How colonial mythmaking erased the global tea trade’s Indigenous and labor roots—from Boston to Canton
Original framing: “Here’s the tea” — MIT Technology Review
The voices of enslaved Africans, indentured South Asians, and Indigenous tea workers are absent from the Boston Tea Party narrative, despite their central role in the trade. For example, the 1830s *Coolies* (indentured laborers) from India who worked on Ceylon’s tea plantations faced conditions so brutal that many died within months, yet their stories are omitted from colonial histories. In modern tea supply chains, workers in Kenya’s Kericho region—where 90% of the labor is female—earn less than $2 a day, a direct legacy of colonial wage-setting practices. The label’s story, centered on a white academic’s ‘discovery,’ further marginalizes these voices by treating them as invisible cogs in a ‘patriotic’ myth.
The Boston Tea Party’s mythos is a trickster tale that has obscured the systemic violence of the tea trade—from the Indigenous knowledge stolen in Asia to the enslaved labor in the Atlantic.
The label’s story, centered on a white academic’s curiosity, is a microcosm of how colonial narratives curate history to serve nationalist myths while erasing the global web of exploitation that sustained them. To dismantle this legacy, solutions must address the ecological, economic, and cultural dimensions simultaneously: restoring land to Indigenous stewards, reparations for marginalized laborers, and rewriting tea’s history through the voices of those who were never heard. The future of tea lies not in repeating the sins of the past, but in building a trade system where harmony—*he*—replaces extraction, and where the stories of Coyote, Anansi, and the Miao people are finally given their due.