Commodity History

Tea has long been associated as the national drink of England and Britain. Like most national commodities, tea represents an invented tradition of British national identity. The history of British tea, however, has long been ignored, left to the periphery of commodity history, only to be picked up tangentially within general works on British Imperialism or to support British nationalism. The result of this is that the British tea trade has never received the proper commodity chain historiography that a product of such global importance deserves. The limitations of tea's historiography can be traced to the nearly single-minded connections between tea and ideas of British culture. Tea, for the British, remains a cultural facet with too many gaps to provide a full cultural-commodity chain in the modus operandi as proposed by the likes of Kenneth Pomerantz and Steven Topik. The development of British tea culture, unlike the rise and fall of coffee in the British Isles, can only be explained through constant starts and stops. Introduced to the court by Caterina of Braganza, the wife of Charles II, but sporadically evident among the wider population of England at least five years earlier, tea has no clear origin story within the realm of public consumption. As Cowan notes in his work, The Social Life of Coffee, the shift from coffee to tea amongst British consumers was primarily a product of a " new fiscal system which made coffee relatively more expensive and tea relatively

This article examines the contrasting evolution in sugar refining in Jamaica and Barbados incentivized by Mercantilist policies, changes in labor systems, and competition from foreign sugar revealing the role of Caribbean plantations as a site for experimentation from the eighteenth through mid-nineteenth century. Britain’s seventeenth- and eighteenth-century protectionist policies imposed high duties on refined cane-sugar from the colonies, discouraging colonies from exporting refined sugar as opposed to raw. This system allowed Britain to retain control over trade and commerce and provided exclusive sugar sales to Caribbean sugar plantations. Barbadian planters swiftly gained immense wealth and political power until Jamaica and other islands produced competitive sugar. The Jamaica Assembly invested heavily in technological innovations intended to improve efficiency, produce competitive sugar in a market that eventually opened to foreign competition such as sugar beet, and increase profits to undercut losses from duties. They valued local knowledge, incentivizing everyone from local planters to chemists, engineers, and science enthusiasts to experiment in Jamaica and publish their findings. These publications disseminated important findings throughout Britain and its colonies, revealing the significance of the Caribbean as a site for local experimentation and knowledge.