halfway across the planet, but more or less on strikingly similar routes.
31:46.108 --> 31:51.110
The shipping route from China to France and China to Britain is the same except the last few miles.
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And then suddenly they differentiate once they get there.
31:57.374 --> 32:00.016
And so this India company had this huge supply of tea.
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We sometimes like to say that they used that the tea act was used in part to help these India company unloaded supplies of tea.
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This wasn't quite accurate.
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They were getting bailed out.
32:11.725 --> 32:15.146
already, and American demand probably wasn't big enough to make a difference.
32:15.786 --> 32:32.010
But the company did have a massive supply, and it had gone through the previous adjustments in the tea taxes in the 1760s poorly, not because of North America, which was kind of irrelevant, but because of Britain.
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They had overbought tea and anticipating that these tax cuts would make for greater tea sales in Britain, and they did it wrong.
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And they didn't cut their prices enough to take market share.
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And as a result, they had massive oversupply of inventory.
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Millions, tens of millions of pounds of inventory and about at least 7 million pounds oversupply.
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But, you know, all it takes is a little inventory management and you can sort yourself out.
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They had sorted themselves out in a few years.
33:02.623 --> 33:08.606
The weird thing about this, one thing that I'm talking to other colleagues about what tea is and what it means is
33:10.859 --> 33:13.920
It's confusing how old this tea must have been.
33:13.940 --> 33:24.583
And, you know, if you think about it wasn't one doubt, the Chinese merchants, the Hong merchants that were selling to Xenia Company were always selling the newest stuff.
33:24.663 --> 33:27.884
By the time it got shipped from there to Britain, it was six months older already.
33:28.184 --> 33:36.626
Xenia Company then keeps it in rotation in its warehouses in London and the oldest stuff gets sold first, of course, right?
33:36.646 --> 33:37.047
And so...
33:39.656 --> 33:47.381
There's actually some debate over whether the tea sent to Boston was rubbish, old, out-of-time tea anyway that wasn't worth much.
33:47.521 --> 33:49.342
It's very unclear.
33:49.362 --> 33:54.305
We'll have to ask the fish what they think of it, but there's no way for us to know.
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So it is a puzzle.
33:57.487 --> 34:07.933
And then if it had been like the Williams tea or the tea from the London that was the ship that brought tea to Charleston, locked up for two, three more years, this tea could be five or ten years old by the time people are drinking it.
34:08.173 --> 34:08.493
Wow.
34:08.513 --> 34:08.994
Wow.
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Does anyone comment on it?
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I mean, in Boston under Block K, they're probably happy to have anything.
34:14.962 --> 34:15.442
Exactly.
34:15.462 --> 34:18.184
And in Charleston in the revolution, which is,
34:18.982 --> 34:22.085
also under some level of blockade and happy to have anything, I guess.
34:22.565 --> 34:24.366
So I don't see any complaints about it.
34:24.406 --> 34:27.729
But I mean, I guess the fish got the better.
34:27.749 --> 34:28.350
Yeah.
34:29.170 --> 34:29.511
Yeah.
34:31.032 --> 34:31.932
So it's interesting.
34:31.952 --> 34:34.434
Now, the tea market, I mean, it emerged.
34:34.935 --> 34:38.838
When does tea become a staple in America or in Britain?
34:38.938 --> 34:40.699
Britain is really the focus of the company.
34:40.719 --> 34:44.823
They're not when the tea act, they're really not thinking, how is North America going to react?
34:44.843 --> 34:47.345
They're thinking about the company and its needs.
34:47.385 --> 34:47.485
So
34:48.272 --> 34:55.197
When does tea become such a popular commodity in England, France, the Netherlands?
34:55.258 --> 34:59.261
In the middle of the 18th century, it really emerges as a major consumer good in Britain.
34:59.621 --> 35:13.852
And it's also part of this, actually, this very fascinating literature on how we understand the emergence of the British Industrial Revolution and the shift in what the average Englishman is drinking and eating.
35:13.952 --> 35:16.694
Is it oats and brown bread and beer?
35:17.253 --> 35:19.875
or is it tea and white bread with jam and sugar?
35:20.976 --> 35:24.059
Uh, the latter is this 19th century industrial diet.
35:24.099 --> 35:27.762
And the former is this 18th century healthy farmer diet.
35:28.343 --> 35:41.594
Um, and there's this shift, uh, and by the middle 18th century, you see all sorts of, uh, you know, middle-class English people complaining that poor people are drinking tea and it's offending them by daring to eat their betters.
35:42.215 --> 35:42.275
Um,
35:42.898 --> 35:44.940
But tea consumption isn't limited to Britain.
35:44.960 --> 35:46.942
There's tea consumption in Germany as well.
35:46.962 --> 35:48.803
The Netherlands consumed significant amounts.
35:49.704 --> 35:53.627
So it's a more widespread good at that time already.
35:54.168 --> 35:55.129
Interesting, interesting.
35:55.709 --> 36:05.958
And you also make the case about comparing the whole politicization of tea with Madeira, another popular drink that the Americans don't boycott.
36:07.079 --> 36:07.320
Yes.
36:07.500 --> 36:08.481
I mean, this is striking.
36:10.580 --> 36:19.624
Madeira is the only other commodity that specifically, the only other consumer good that specifically singled out in the article of association in the boycotts around them.
36:20.044 --> 36:26.767
And they say this when they boycott trade from the wine islands, which means Madeira and other similar islands.
36:26.787 --> 36:28.587
So they can boycott this.
36:28.627 --> 36:36.931
And these are islands which are not controlled by Britain, but are economically dominated by British merchants that live on the island, supply the Madeira.
36:39.007 --> 36:43.315
But Madeira does not become a symbol of it, even though it's officially boycotted.
36:44.177 --> 36:50.969
And it's not practical or really to make it a symbol because the boycott says,
36:51.636 --> 36:56.519
Well, you know, it's only Madeira imported after this date, December 1st, 1774.
36:56.839 --> 37:00.401
So you can't tell by looking at the bottle when it was imported.
37:00.421 --> 37:04.303
And colonists like to age their own Madeira anyway.
37:04.803 --> 37:11.226
So you buy it young before the boycott starts, you keep it in your cellar during the boycott, and you drink it when it's aged after.
37:11.246 --> 37:18.150
And so Thomas Jefferson's happy to settle his Madeira bill at the end of the Second Continental Congress when the
37:19.290 --> 37:25.991
when it was under boycott, but only New Madeira, and he's not violating any rules by doing so.
37:26.532 --> 37:28.352
So it never has that symbolic value.
37:28.372 --> 37:33.153
They're not smashing bottles of Madeira in protest, even though on paper they should be.
37:33.593 --> 37:34.633
That's right.
37:34.973 --> 37:39.354
We've been talking with James Victor, author of Tea, Consumption, Politics, and Revolution, 1776.
37:39.394 --> 37:40.154
Now, is the book out yet?
37:40.174 --> 37:41.194
When will we be able to read it?
37:45.245 --> 37:45.725
It is not out.
37:45.745 --> 37:54.609
It comes out on December 15th, 2023, in the day before an August date, before the Boston Tea Party's 25th anniversary.
37:55.389 --> 37:59.511
So it is available for pre-order at the Cornell University Press website.
37:59.971 --> 38:00.311
Very good.
38:00.411 --> 38:00.691
Very good.
38:00.711 --> 38:01.351
Thank you.
38:01.371 --> 38:06.233
I mean, it seems like we've covered a lot of ground, and we probably could go on, in my case, all day, and yours would be all night.
38:06.273 --> 38:09.775
But I know we... Anything else we should talk about before we let you go?
38:10.575 --> 38:11.896
Oh, I think it's been wonderful.
38:11.936 --> 38:12.156
I think...
38:13.403 --> 38:15.064
I think we should stop here, yeah.
38:15.364 --> 38:15.965
Okay, I think so.
38:16.005 --> 38:16.825
You're right.
38:16.845 --> 38:18.206
Let's give folks a break.
38:18.226 --> 38:21.768
So thank you so much to James Victor for joining us from Hong Kong.
38:22.049 --> 38:25.491
And we look forward to the book, Tea, Consumption, Politics, and Revolution.
38:26.111 --> 38:26.872
And so thank you.
38:26.952 --> 38:30.474
And I want to thank our producer, Jonathan Lane, the man behind the curtain.
38:31.795 --> 38:38.459
And by the way, if you have an idea for a topic or a guest, send Jonathan Lane an email, jlane at revolution250.org.
38:40.621 --> 38:47.769
And I also want to thank our many listeners around the world, including Professor Victor, who says he listens in from Hong Kong.
38:47.809 --> 38:54.576
But we also have listeners in Marseille and in Frankfurt, Garfield, New Jersey, Warren, Vermont, Jamaica Plain.
38:55.157 --> 38:58.698
Massachusetts, and Brisbane, Australia, and all places between and beyond.
38:58.738 --> 39:04.899
If you're in one of these places, send Jonathan an email and they'll send you one of our Revolution 250 refrigerator magnets.
39:05.400 --> 39:07.620
And I look forward to talking to you all again.
39:07.640 --> 39:11.981
And Professor Victor will be making appearances in North America in December.
39:12.381 --> 39:14.542
So look for him then about the time the book comes out.
39:14.682 --> 39:17.583
And now we will be piped out on the road to Boston.
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Absolutely.
39:18.683 --> 39:19.063
Thank you.