In Terence McKenna’s, Food of the Gods, he devotes part three of his book called Hell, to the subject of your article in a chapter called Complacencies of the Peignoir: Sugar, Coffee, Tea and Chocolate. A common theme woven throughout much of his works is the concept of dominator culture as opposed to partnership, nature of these tools of capitalism. Boundary dissolution and supression of the ego is much needed in our epoc and a gift we can obtain from the sacred plants who have incessant patience and willingness to teach, not to mention an extremely long track record.

Louis

Evidently, people drank something else before they started drinking tea. Also, tea-drinking is of course related to the colonial past. And quite likely, people’s habits had to be changed so that imported beverages could replace their traditional drinks. As it seems, this was done (at least partially) via beer-brewing related taxes:

http://books.google.com/books?id=b1VHAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA17&dq=cottage+economy&output=text

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Mr. Ellman, an old man and a large farmer, in Sussex, has recently given in evidence, before a Committee of the House of Commons, this fact; that, forty years ago, there was not a labourer in his parish that did not brew his own beer; and that now there is not one that does it, except by chance the malt be given him. The causes of this change have been the lowering of the wages of labour, compared with the price of provisions, by the means of the paper-money; the enormous “tax upon the barley when made into malt; and the increased tax upon hops. These have quite changed the customs of the English people as to their drink. They still drink beer, but in general it is of the brewing of common brewers, and in public-houses, of which the common brewers have become the owners, and have thus, by the aid of papermoney, obtained a monopoly in the supplying of the great body of the people with one of those things which, to the hard-working man, is almost a necessary of life.
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Cobbett is funny to read because he is so very wrong about so many things. (When people claim permaculture would be about "going back to the 19th century", I occassionally let them read some of Cobbett's writings – no, we are certainly not in any way going back to believing such strange things, and founding our culture on them.) Still, his writings offer an outer perspective and sometimes are very useful to get an idea what the roots of those forces are that shaped the present.