While much has been written about tea utensils as signs of politeness, by comparison very little has been discussed about the box of tea, an indispensable article in the East India Company’s China trade. Still less has been written about the smallness of the box, which facilitated the movement of tea across ocean and land and shaped the aesthetics of protest in North America. Might the box of tea enable us to reassess how the material culture of an emergent British empire was fundamentally an empire of small things? This chapter analyzes smallness as the hallmark of a British colonial aesthetic sharpened by the complexities of the China trade. It examines boxes of tea as maritime merchandise before turning to botanical containers and tea caddies as sites of sensory engagement. Smallness, this chapter contends, emerged as a paradigm of intimacy that embedded an article of botany and commerce into the ebb and flow of domestic life. Like porcelain tea utensils, the small box played its part in tea ceremonies, while securing the careful management of a luxury product.

Historians have been slow to examine the political ramifications of the consumer revolution. Europe and the Americas experienced intense political strife in the eighteenth century, culminating in the American Revolution, the French Revolution, the Haitian Revolution, and Latin American revolutions. Did the consumer revolution (lowercase “r”) have anything to do with these political Revolutions (uppercase “R”)? This chapter provides a framework for understanding how consumer goods became implicated in revolutionary movements. It argues that activists during the age of Revolution politicized consumer goods in three ways. First, by protesting against the “despotic” commercial regulations and consumption taxes at the heart of imperial political economies, activists politicized colonial goods, such as tea and tobacco. They demanded that such “necessities” circulate freely and at low cost. Second, citizens imbued everyday objects with revolutionary meaning. Material objects like the tricolor cockade mediated revolutionary ideas and aspirations, enabling citizens to participate in and express their allegiance to (or rejection of) evolving political projects. Finally, consumer activism shaped debates on slavery. The enslaved of Haiti launched the era’s greatest attack on slavery, overthrowing a brutal system of production that provided Europeans with large quantities of colonial products. Further, abolitionists in Europe and North America protested slavery by abstaining from slave-produced sugar. They argued that consumers had the power to effect large-scale change through a new mode of collective action: the boycott.

Chapter 2 discusses the First Amendment right to peaceably assemble and the related right to form associations. In their original proposed constitutional amendments, George Mason and James Madison both included a right “peaceably to assemble to consult for the common good.” Historically the assembly right was a powerful one, entitling the people to gather in public places without prior permission from government officials.Furthermore, even disruptive assemblies were tolerated so long as they did not cross into violence because assembly was recognized as an essential element of popular sovereignty. After all, in an era before electronic communications, physical gatherings were the only way ordinary citizens could exchange and jointly formulate their political beliefs. For similar reasons, the First Amendment has also been long interpreted to protect the right to form permanent associations. This right emerged from efforts during the Washington Administration to suppress the Democratic-Republican Societies, founded to support the French Revolution. Today, the Supreme Court accepts that meaningful citizen participation in government requires stringent protection for associations because it is only through joining groups that individual citizens are able to influence policymaking. The hard question that remains is whether to tolerate discriminatory associations.