It was a photo of Frank Sinatra sipping tea at a Royal Albert Hall gig that first gave historian and academic Erika Rappaport pause. The Sinatra photo was on the cover of the 1975 United Kingdom Tea Council Limited Annual Report under William Cowper’s quote “The cup that cheers” and Rappaport sought “to uncover the world that could encompass an eighteenth-century evangelical poet and a twentieth-century American entertainer”.

The result is a hefty tome of 549 pages (don’t worry, 20% of that is references and notes). I’m not a slow reader by any means, but not since I read the Lord of the Rings trilogy (each novel took me three months – in my defence I was in third-year uni and my course readings were relentless) have I moved so slowly through a book.

This is not to say A Thirst for Empire is tedious – quite the opposite. I have 38 pages of notes and 16 page scans that serve as evidence of its thorough account and fascinating insights.

With meticulously referenced research, Rappaport pieces together the British story of tea through an imperial lens. It’s not just the story beats that we already know: tea taxation leading to the Boston Tea Party and American independence; the Opium Wars, which were really about the tea trade; and the commercialisation of tea plantations in South Asia.

Instead, Rappaport furnishes these well-trodden paths with rarely used information that give context to some of the events where tea seemed an unlikely player. Take, for instance, the South African War of 1899-1902, which was not fought over tea; the British government of the time, however, raised the tea duty to offset the costs of the war.

Rappaport focuses very tightly on British imperialism through war, expansion and acquisition, but also capitalism and consumerism, marketing and propaganda, and the book is all the better for its depth rather than trying to tell tea’s much bigger story.

Tea thus provides a foundation for many British movements, from the Industrial Revolution (as a way to control and assuage workers) and temperance (to promote sobriety) to women’s suffrage (because women could meet in teahouses), while also being the catalyst for colonisation, for example India: “The conquest and cultivation of tea in Assam were two parts of the same process.”

In some cases, the introduction of tea was part of the way it tempered those under its rule, such as in Sri Lanka (Ceylon), South Africa and Kenya, where the growth and consumption of tea was instrumental in building capitalism. For example, the Tea Board urged industry to provide tea to its workers in South Africa and Kenya using the pamphlet ‘Tea revives them’ as an echo of the Industrial Revolution. The message was that tea would make them good workers and entice them to behave themselves.

The other part of imperialism often forgotten is the winning of hearts and minds and here Rappaport delivers a strong account of tea and its relationship to propaganda, and later marketing and consumerism. One early campaign was to discredit the quality of Chinese tea and switch consumer tastes to ‘British-grown’ tea (ie tea grown in India). This was so effective that several decades later, in his famous essay on tea, George Orwell, “an intense critic of propaganda, had unwittingly absorbed decades of advertising that highlighted the strength and healthiness of India over the effeminacy of China”.

Another was the wooing of the United States after the War of Independence. After tea was deemed unpatriotic, the US turned to coffee as its national drink, but the tea trade was still significant there, though it bought directly from many countries including China, Japan and the Dutch colonies. To capture a higher percentage of the American market, the tea-growers of the British Empire had to create the myth that tea was an American product and hide its previous associations, as it was considered snobby, feminine and British. Iced tea became the product that broke through thanks to a collaboration between the Indian Tea Market Expansion Board, Domino sugar and Sunkist (a creation of Californian citrus growers) as it “did not carry any particular gender of class associations”.

Another key area where tea was highly visible was during World War II. “Tea was considered so important that the government developed plans to protect the nation’s tea several years before the onset of hostilities.” Although tea was rationed, it was important that it was available because it had become social welfare and a public good, plus signified normalcy so the government could keep public sentiment about the war in check.

Tea becomes a different instrument of propaganda as decolonisation challenges the British hold on South Asia. Mahatma Gandhi instigates the swadeshi movement, which preferenced the consumption of Indian goods over European items. Unintentionally, Gandhi turns buying into a form of nation-building and, as a result, introduces tension to the tea industry where tea gets re-appropriated as an Indian product so the producers can continue to maintain the domestic market, while activists see the continuation of the industry as colonisation by capitalism. “I will never drink tea as it would be drinking the blood of my brothers,” wrote one nationalist to commissioner of tea John Harpur.

Meanwhile, coffee and cola move into tea’s space. Thanks to the power of American marketing, these beverages were seen as aspirational and modern, leaving tea to play catch-up, even in Britain. Rappaport gives a very thorough account of some marketing successes and failures in these latter decades. My favourite is probably how, in the 1950s and ’60s, tea had to reflect three versions of Great Britain: an insular island nation; a new multinational Commonwealth; and a young, hip cosmopolitan country that looked to both the US and Europe. “This was a schizophrenic project,” Rappaport wryly observes. “Coke, espresso, and instant coffee arrived just as the tea industry was undergoing the most painful period of decolonisation and post-war rebuilding.”

All in all, this is an extremely detailed account of tea as it relates to empire, capitalism and consumerism written in a clear and accessible manner. Admittedly it’s not a book for every tea-lover, just those who enjoy the confluence of history, foodways and our favourite beverage.

As Rappaport writes in her outro: “When I began writing this book I did not foresee the way that tea would uncannily show up as a protagonist in key events, movements and turning points in Britain’s domestic and international history.” I, for one, am glad she made these connections and had the academic chops to piece things together.

A Thirst for Empire: How Tea Shaped the Modern World (Princeton University Press, 2017)