So this is why the British love their tea

The British became a global Empire with their military victories over Napoleon in the Battles of Trafalgar and Waterloo. But the groundwork for these military victories was laid by the Industrialization that took hold in the 18th century that propelled the British economy to become the world’s most advanced throughout the 19th century. And what was the secret sauce for the successful industrialisation of Britain? It turns out it was tea.

If you think about it, the industrialization of the British Isles required three key ingredients. It required the innovations of James Watt, George Stephenson and others to develop machines, railways, etc. that would allow British industry to become so much more productive and profitable than its counterparts in Europe. It required capital to invest in these new inventions. And it required many workers to man the machines in factories.

The problem for Great Britain was that it didn’t really have that many workers. The population of the British Isles in the mid-18th century was a little above 5 million but then began to rise. As the Industrial Revolution took hold, hygiene standards and living standards increased while famines became rarer. The result was a massive population explosion, that helped spur growth and create enormous wealth.

Population of the British Isles 1100 to 2000

Source: Wrigley Roger and Schofield (1989)

But what caused that original increase in population around the late 1700s? If you believe Francisca Antman it was the widespread adoption of drinking tea. In the early 18th century, tea was a luxury commodity, mostly because of the high import duties and taxes posed on tea. But throughout the 18th century, the tea levies were reduced which led to the widespread adoption of tea drinking across the country. Both the East India Company, which had a monopoly on the tea trade and the government which cashed in on the tea frenzy through taxes encouraged the population to drink tea.

But what does drinking tea involve? It requires you to boil the water you use for making tea. And by boiling it, you reduce the number of bacteria in the water. The inadvertent result of the widespread adoption of tea in Great Britain was that death rates declined and more people survived into adulthood and had children themselves. The decline in mortality rates is measurable across the country and it is more pronounced in parishes that had poorer water quality. Drinking tea thus created not only more people but more people in poorer parishes (because it was poorer parishes that on average had poorer water quality). This in turn created a flood of workers that moved to cities to find employment in the many newly established factories.

And the rest is history.

Decline in mortality rates due to rising tea consumption

Source: Antman (2022)

There are indeed several of these “accidents” of history. One reason why the Arab world declined relative to Europe after the Middle Ages was the invention of the printing press. The printing press used individual letters in the Latin alphabet and allowed the fast and cheap reproduction of information and knowledge. As a result, the printing press created a significant acceleration of the creation of knowledge and made knowledge more widely available. The Arabs couldn’t emulate that because the Arab script links individual “characters” together in one fluent script. One cannot create individual Arab characters and set them in a printing press next to each other to form words and sentences because the letters wouldn’t link up with each other. The printing press was invented by Johannes Gutenberg in 1440. The first Arab printing press was invented in Lebanon in 1734. 300 years of lost time cost the Arab world its advantage in science and mathematics vs. the Europeans.