Drugs

The word drug seems loaded nowadays. Instead of its dictionary definition of "a medicine or other substance which has a physiological effect when ingested or otherwise introduced into the body." the word seems to suggest something sinister. Is a medicine inherently good and a drug is inherently ba? This have something to do with the infamous "War on Drugs" started primarily, against psychedelics in the 1970's by the pro-war, Nixon administration. However, drugs are simply chemicals and are morally relative, nor bad nor good just dependent on their context.

With this in mind arguably the first and currently most popular drug on the planet is caffeine. 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

a profile of the population history of England

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