I quite liked
Richard Glover's column this morning, which starts as follows:
The popularity of tea in the 17th century, I read this week, was a
crucial factor in the expansion of the slave trade. This made me feel
guilty about my early-morning ritual - properly brewed tea sipped in bed
while reading the newspaper and picking nits from my partner's hair.
In truth, I shouldn't feel too bad because I don't take
sugar. The sugar, you understand, was the problem; the popularity of tea
brought a surge in demand for a sweetener, which created the need for
vastly expanded sugar plantations, which in turn led to a boom in the
slave trade.
Coffee, meanwhile, is said to have had a much more noble
impact on history. I remember a book from a few years ago in which the
writer Tom Standage argued that coffee led to the Enlightenment.
Here's his theory: once coffee arrived in Europe, coffee
shops started taking over from pubs as the place where people would meet
and talk which meant people were no longer completely pissed when they
tried to strike up a conversation. All over Europe, people suddenly
started making sense instead of just sounding like your Uncle Terry
midway through lunch on Christmas Day. Sober for the first time in six
centuries, they rapidly came up with the idea of rational thought.
It's a tough comparison for those of us who prefer a nice cup of tea: on
one hand you have Jean-Jacques Rousseau knocking back an espresso while
inventing universal education; on the other, a bunch of tea-desperate
Poms waving off a fleet of miasmic slave hulks in order to summon up
their next sugary hit.
I'm not sure what the reference to nits in his wife's hair is in there for, though. Ignore that, and the rest is very witty.
1 comment:
Coffee was popular in the UK before tea - in fact a book I read argued that it was only after a blight in Ceylon wiped out all the coffee crops that tea drinking really took off amongst the British. Certainly in the 17th century coffee drinking was going strong - we know about Johnson, Pope, and Swift drinking in coffee houses, and that's in the mid 1700s. One assumes all those coffee drinkers would have used sweeteners.
The British abolished slavery in the late 18th/early 19th century. They were beaten by the French, it is true, who had abolished it during the revolution, but then it was revived by Napoleon, and it was partly through the active anti-slavery policies of the British government (they declared all slave traders pirates) that it was abolished again.
I have no idea what all this means apart from the fact that Glover should probably just drink his damn tea.
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