Robert Fisk is a great journalist. He won’t last forever, so I’ll enjoy him while I can. While most of his stuff is pretty grim due to the fact his beat is the Middle East and he pulls no punches, this article is a jolly nice bit of history with a rather low body count to it. It’s all about how tea helped sober up England and the rest of Europe so it could go on to have an industrial revolution.

As a historian, I like the fact that it’s an example of how China helped civilize Europe. Too often, people that teach world history fail to look much beyond Europe and North America, except when Europeans and North Americans showed up to colonize or otherwise muscle in on the locals. The fact is that, for much of its history, Europe was an uncivilized backwater with little to offer the rest of the world. All the swingin’ civilizations were around the Mediterranean, in India, and in China. The civilizations in Central and South America seem to have come along much later, but archaeology there is so difficult that we’re only beginning to realize that there’s a big possibility there was much more going on there much earlier than we ever expected.

Global contacts have existed for centuries. They have gotten more frequent and faster, especially in the last few years, but we’d all do well to recognize that no civilization is an island. No civilization is better or worse, just different. When we appreciate the differences, we prosper in so many ways.