Few plants have impacted world history as profoundly as Camellia sinensis, the tea plant. Jessica J. Lee, in her book Dispersals: On Plants, Borders, and Belonging, describes how tea is integral to both seemingly disparate halves of her family tree—her Welsh paternal grandparents and her Taiwanese maternal family all loved tea and consumed it constantly, in different permutations and customs all stemming from the same plant. Even as she struggles to re-learn Mandarin, the many words for tea spill out effortlessly when she remembers childhood teachings, so embedded is this plant in her being.

Tea is indeed intertwined with both Asian and British history—central to East Asian cultures for thousands of years, its introduction to the British in 1657 was a watershed event. By the mid-1700s, tea had become increasingly popular with all classes of British society—that dose of caffeine was helpful to aristocrats and laborers in newly established factories alike—...