Tea was the microchip of the 18th century. Tea—along with coffee and chocolate, the other exotic, hot, non-alcoholic beverages introduced into Europe at about the same time via trade and colonization—was probably the single greatest catalyst to changing everyday life in England and her colonies. Not long after tea was introduced at the English court in the 1660s, the British people, who had drunk beer as their staple beverage for centuries, became besotted with the bewitching new brews.
A vast range of household goods—tea tables, kettles, pots, cups, canisters, spoons—was developed to serve tea, coffee, and chocolate in style. When imported porcelain from China could not fill the gentry's desire for tea wares, England's challenge to supply the "right stuff" domestically fueled the industrial revolution. The rising middle class that made and sold tea equipage could afford to serve it from new Sheffield tea kitchens and drink it from new Staffordshire pottery.
American colonists so resented Parliament's tax on tea that the tea pot became the symbol of the American Revolution. Boston Tea Party! "No Stamp Act" teapot! The teapot could be Colonial Williamsburg's logo for our Revolutionary City programming. When the non-importation agreement was in effect, coffee and chocolate became the politically correct substitutes.
Thus, the Starbucks buzz is not so new; America has had a serious caffeine addiction for more than two centuries. There's not another museum in the country that can tell the story like "Revolution in Taste" at Colonial Williamsburg's DeWitt Wallace Decorative Arts Museum, with its stunning array of 18th-century goods developed to serve tea, coffee, and chocolate. Want antioxidants? Check out our "green tea" canisters and pots. Like fusion design? Tea introduced East to West. The fascination is eternal.