Book Review: A Social History of Tea — teaformeplease.com

The book starts out with a brief discussion of the origin of tea (Sheng Nong, et al.) but the main focus is on British and American tea history. I really love that the chapters are organized by century. This makes will make it super easy to find material for reference in the future. There are lots of photographs, illustrations, and paintings throughout that help to tell the story as well. It's hard to make a huge amount of facts readable but the tone was pretty conversational throughout. Everything was very well researched and backed up by an extensive bibliography. There wasn't a lot of information that was necessarily new to me but I've been reading every book on tea that I could find for the last ten years. This book is an excellent resource, especially for those that are fairly new to tea and looking for historical context.

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