China and Its Delayed Industrialization

Since the eighteenth century, the United Kingdom has maintained its position as the primary importer of Chinese tea in Europe, and later, with the addition of the United States, this continued for one to two hundred years. In the early eighteenth century, the British East India Company sold less than 50,000 pounds of tea annually. However, by the end of the century, the company's annual tea sales had surged to nearly 20 million pounds, marking a staggering 400-fold increase within that century. Throughout this period, the industrial cities and coastal regions of the United Kingdom, encompassing even the impoverished population, adopted tea consumption.