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Tea's transformation from a regional Chinese beverage into a global commodity was neither swift nor accidental. Early European traders initially prized it as a medicinal curiosity, sold in small quantities through apothecaries rather than general merchants. Its shift toward mass consumption in Britain owed much to deliberate taxation policy: successive reductions in import duties during the eighteenth century made tea affordable to laborers for the first time, coinciding with the spread of sugar from colonial plantations, which softened tea's naturally bitter taste and made it more palatable to a broader public. Historians therefore treat tea's popularity less as an organic cultural preference and more as the product of intersecting fiscal and colonial economic policies.