… c. 1720. Abstract The tea-table is an object, an event, and an idea, the context of which is the emergence of tea drinking in Britain in the late-seventeenth and early-eighteenth centuries. As an item of furniture, the tea-table is a small table, imported from Asia or of domestic manufacture, whose purpose was to facilitate tea drinking. As an event, the practice of tea drinking was a polite and sociable encounter staged around the tea-table. In media representations (visual culture, …