Ellen Hartigan-O'Connor
By tackling a commodity we think we already know in its political, economic, and cultural dimensions, Jane T. Merritt demonstrates that the true story of tea is more complex and global than readers might expect. The Trouble with Tea is a surprising and detailed look at how the long-term moral debates over tea overlapped with and offered a vocabulary for the politicized debates of the Revolutionary War era.
Benjamin L. Carp
Long before Bostonians dumped tea overboard, tea was trouble: as trading companies pushed it and consumers sipped it, tea sparked debates over free trade and dangerous luxuries. With her wide-ranging command of global commerce and domestic politics, Merritt tells a vital tale about how tea shaped our world.
Michelle Craig McDonald
While tea has long been a symbol of the American Revolution, The Trouble with Tea situates the commodity within broader economic and cultural contexts, persuasively demonstrating its role in the expansion of imperial trade and creation of complex consumer rituals long before and after 1776.
Dael A. Norwood
Merritt’s remarkable study of the political economy of tea reveals that this quintessential commodity of eighteenth-century commerce has a great deal to tell us about the relationship between consumer desire, imperial rule, and revolution. Impressively researched and elegantly argued, The Trouble with Tea uses a global framework to investigate how the trade and consumption of tea first united and then divided the British Empire, and how these same forces later led restive Tea Partiers to become nation-building taxpayers. You might think you know where to find tea in the history of America and Britain; this book is here to show you that you need to far deeper than the bottom of Boston’s harbor to get the full story.
From the Publisher
By tackling a commodity we think we already know in its political, economic, and cultural dimensions, Jane T. Merritt demonstrates that the true story of tea is more complex and global than readers might expect. The Trouble with Tea is a surprising and detailed look at how the long-term moral debates over tea overlapped with and offered a vocabulary for the politicized debates of the Revolutionary War era.—Ellen Hartigan-O'Connor, author of The Ties that Buy: Women and Commerce in Revolutionary America
Long before Bostonians dumped tea overboard, tea was trouble: as trading companies pushed it and consumers sipped it, tea sparked debates over free trade and dangerous luxuries. With her wide-ranging command of global commerce and domestic politics, Merritt tells a vital tale about how tea shaped our world.—Benjamin L. Carp, author of Defiance of the Patriots: The Boston Tea Party and the Making of America
Merritt has produced an elegant commodity history, one that embeds the American Revolution in its global context and prompts a reconsideration of the early republic’s political economy. Americans famously dumped their tea en route to independence, but Merritt tells the surprising story of how hard they worked to get it back in the wake of nationhood.—Seth Rockman, coeditor of Slavery's Capitalism: A New History of American Economic Development
Merritt’s remarkable study of the political economy of tea reveals that this quintessential commodity of eighteenth-century commerce has a great deal to tell us about the relationship between consumer desire, imperial rule, and revolution. Impressively researched and elegantly argued, The Trouble with Tea uses a global framework to investigate how the trade and consumption of tea first united and then divided the British Empire, and how these same forces later led restive Tea Partiers to become nation-building taxpayers. You might think you know where to find tea in the history of America and Britain; this book is here to show you that you need to far deeper than the bottom of Boston’s harbor to get the full story.—Dael A. Norwood, Binghamton University
While tea has long been a symbol of the American Revolution, The Trouble with Tea situates the commodity within broader economic and cultural contexts, persuasively demonstrating its role in the expansion of imperial trade and creation of complex consumer rituals long before and after 1776.—Michelle Craig McDonald, Stockton University
Seth Rockman
Merritt has produced an elegant commodity history, one that embeds the American Revolution in its global context and prompts a reconsideration of the early republic’s political economy. Americans famously dumped their tea en route to independence, but Merritt tells the surprising story of how hard they worked to get it back in the wake of nationhood.
