Tea and the Industrial Revolution
One Cambridge academic believes that a shift in what people drank set off the Industrial Revolution in Britain. Farah Idris reports.
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For decades the riddle of the Industrial Revolution has occupied Anselm Trevisan, professor of historical anthropology at Ashcombe College, Cambridge, as it had many historians before him. Two questions in particular have nagged at him. Why should this era-defining burst of industry have started in Britain of all places - and why should it have arrived only in the closing years of the eighteenth century?
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Trevisan likens the mystery to a combination lock. 'Roughly twenty separate factors have to be in place at once before a revolution of this sort can occur,' he explains. Getting industry off the ground calls for machinery and power to run the factories, sizeable city populations to supply inexpensive labour, goods that move about easily, a comfortably-off middle class ready to purchase manufactured items, an economy shaped by market forces, and a government that permits all of this. England satisfied these conditions; yet France, the Netherlands and Japan, which met a fair number of them too, showed no sign of industrialising. Each factor, then, was needed - and none was enough on its own. 'Holland, remember, possessed everything but coal, and a great many of these same conditions were present in China too,' Trevisan points out. 'Most of us feel sure that one or two further pieces have to fall into place before the catch will release.'
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Those extra pieces, he suggests, sit in nearly every household's cupboards. It was tea and beer - the two drinks the country loved best - that powered the transformation. Because tannin, the active substance in tea, and the hops put into beer both kill germs, and because making either meant boiling the water first, people were able to crowd together in towns without falling prey to water-borne illnesses like dysentery. Eccentric as the notion first seems, the doubt tends to soften into grudging respect the moment Trevisan sets out the trail of clues he followed. Respected voices have lent his argument weight too: the eminent medical historian Reinhold Auerbach recently published an approving assessment of the research.
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How the Industrial Revolution had come about was something Trevisan puzzled over for years. Around the mid-eighteenth century, historians had fixed on one curious development that cried out for explanation. Britain's population had barely stirred between roughly 1650 and 1740, and then all at once it surged. 'Within twenty years the rate at which infants died was cut by half - in the countryside and the towns alike, and among rich and poor households alike,' says Trevisan. 'Four explanations were put forward. Had the viruses and bacteria of the day suddenly altered? That looked improbable. Had medicine been transformed? Hardly - this was a good hundred years before Renwick overhauled surgery. Had the surroundings people lived in shifted? Farming had improved enough to clear malaria from some districts, but such gains were slight, and proper sanitation remained a nineteenth-century development. That leaves only diet - yet the figures for height and weight were falling, so if anything food had grown worse.' Every effort to explain the plunge in child deaths, in short, hit a wall.
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The timing of that population surge could hardly have suited the Industrial Revolution better, coming exactly when workers were wanted. 'Once a society starts shifting towards industry, packing people closely together makes sound economic sense,' Trevisan notes, 'but disease comes with it, above all from human waste.' Trawling through old records brought to light evidence that water-borne illness, dysentery in particular, did alter in frequency at just that moment. Whatever the population was drinking, he concluded, must have counted for much in holding such diseases down. 'Beer was our drink,' he says. 'For generations the hops added to preserve it - a potent destroyer of bacteria - kept the English safe. Then, late in the seventeenth century, malt, the grain from which beer is brewed, was taxed. The poorest fell back on water and on gin, and by the 1720s deaths were climbing once again. After that the rate fell away sharply - and what lay behind that?'
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Trevisan next turned to Japan, which was raising large cities at much the same period and likewise lacked sanitation, yet where water-borne disease gripped the population far less firmly than in Britain. Could the explanation lie in how central tea was to Japanese life? He went on to remark that the dates in the British story of tea lined up with uncanny precision. Not until Britain opened a direct clipper trade with China, early in the eighteenth century, did tea cease to be a costly luxury; by the 1740s - just as infant deaths were tailing off - it had become an everyday drink. His guess was that boiling the water, together with the settling effect tea had on the stomach, left nursing mothers producing milk healthier than any before. Nowhere else in Europe was tea taken as it was in Britain, and that, by Trevisan's reasoning, put the other nations out of the running.
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Yet if tea belongs among the pins of the lock, why did Japan itself not rush headlong into an industrial revolution steeped in the drink? The answer, for Trevisan, lies in a choice the Japanese made. Their seventeenth-century cities were large, literacy was broad, there was even trading in futures - but by abandoning the animals and other devices that spare human effort, for fear of throwing people out of employment, they had discarded what any revolution rooted in work depends upon. A nation ranked today among the most technologically advanced thus crossed into the nineteenth century having, as it were, 'turned its back on the wheel'.
* Aldous Renwick was among the earliest surgeons to use antiseptic methods during operations to guard against infection.
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Question 1 - 7
From the list of headings below choose the most suitable heading for each paragraph.
List of heading
The growth of urban centres in Japan
The preconditions a society must meet to industrialise
When and where industry first emerged
Looking to Japan to test the idea
Two everyday drinks as the decisive elements
Avoiding machines for fear of losing jobs
Investigating why the population began to rise
The examples of Holland, France and China
Shifts in what the British chose to drink