"Over the next 200 years, tea would become inextricably bound up with British national identity. As collectively the British tipped more and more tea down their throats, the 'cuppa' would come to symbolise temperance, domesticity, purity and industriousness. Tea got us up in the morning, kept us going through the working day, took pride of place on the dinner table and helped win two world wars. When George Orwell defined Englishness in 1941, he pinpointed the football match, the pub and a 'nice cup of tea'.
"Yet, this homely notion of tea as patriotic and wholesome was carefully manipulated in order to promote the interests of the British Empire."
Wendy Moore at History Today reviews Erika Rappaport's A Thirst for Empire: How Tea Shaped the Modern World and Angela McCarthy and T.M. Devine's Tea & Empire: James Taylor in Victorian Ceylon.
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