For All the Tea in China: On the Question of Historical Contingency

All around the world people enjoy hot, caffeine based beverages.

Some people like coffee. Other people like tea. Others like both drinks. They’re not the same drink. They taste different from each other but they both perform similar, invigorating and thirst quenching functions, to a greater or lesser extent. Some people mostly drink tea but sometimes these people will also drink coffee. Other people are exclusive tea drinkers, or exclusive coffee drinkers. They each have their pros and cons and only some people are passionate about their preference.

Tea drinking, like coffee drinking, is culturally specific and ones attitude and habits often depends on where you were born and how you were raised. Some people drink green tea, others drink black tea. Sometimes tea comes with milk, or sugar, or both, sometimes it doesn’t.

In Japan, they drink tea in ritualised ceremonies. In Argentina, they organise social events around it, which they call mate. In England, the High Tea, with its accompanying scones with jam, or tiffin, or crust-free sandwich, is etched into the iconography of our national identity. We can have sincere arguments about how to do it properly: boiling water or not, bag or leaf, milk first or after, pot or mug.

People will often break these constraints and acquire their own taste for the other way of doing it, or for coffee if they are from a tea drinking family but, most often, whether you drink more tea or more coffee is largely dependant on where you live, how wealthy you are, whether you’re in a target market for the sellers and what your own parents taught you.

None of this matters, unless or until you are asked, “Tea or Coffee?”

We don’t think of other people, and most of us don’t think of ourselves, on the basis of whether or not we prefer coffee to tea, or vice versa. We don’t organise our societies along these lines. We don’t legislate a preference for one over the other. We have no reason to.

I am not a TeaCup, you are not a CoffeeSpoon.

For the sake of this story, let’s imagine a situation where it did matter.

Let’s say we did begin to legislate about our preferences for tea or coffee.

Let’s say, for example, there were simultaneously revolutions in Indonesia, Brazil, Guatemala, Kenya and all the other major coffee producing countries of the world; revolutions in which far right government came to power. And, let’s also say, very soon thereafter, India and China and all the major tea producers went to the far left by the same revolutionary processes.

And let’s say the far left block led by China and the far right block led by Brazil both sought to disrupt whatever is now left of the global order characterised by a Western liberal hegemony, and they both made all things much more difficult for the Americans and the Japanese and the Europeans and the Australians, and all the other people and nations who hold disproportionate power and wealth and influence, and who decide how things are done. Let’s say both new blocks make demands of the old order, and that the old order sought to adapt to and survive the new situation, whilst noting that the principal export of the far right grouping was coffee, and the principal export of the far left grouping was tea (it isn’t, in either case, but this is a fiction, so pretend that it was).

In this fiction, after some humming and hahing and other forms of political debate, the old order would decide that it was better to accommodate the demands of the imagined far left block, because 3/7 of the world’s population were Indian or Chinese and neither these people nor these markets could be ignored, whilst only 1/10 of the world was Indonesian or Brazilian, and they were — on average — poorer, anyway and they most certainly could be ignored. And once they decided whose side they were on or, rather, which side posed less of threat to them and served and protected their own interests better, they would set about destroying the other one, since both could not prevail. They would open trade missions to China and India and turn their malign attentions to Brazil. They would do all the stuff about diplomacy and communications and military conflicts, as they are wont to do but, as it is wont not to do in the long run, none of it would work. So they would go for the economic jugular, Coffee.

They would establish a panoply of measures that sought to dissuade all the people who prefer to drink coffee, even those who only did so occassionally or in moderation, not to do so. They would deny Brazil and her allies the financial wherewithal to survive.

So they would fund research which happily concluded that drinking coffee was harmfully addictive, and was closely linked to other harmful addictions, and other anti social behaviours. And they would propagandise that research, until enough people believed it. And so coffee sales would drop. Then they would start regulating the drinking of coffee, and licensing the sale ever more restrictively, and increasing the taxes, until it was socially frowned upon, when they would ban the drinking of it in public places and then then they would ban the sale completely.

Sometime, people found drinking coffee on a regular basis would be hounded out of town. In some places, coffee would be put on bonfires, or thrown away into sewers, or harbours, bring to mind the Boston Tea Party, at another time when a hot drink became the focus of political protest and community identity.

And so, as the markets for their principal goods closed down, the economies of Brazil and the rest of the right wing block would weaken and weaken, whilst the Chinese and the Indian led block would make a peace and an accommodation.

There would be a resistance, of course, and an unregulated market. In Seattle, a lot of people prefer coffee and a lot of other people have their jobs and livelihoods depend on it. So someone like the Seattle mayor would have to be assassinated, and all sorts of terrible and untrue things would be said and written about her and what she did with spoons and coffee and little choirboys and so all the people of Seattle would soon come to be known across the rest of the world as Coffee Spoon Seattlers, which would become Spoon Settlers, which would become Spooners.

And very soon anyone who declared a preference for drinking coffee over tea would be known as a Spooner, which now means pervert, and even those who only occasionally imbibed when they were on a weekend break in Amsterdam, where everything was still always allowed for a price, would be told that what they had done was completely Spoonerish, to be frowned on (and laughed at in some circles, where everyone had been to Amsterdam).

And years later, when a new left of centre world order had been built, and the governments of Brazil and Kenya and Indonesia had fallen, and the Chinese government had successfully taken it all over and had started to run the world, and when everyone always drank tea, or said in public that’s what they did, the people in Hong Kong would sometimes ask the question, “Were there any Spooners in the ancient USA?”

And so comes the reply, “Yes, of course there were. Here’s a picture of Barack Obama drinking his morning cup of coffee. It is well known that Spooners and their licentious addictions was a part of their own eventual downfall.”

But Barack Obama wasn’t actually a Spooner. When he was President there was no such thing as a Spooner. The revolutionary changes which set the tea-based cultural world order hadn’t happened.

He just drank a cup of coffee in that Hong Kong photograph.

We have never otherwise thought twice about whether he drank coffee or he drank tea, or which he preferred. It didn’t influence what we thought of him because we never thought about it. And if we ever did think about it, we didn’t really know which he preferred. He never made it a thing. if we were ever to have been asked, we probably would have thought that either was possible, maybe both, but we just didn’t organise people that way, and we didn’t categorise people that way, so we would have moved our thoughts quickly on. It didn’t ever matter to us, not unless he was our guest and we were offering him the choice and, for most of us, he was never our guest.

And, though he may or may not have had a strong preference for coffee, or even for tea, nor — we must suppose — did Barack Obama ever think like that about himself. He just knew what he liked, and what he wanted when asked.

Similarly, same sex acts have probably always existed in our species, as they do in many species, but the idea, the thought, of a person *being a homosexual person* — and it being a defining characteristic — is a relatively modern conceit, one which began with the control of homosexuality and then rapidly expanded with its pathologisation.

And that is as true for exclusively homosexual people as it is for our occasional guests. The idea of *being gay* is even more recent, a reaction to controlled and pathologised homosexual acts.

It is our way of saying, “I drink coffee”. And, trust me, there are plenty of coffee drinkers out there who will swear blind they only ever drink tea.

We are not born this way. We choose to be.

It is a political act.