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| In Our Time
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| | | The big ideas which form the intellectual agenda of our age are illuminated by some of the best minds. Melvyn Bragg and three guests investigate the history of ideas and debate their application in modern life. | | | | | LISTEN AGAIN | | | |
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| | | | | "I'm fascinated by the fact that we live in a time when so many people are doing fantastic work, and thinking in areas which it's not remotely possible for me to keep up with & and these people are prepared to talk about it. They're prepared to come on In Our Time and other programmes on Radio 4 and try and talk to the rest of us ..." |
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|  | | TEA
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After air and water, tea is the most widely consumed substance on the planet and the British national drink. In this country it helped define class and gender, it funded wars and propped up the economy of the Empire. The trade started in the 1660s with an official import of just 2 ounces, by 1801 24 million pounds of tea were coming in every year and people of all classes were drinking an average two cups a day. It was the first mass commodity, and the merchant philanthropist Jonas Hanway decried its hold on the nation, “your servants' servants, down to the very beggars, will not be satisfied unless they consume the produce of the remote country of China”.
What drove the extraordinary take up of tea in this country? What role did it play in the global economy of the Empire and at what point did it stop becoming an exotic foreign luxury and start to define the essence of Englishness?
Contributors
Huw Bowen, Senior Lecturer in Economic and Social History at the University of Leicester
James Walvin, Professor of History at the University of York and author of Fruits of Empire: Exotic Produce and British Taste, 1660-1800 (Macmillan, 1997)
Amanda Vickery, Reader in History at Royal Holloway, University of London and author of The Gentleman's Daughter: Women's Lives in Georgian England (Yale Nota Bene, 2003)
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