Towards the end of Macfarlane's article "From Empire of Tea" the author gives a good summary of the impact of tea on the world:
"Tea transformed Britain as it had done China and Japan. 'In no instance has a greater revolution taken place in the habits of a people than that which tea has effected within the last hundred years among the English,' wrote John Davis, the historian of China, in the middle of the nineteenth century. Alongside that transformation there emerged the most powerful capitalist and imperial nation in world history. The anthropologist Sidney Mints described how the 'first sweetened cup of hot tea to be drunk by an English worker was a significant historical event, because it prefigured the transformation of an entire society, a total remaking of its economic and social basis.' Tea changed everything" (96-97).
Tea began to show one's wealth and began to be another defining feature of an upperclass European. Tea changed the day to day patterns of a European. The fact that the tea came from China added the international trading factor. China, who had never had a hugh role in the trading industry, now became a very big deal to Europeans especially. Had the tea epidemic not happened, European history and culture would be completely different and therefore Europeans would not have affected America in the same way.
As the author said, "Tea changed everything."
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