This four-volume, reset collection takes as its starting point the earliest substantial descriptions of tea as a commodity in the mid-seventeenth century, and ends in the early nineteenth century with two key events: the discovery of tea plants in Assam in 1823, and the dissolution of the East India Company’s monopoly on the tea trade in 1833

Volume 3 Tea, Commerce and the East India Company Introduction Humphrey Broadbent, The Domestick Coffee-Man, shewing the True Way of Preparing and Making of Chocolate, Coffee and Tea (1722) Great Britain, Commissioners of Excise, Instructions to be Observed by the Officers Employ’d in the Duty on Coff ee, Tea, and Chocolate, in London (1724) The Case of the Dealers in Tea ([1736]) [Matthew Decker], Serious Considerations on the Several High Duties which the Nation in General (as well as it’s Trade in Particular) Labours Under (1743) Considerations on the Duties upon Tea, and the Hardships suffer’d by the Dealers in that Commodity (1744) Jonas Hanway, ‘Essay on Tea’ (1756) Stephen Theodore Janssen, Smuggling Laid Open, in all its Extensive and Destructive Branches (1763) Pehr Osbeck, A Voyage to China and the East Indies (1771) The Chinese Traveller (1772) John Entick, ‘Empire of China’ (1774) [William Smith], Tsiology; a Discourse on Tea (1826) Editorial Notes