Posted Sunday morning, February 14, 2021.
Detail from “Tea Time” by Jan Joseph Horemans II, painted sometime in the second half of the 18th Century. Royal Museum of Fine Arts, Antwerp. Via Wikipedia.
I don’t know whether I’d have been a Patriot or a Tory if I’d been alive and living in Boston when the Tea Act was passed, but if I’d been a tea drinker on either side, I'd have found common cause with the smugglers. From “The British Are Coming: The War in America, Lexington to Princeton, 1775-1777” by Rick Atkinson:
...The Tea Act restructured the East India Company and gave it a monopoly on tea sold in America. The company could appoint its own American agents, eliminating the expense of British wholesalers; the tax of three pence per pound would be retained to again affirm Parliament’s authority, but other export duties were eliminated. The price of tea in America would drop by more than a third, selling for less than the smuggled Dutch, Danish, and Portuguese tea popular in the American market. Pleased by the windfall, the East India Company prepared two thousand lead-lined tea chests for shipment to New World ports.
Too clever by half, the plan infuriated both smugglers and American merchants now superseded by favored East India agents. It implied Parliament’s authority to create monopolies for other commodities and reawakened the fraught issue of taxation without representation. The cynical manipulation of colonial markets on behalf ot British mercantile interests nudged American moderates toward common cause with radicals who deplored all British meddling in American affairs. In an attempt to stigmatize the beverage, one writer asserted that tea turned those who drank it into “weak, effeminate, and creeping valetudinarians.”
I admit to being a creeping valetudinarian these days, but would someone weak and effeminate, even if a creeping valetudinarian, drink his tea out of a mug like this?
Beam me up some Earl Grey, Scotty...
I assume that the Away Team appears under the influence of a nice hot cuppa. Very macho!
Posted by: M | Tuesday, February 16, 2021 at 07:52 AM
As a NEXT GENERATION-era fan, I would be failing my duty if one were to not point out that the Starfleet-proper drinks order is "Tea, Earl Grey, Hot." (-;
Posted by: ED | Thursday, March 18, 2021 at 02:55 PM
ED, I will make it so.
Posted by: Lance Mannion | Friday, March 26, 2021 at 09:57 AM