Notes/info from/about book A Thirst for Empire: How Tea Shaped the Modern World by Erika Rappaport,
published Aug. 28, 2017
Page 1
I
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n 1941 (Great Britain) was not an island nation but a
multinational empire able to marshal and supply a high military machine. Men
and women from the Indian Subcontinent, from African, Canada, Australia, New Zealand,
and so many other regions in the empire were fighting this war. American money,
munitions, and supplied also had already been deployed against the Axis powers.
Millions of people and a great deal of tea sustained the nation at war in 1941.
Page 2
Why did so many work so hard to serve tea to … soldiers in
wartime…? The simple answer, and one that so many Britons would so easily
reach, was that tea was energizing, soothing, and boosted morale.
A nurse who had treated the wounded after Rommel had
“punched” the Eighth Army “hard on the nose” and taken Tobruk in Lybia in 1942 recalled
how thought the men could barely talk, the first thing they asked for was a cup
of tea.
Page 9
“Decades before Coca-Cola refreshed the world or McDonald’s
served fast food to millions, tea growers combined propaganda, politics and
ideas derived from preexisting consumer and commercial cultures to create tea
drinkers in places as diverse as Glasgow, Cincinnati, and Calcutta. Although
they met with a great deal of resistance, planters were nevertheless able to
alter retail and consumer practices, design new drinking habits, and transform
bodily experiences.”
Pages
10-11
As we will see, the industry spent a good deal of time
debating how and whether to brand tea as feminine, masculine, national or
imperial.
Page 12
“In the nineteenth century, tea’s history does indeed look
quite a bit like an epic battle between the British and Chinese empires. In one
of the most dramatic episodes in the history of his commodity, British soldiers,
scientists, and colonial officials engaged in outright violence, bribery, drug dealing,
and stealing, and they imprisoned, executed, and expropriated the property of
their South Asian allies and employees.”
Page 23
In 1600 few Britons had ever heard of tea, but over the
course of the next century economic and cultural exchanges that transpired in
Asia, the New East, Europe and the Americas produced Britain’s craze for
trading, growing, and drinking tea.
Page 24
Tea was unique, however, in large part because the Chinese
prevented the transfer of its seeds, plants, and knowledge to the West.
Europeans were unable to transfer production to regions under their control
until the early nineteenth century, and it took another half century to compete
successfully with the Chinese in the world markets. This did not preclude the
growth of a high profitable commerce, but it did mean that Chinese influenced
tea’s global commerce and consumption until the twentieth century.
Page 82
It’s also possible that temperance communities invented the
social ritual of afternoon tea.
Page 115
While Americans tried to plant tea, quite a few “British
planters” moved to the United States to grow and sell tea and shape American
policy.
Page 190
British tea planters also had their eye on Canada, another
settler colony with a longstanding taste for tea
Pages 190-191
Tea growers were also enthralled with the United States and
wistfully remembered the days before the American Revolution when colonists
loved the beverage.
Pages 197-198
Tea planters envisioned the Chicago World’s Fair (DATE?) as
a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. This exhibition was to announce American’s stature
as an industrial and consumer-oriented nation driven by an insatiable urge to
buy and sell new things. Chicago confirmed what many team men already knew;
America was the greatest market the world has ever seen, but it also was one of
the most difficult and expensive to conquer and control.
Page 204
While men such as Ukers and Lipton became well-known
throughout the global tea trade, middle- and upper-class ladies u the United States, as in the UK, also
developed America’s tea culture and knowledge. Female college graduates and
other New Women managed and patronized thousands of team rooms in major cities,
at resorts, and along America’s highways.
Page 205
When drinking tea American women could assert an Anglo-Saxon
heritage. Advertisers and etiquette writers frequently underlined the
Englishess of afternoon tea.
Page 206
Tea had found a place in American culture during the turn of
the century, the tea industry had grown more organized, thousands of tea shops
stocked team and increasingly that tea came from the British Empire, though
many Americans liked Japanese team as well.
Page 229
In 1921 the US Tea Association urged their colleagues in
India to recognize that “more and more American people are being swayed by
advertising in making their purchases. The feeling is gaining ground that worthwhile
things are advertised.
Page 231
With Indian’s money, Higham’s campaign stressed the
emotional and social experiences of consumption rather than the benefits of
consuming modern British-grown tea. Ads also deliberately tried to shift the
gender identity of team by calling it “A Man’s Drink.”
Page 284
ITMEB (International Tea Market Expansion Board) developed
an American version of the Tea Revives You campaign that, based on their
research, worked with and against what they saw as American prejudices. Instead
of telling American that “Tea Revives You,” Mr. T. Pott and other celebrities
explained that “vital” people such as male works and athletes were turning to
team.
Page 285
While the Tea Revives You Campaign emphasized modern men and
women in energetic activities, other advertising presented tea as part of a
feminine English culture that American bourgeois women were thought to enjoy.
(1937
“Turn To Tea Today” advertisements from University of California Davis special
collection.)
(Hot
Tea Week: Turn to Tea! pinback button found on ebay 2018)
Page 328
Wartime photography similarly immortalized tea as an
evocative symbol of communities forged under stress.
Page 330
With the slogan “The Soliders’ Drink – Tea” painted
prominently on the side (of mobile tea canteen trucks), the tea cars
constituted a new kind of consumer culture. Armies had always been markets, but
the modern mass media commodified soldiers’’ bodies in new and decidedly modern
ways.
………………………….
TEA POSTSCRIPTS:
Tea
info:
https://www.spectator.co.uk/2017/09/the-glories-of-empire-and-britains-taste-for-the-exotic/pugpig_index.html
Review
of tea book:
http://www.futurity.org/tea-british-empire-1536862-2
Tea
traditions at Washington State University, Pullman, Washington:
........
Lipton tea ad: Reader's Digest magazine Oct. 1981
