How the United States Became A Coffee-Driven Culture of Expansion and Desire

The English apppropriated tea culture from India and China and made it their own by adding porcelan, milk, fancy silver cutlery, jam and scones. They then began exporting the English version of drinking tea back into the cultures from which they had taken it.
When the early English colonialists travled to the new world, they too brought tea culture with them. It is assumed that high tea taxes and greed led to the American Revolution begining with the infamous Boston Tea Party. I would suggest, however, that the American revolution was equally motivated by an intense desire for social liberation.

When the colonists came to the new world they maintained a strong pressence of Engish power and control over their lives by bringing tea. Despite the obvious potential for control in the addictive quality of caffine there were also opportunities for the English to exert control via the social dependance on (or addiction to) tea (as a social facilitator) in colonial America (similar to the current American economic dependance on oil producing nations today).

If a government controls the socialization of its people, that government has absolute control over said people due to the simple fact that socialization is a basic human need intrinsic to our survival. When babies are denied touch they die. Adolecents would rather die than be rejected by thier peer group. Men and women take desperate measures to maintain social networks of love, acceptance and stability.

As tea was consumed in every level of English society and colonial outpost in the context of leisure and socialization, it could easily be used by the English as a social control mechanism by withholding it or inflating the price (and limiting availability) through Taxes.

The homesick colonialists could engage in the social ritual of tea to remember all the good things about England and the home they had left behind. However every time a colonist sat down for a cup of tea she was looking back, like Lot's wife, betraying their primary vision of freedom and pledging their fealty to England's throne.

Just like the final purging of the old, ephemeral relics of a defunct love affair can provide realease from the past, so too was the Boston tea party a decleration of independence from a dysfunctional relationship to all things English, including tea. As the Boston Tea Party Participants tossed boxes of tea into the harbor, they were not only rejecting the financial burden tea represented, they were rejecting of a way of life and socialization that had become a barrier to their growth and development as a nation. Ever since this action America has been rapidly developing as an overcaffinated, coffee-driven culture of independence, expansion and desire.