Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin - The British and their Tea (Redux)

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March 23, 2025 - Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin

09:45

The British and their Tea (Redux)

Everything comes from somewhere.

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	In 2020, the British TV show Horrible Histories produced a Brexit special called British Things, in which, well, frankly, they decided that actually nothing was British, because if you go back long enough, you can trace almost everything to somewhere else, which is true.
	But it turns out that actually everything has an antecedent, something that came before it, that directly precedes what we have now.
	And actually the issue about being British, which was the form of attack that they were taking against the British people who had voted for Brexit, was of course being done with a huge amount of malice.
	This kind of deconstructivist argument was, of course, made many times over, but has been refuted many times since.
	And the video that I'm going to present to you today was one I made for my CatDaily channel, in which I think I did a rather good job of it.
	I actually commissioned an animator to animate it for me as well because I thought well that'd be fun wouldn't it?
	And it turned out really really well.
	I think it's important to remember just how quickly the discourse is shifting at the moment because if you go back five years Nish Kumar's attack on Britishness and British culture was highly offensive to many people at the time and not that it was unprecedented but it was the nature of the attack that took everyone by surprise.
	Using a children's TV show to just turn around and say look nothing's British and you're basically a bunch of evil enslaving warmongering imperialists and we're going to allow the BBC to pay Nish Kumar to tell your children that seemed to take everyone by surprise, especially given the childish and vengeful nature of the show.
	And they chose the medium of a children's history TV programme because they know how much this is going to bother you if you poison the minds of children against their own civilization and society, while they're going to be so much easier to mould into communist revolutionaries going forward.
	But moreover, this was just Nish Kumar's contribution to the campaign of demoralization against the British people that they thought would somehow be able to overturn the Brexit vote.
	So far that has not been successful, but what it has done is actually call into question, well, if tea is not from Britain, is the surname Kumar from Britain?
	And if tea is not British, are people with the surname Kumar?
	Now back in 2020 when I wrote this, everyone had a much softer line on that, but this intervening five years has been long and hardened many hearts on that subject.
	And so the subject of this video seems all the more relevant today than when I first recorded it, because it seems actually, in their continual attempt to deconstruct us, they have deconstructed themselves as well.
	Britain is striking out on its own and leaving Europe.
	Go, Britain!
	Tea comes from India, therefore it's not British.
	What is the point of this statement?
	It isn't correct anyway.
	Tea is from China, and during the late 17th century, it became fashionable to drink with sugar among the English aristocracy as part of a health fad.
	However, China had a monopoly on the tea trade, and so the British created tea plantations in India in order to break China's control over this desirable good.
	But let's assume the statement was true, and not a misunderstanding of the history of the tea trade.
	What does it even mean to be British then?
	We were recently informed by a CBBC segment called Horrible Histories that various aspects of British history and culture, such as castles, the monarchy, cooking, fashion, tea, sugar, and cotton, were all not British.
	In fact, hardly anything is British.
	If almost all aspects of British culture are actually not British, what are we even talking about?
	A subject that barely even exists, just some damp archipelago in northwest Europe.
	The answer is, of course, that culture is not about location.
	It is about expression.
	Culture is the tone and character of what people do.
	It's usually associated with particular geographic areas because that's where our cultural expressions are localised.
	The nature of these actions has a common identifiable form, which we call its character.
	And that is what is being commented upon when we ascribe certain kinds of cultural expression to a geographical location.
	We are describing the character of the behaviour that is typical of the people who occupy that place.
	If we are to associate tea drinking with Britain, we are not declaring that tea comes from Britain, nor is it implied that it should originate from within Britain.
	We are saying that British people enjoy consuming tea, often as a social ritual that has a particular character.
	And of course, it is this character that is something that foreign visitors to England often relish when they visit an English tea room.
	The British affinity for tea is an emergent property of Britain's cultural life.
	It did not emerge in India, where they did not drink tea with milk and sugar from porcelain cups and saucers, accompanied by scones with clotted cream and jam, and possibly sandwiches with the crusts cut off while sat in an English country garden.
	This kind of cultural expression emerged in Britain and the trade networks that supplied the tea and sugar from across the world were a product of the British Empire, so we understandably call it British.
	But why are we even having this conversation?
	It seems that certain children's entertainers would have us believe that if we can identify the components of a thing, then it essentially ceases to be.
	Where does this line of logic end?
	Are we not all actually from Africa?
	Are we not all animals?
	Are we not all made of stardust?
	If we can trace the origins of the molecules in every human being, does that mean that the human race no longer exists?
	The English language itself is an example that any coherent thing is more than the sum of its parts.
	Around 1500 years ago, the Roman Empire withdrew from Britain.
	Tribes from northern Germany and Denmark migrated to the British Isles and conquered the territory that would come to be known as England.
	The Kingdom of England, as a political entity, has existed for over a thousand years and has fought wars with almost every other major power on earth, either independently or part of the United Kingdom, and has conquered and been conquered in turn.
	Over this vast period of time, the language spoken by the English has changed and incorporated foreign influences from many different languages, and out of this confluence, something we can uniquely identify as the English language has emerged, a language not intelligible to speakers of other languages.
	We can declare that the English language comes from England with absolutely no confusion.
	It doesn't come from France, Germany, Italy or Greece, no matter what we might think of each culture's impact on the language itself.
	England is the original English-speaking country before the language was spread across the world during the Age of Sale.
	Knowing the etymology of each word in the English language does not make the language any less intelligible to anyone who speaks it, nor does it help non-speakers understand it.
	Taken apart, the disparate collection of words from different cultures would make no sense, but when incorporated into a common language, they are infused with meaning that is unique to the language itself.
	It becomes a thing that did not exist before.
	It makes no sense to suggest that because we can identify the origin or components of a thing, then we have deconstructed the thing, at which point it no longer exists.
	Not only is this the reverse of how we understand or create anything, but by this standard almost nothing exists.
	This line of reasoning can be applied to anything.
	So at what point does the recurring process of deconstruction end?
	Nothing is pure.
	Everything exists in the world and is constructed of other parts.
	It also seems remarkably exclusionary to say that things that originated outside of England can't be incorporated into its customs and culture.
	It has a whiff of blood and soil nationalism about it, as if England isn't an outward-facing nation that has had a great influence on the rest of the world and has been influenced in turn.
	It suggests that worthiness is only found in purity, and anything that did meet the standards laid out by a deconstructionist would have to be admitted to be superior.
	Is that really a path we wish to tread?
	If we agree that tea comes from India, therefore it's not British, is a valid statement, does this logic then not apply to things other than tea?
	What prevents us from making the same observation about people?
	Not much, it would seem.

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