Camelia Lounge
A working-class family gathered around a table sharing tea by warm lamplight — a large brown earthenware teapot and cups — with the industrial mill town of chimneys, terraced houses, and a smoky dusk sky behind them
Chapter 8THE JOURNEY

Tea and Industrial Society

Britain, from the 1780s to the late nineteenth century

While Britain fought over the China trade and built plantations in India, tea was becoming ordinary at home.

Price mattered. In 1784 the Commutation Act, introduced by William Pitt the Younger on the advice of the tea dealer Richard Twining, cut the duty on tea from 119 percent to 12.5 percent. Smuggling largely ended, and the tea passing legally through customs rose sharply. In the nineteenth century Britain’s tea came increasingly from India and Ceylon as well as China.

Tea became part of the working day. Sweetened with sugar, it entered the daily diet of laborers, and the break for tea became a fixture of work. The British cup took the form it still has: black tea with milk and sugar.

Among the better-off, tea became a social ritual. Afternoon tea is traditionally credited to Anna, Duchess of Bedford, in the first half of the nineteenth century. Tea also became the drink of the temperance movement, promoted as a sober alternative to alcohol.

Tea may also have had an unintended effect on health. Making tea meant boiling water. A study by the economist Francisca Antman, published in 2023, found that as tea drinking spread in eighteenth-century England, mortality fell more in places where water quality was worse. She concludes that drinking more boiled water may have reduced deaths; she describes parts of her evidence as suggestive.

By the end of the nineteenth century tea was drunk across British society.

A painted scene in three parts: working men take a tea break with mugs in a workyard; a family sits at a kitchen table as the mother pours from a brown teapot, a kettle on the fire behind; and a well-dressed couple take tea from a porcelain service in a parlor

At work, at home and in the parlor: by the end of the nineteenth century, tea was drunk across British society.

A Note from the Trade

The Temperance Tea

The temperance movement did more than recommend tea. It held tea meetings across Britain, where people came to drink tea, eat and hear the case against alcohol. The meetings were also used to raise money for the cause.

What This Means

Lower Duty, Wider Reach

The 1784 cut ended most smuggling and enlarged the legal trade.

A Working Drink

Sweetened with sugar, tea became part of laborers’ daily diet.

A Sober Ritual

Afternoon tea in the parlor; tea meetings for the temperance cause.

A Possible Health Effect

One study found larger mortality declines where water quality was worse as tea drinking spread; the evidence is suggestive.

Cheaper tea reached every class
and became Britain’s everyday drink.

In Your Cup

Black tea with milk and sugar became the British cup in the eighteenth century, and still is.

Taste this chapter →

How did tea reach the Gulf, and what did it become there?

Next · Chapter NineThe Gulf Crossroads