Tea and the Industrial Revolution

Tea and the Industrial Revolution

A Cambridge professor says that a change in drinking habits was the reason for the Industrial Revolution in Britain.

AAlan Macfarlane, professor of anthropological science at King's College, Cambridge, has, like other historians, spent decades wrestling with the enigma of the Industrial Revolution. Why did this particular Big Bang – the world-changing birth of industry – happen in Britain? And why did it strike at the end of the eighteenth century?

BMacfarlane compares the puzzle to a combination lock. There are about twenty different factors and all of them need to be present before the revolution can happen, he says. For industry to take off, there needed to be the technology and power to drive factories, large urban populations to provide cheap labour, easy transport to move goods around, an affluent middle-class willing to buy manufactured goods, and a market-driven economy with a political system that encouraged private enterprise. Britain possessed all of these, but other nations such as France, Holland and China had several of them as well, yet failed to industrialise.

CAll these factors were necessary, but not sufficient to cause the revolution on their own. Macfarlane argues that there were two additional missing factors that tipped the balance in Britain's favour: an unprecedented boom in population, and an unexpected decline in fatal water-borne diseases that allowed large numbers of workers to live densely packed in industrial cities without succumbing to epidemics.

DThe search for the explanation of this sudden population growth led historians to examine medical records, agricultural yields, and sanitation improvements. Curiously, between 1740 and 1780, infant mortality rates dropped dramatically, even though medical science had made no major advances and hospitals were notoriously lethal places. What was protecting the population from water-borne pathogens such as dysentery and cholera?

EMacfarlane believes the answer lies in an extraordinary revolution in British drinking habits. In the mid-eighteenth century, the British population switched en masse to drinking two new beverages: tea and beer. Both required boiling water, which killed harmful bacteria. Moreover, the active ingredient in tea – tannin – contains powerful antibacterial properties. As tea became cheap and ubiquitous, infant mortality plunged, providing the healthy, thriving workforce required by Britain's burgeoning factories.

FTo test his hypothesis, Macfarlane turned to Japan. In the eighteenth century, Japan also developed a sophisticated culture of tea drinking and maintained remarkably low rates of water-borne disease despite high urban densities. However, unlike Britain, Japan had virtually no domestic livestock, relying instead on human muscle power and hand tools. Fearing widespread unemployment, the Tokugawa shogunate actively banned wheeled transport and labour-saving machinery, deliberately turning its back on the industrial path.

GBritain, by contrast, had no such reservations. With abundant coal, capital, and a cultural embrace of mechanisation, the sudden surge in a healthy, tea-drinking labour force ignited the Industrial Revolution, transforming Britain into the workshop of the world.