In the internet age, political outrage and consumer boycotts move at warp speed across the political spectrum. By contrast, in the mid-1770s, a single commodity, tea, became the focal point of American patriots’ consumer politics. As James R. Fichter reveals in Tea, both the political maneuvering and cultural meanings of tea had ramifications far beyond the famous chests thrown into Boston Harbor. Fichter's argument boldly pushes back against T.H. Breen and other scholars who have overstated the political impacts of boycotts during the revolutionary era. Fichter instead contends that the tea boycott of 1775 failed to create meaningful political change and even failed to keep people from selling or consuming tea.
How can we say that non-consumption ‘mobilized people’? Mobilized whom? To do what? To what degree? To what end?” Fichter asks (3). His meticulous reconstruction of “how non-consumption worked on the ground” (3) shows that the answers were much messier than previous generations of scholarship have admitted. By broadening the lens from Boston to other cities where tea landed in that fateful December 1773—such as Charleston, New York City, and Philadelphia—the book underscores the radical nature of the violence of the Boston Tea Party, an event that horrified most colonists, many patriots included. Contrary to popular understandings, the road from 1773 tea shipment to 1775 prohibition to the American Revolution was anything but linear. Patriots aspired in 1774 to “impose non-importation by force,” (59), but they rarely enforced tea boycotts. Colonists of all political stripes signed the Continental Association pledging not to buy or consume tea, but sales continued despite formal bans. The beverage was too lucrative, too desirable, and too essential—to the rituals of everyday life and ceremonial occasions like weddings—for many to resist.
The book has an unusual structure, with some chapters offering chronological retellings of events and others delving more thematically into the cultural history of tea. Tea is divided into three parts. Part One opens with “The Tea Party That Wasn't.” On December 3, 1773, two weeks before the Boston Tea Party, Charleston received a shipment of tea. The Charleston Sons of Liberty tried to compel merchants not to land and sell it, but many refused to comply. On December 22nd, the customs collector seized the tea for nonpayment of duty. Boston patriots dumped their tea into the harbor; Charleston's tea landed anticlimactically in a warehouse with no public outcry. Fichter then backtracks to summarize tea protests and smuggling before 1773.
Part Two discusses the campaigns against tea from the immediate aftermath of the Boston Tea Party to the Continental Association's ban on tea imports effective December 1, 1774, and ban on tea consumption effective March 1, 1775. During the period from December to March, Fichter notes, merchants flooded the market with already-imported tea and consumers bought up enormous amounts. He delves into the cultural meanings of the tea ban, in tea advertisements and propaganda, as well as the gendering of tea consumption and non-consumption. Part Three examines the short life of the tea ban from March 1775 to April 1776, when the Continental Congress effectively repealed it once enthusiasm faded. By spring 1775, the largely symbolic wrangling over tea was displaced by debate over a more essential commodity—gunpowder, as the colonists went to war. Fichter shows an impressive command of written sources across numerous archives, analyzing everything from the fluctuation of tea prices to the language of tea-sellers’ newspaper advertisements to both quantify and qualify colonists’ uses of the product.
Despite Fichter's exhaustive research, some subjects remain glaringly absent. The book mentions that “Mohawk and Delaware Indians drank [tea], and some Native Americans had imported teacups” (25). But Tea has nearly nothing to say about why colonists so often “played Indian,” in the words of Philip Deloria, by dressing as “Mohawks” to destroy tea and carry out other protest actions. During a close reading of the political cartoon “The Able Doctor, or America Swallowing the Bitter Draught,” which depicts British officials assaulting “America,” there is no discussion of why the colonies are personified as a Native American woman, imagery that by the 1770s had a long history in European fantasies of conquest and sexual violence against Indigenous women. Analysis of gender is mostly limited to a single chapter, “The Sex of Tea.” It does not engage with the body of scholarship, including work by art historians Yao-Fen You, Hope Saska, and Caroline Frank, on the racial and gender anxieties about East Asian masculinity that shaped European discourse about tea consumption. Further consideration of the visual and material cultures of tea, as well as engaging with scholarship on race and gender in the culture and politics of this era, would have rendered Fichter's analysis of tea all that much richer.
These shortcomings aside, Tea is painstakingly researched and compellingly argued. It will certainly transform the way I teach about the Boston Tea Party and the broader impact—or, as Fichter reveals, lack of impact—of nonimportation agreements in the revolutionary era. Despite the patriots’ efforts to politicize tea, or social media calls for boycotts today, the act of “consumption,” as Fichter concludes, remains “the pursuit of happiness” (264).