Thank you for downloading this episode of a history of the world in a hundred objects

from BBC Radio 4. What could be more domestic, more unremarkable, more British than a nice cup of tea?

You could ask that question the other way round.

What could be less British than a cup of tea, given that tea is made from plants grown in India, China or Africa,

and is usually sweetened by sugar from the Caribbean.

It's one of the extraordinary ironies of British national identity, or perhaps it says everything about our national identity,

that the drink that's become the worldwide caricature of Britishness has nothing indigenous about it, but it is the result of centuries of

global trade and of a complex imperial history. Behind the modern British cap of T

modern British cap of tea lie the high politics of Victorian Britain,

the story of 19th century empire of mass production and mass

consumption, the taming of a turbulent and drunken industrial working class, the reshaping of agriculture across continents, the movement of millions of people

and a worldwide shipping industry.

It's a lot to think about as you tuck into the cucumber sandwiches at the vicarage.

It takes one into the heart of the Victorian parlour.

You have this superficial gloss of politeness and sobriety, but underneath you have this absolutely

cut-throat imperial economic agenda.

A history of the world in a hundred objects. Early Victorian T-T-Set, made in Staffordshire, England between 1840 and 1845. 45.

This week we're looking at the global economy in the 19th century at mass production and mass consumption.

When all over the industrialized world luxuries became commonplace, clothes and clocks, pepper and

porcelain.

And some luxuries came to be seen as not only desirable, but essential.

In Britain, the most ubiquitous of all these former luxuries was tea.

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