In 2000, a Cambridge professor put forth a theory that the 18th century Industrial Revolution first took off in Britain, as opposed to anywhere else, because of what habit of the British population?

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In the Middle Ages when large amounts of unskilled laborers would gather, with their families, in one area, they would usually succumb to disease. What changed for the British, like no other country, was their consumtion of tea. Tea was drunk in boiling water that killed of disease-carrying bacteria. Tea also possesses, in tannin, an antiseptic agent which made mothers' breast milk the healthies it had ever been. No other nation drank tea on the same scale that the British did, and this, according to Macfarlane, was the key to why the Industrial Revolution was born in Britain. http://www.librarything.com/work/272556 Jul 18 10, 11:16 PM