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Caroline Frank, Jane T. Merritt. The Trouble with Tea: The Politics of Consumption in the Eighteenth-Century Global Economy., The American Historical Review, Volume 123, Issue 1, February 2018, Pages 189–190, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/123.1.189
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In 2009, historians, anonymous readers of my book manuscript Objectifying China, Imagining America: Chinese Commodities in Early America (2011) simply would not accept the argument, central to the book, that tea played a significant role in provoking the American Revolution. The fact that the commodity dumped overboard on the evening of December 16, 1773, was Chinese tea was simply a “coincidence” in the view of two readers. In reading Jane T. Merritt’s book The Trouble with Tea: The Politics of Consumption in the Eighteenth-Century Global Economy, I realize how far our historiography of the American Revolution has come in eight years. As early as page 2, Merritt asserts that “Americans imagine tea as central to their revolution.” This book makes an important contribution to our understanding of the powerful global context of the American Revolution and of late-eighteenth-century American commercial ambitions and achievements.
For too long, mainstream historical accounts of the era of the Revolution have ignored the intricate global causes and context for events in the second half of the eighteenth century in the British American colonies. Merritt demonstrates that focus on one significant Chinese commodity, tea, allows researchers to recover much of the Revolution’s rich international framework. Tracing the English East India Company’s ventures across Asia, she illuminates the degree to which the British government was intertwined with the rising and falling pulse of its East India Company. The Trouble with Tea tackles the much-trodden ground of the role of multinational merchants in structuring the early American political economy. But, contra the continuing profusion of Atlantic World studies, Merritt follows the full global circle of exchanges responsible for putting tea in American parlors. She does not stop with an examination of Britain’s East India Company’s debts in London, but tracks the train of exchanges all the way to India and China—Edmund Burke’s “mighty circle commerce” (79)—excavating empirical links between these exchanges and mercantile wealth and health in America, even before Americans left the Atlantic.
