Commodity Watch: History in Every Teacup

6 July 2026

Ahmad Al-Sati

<div class="grid grid--33-66-col"><div class="col"><img loading="lazy" src="/getContentAsset/061c994a-a452-418f-bfa0-f2cf3cf5c577/cb87803a-320c-480f-ab75-7b9029eaaf79/Ahmad-Al-Sati-new.png?language=en" alt="Ahmad Al Sati - insights" title="Ahmad Al Sati - insights" style="width: 180px" class="fr-fic fr-dii"></div><div class="col">AHMAD AL-SATI PRESIDENT OF GEMCORP CAPITAL ADVISORS LLC, PORTFOLIO MANAGER Ahmad Al-Sati is Portfolio Manager of the Gemcorp Commodities Alternative Products strategy (GCAP) and President of Gemcorp Capital Advisors LLC, based in New York. He is responsible for leading Gemcorp’s commodities-focused investment strategy and overseeing the firm’s US advisory platform.</div></div><hr>Before America was a place of coffee drinkers and coffee houses, tea was it. In the 1760s, the thirteen colonies consumed 1.5 pounds of tea per person, enough for almost one cup per day1. 90% of that tea was bought from the Dutch and smuggled in to circumvent British duties and trade restrictions. By 1773, tensions over those taxes and trade restrictions led Bostonians to throw approximately 92,000 pounds of tea2 into Boston harbour.   The “Boston Tea Party” had been brewing for decades. Since the 1730s, the British had imposed a series of taxes, tariffs and trade restrictions by limiting both exports (tobacco had to be sold to Britain alone) and imports (finished goods could only be imported from English merchants). Britain also imposed duties on molasses and tariffs on American pig iron, harming budding local industry. The colonists pushed back, denouncing these measures as arbitrary and corrupt. After all, they did primarily benefit British special interests. The Molasses Act of 1733, for example, benefited British West Indies plantation owners, many of whom were members of Parliament, by taxing molasses imports from non-British territories.   In the decade preceding the events in Boston, war, weather and a corporate bailout came together to increase the financial pressures on the American colonies. In 1763, Britain’s sovereign debt doubled after it fought and won the Seven Years’ War. The Crown needed revenue. And, in a series of laws and edicts, Britain attempted to collect more taxes from its colonies throughout the 1760s. Then in 1770, a drought in Bengal caused (as some here may guess) by an El Niño event and exacerbated by mismanagement of the East India Company (EIC), severely degraded the EIC’s financial condition (more importantly, it killed 10 million people across Bengal). By 1773, the EIC was in trouble. It was indebted to the Crown, and it had a surplus of tea rotting in British warehouses. It was also a linchpin of the British economy, with 50% of all British trade controlled by the EIC3. To save this systematically important corporation, Parliament passed the Tea Act in 1773, granting the EIC a monopoly to sell tea in the colonies. The Americans resisted, first in Boston, then elsewhere. And the rest, as they say, is history.   The 1770s were not the last time that government debt, war or weather had knock-on effects that we still live with today. And it was not the last time that trade (or its disruption) played an important role in shaping human events. Sometimes these catalysts come at you fast. Sometimes they don’t. Ultimately, the particulars of an investment or a strategy is what really matters. But understanding the overall environment will determine whether we need the equivalent of an umbrella or sunscreen.    Happy Birthday, America. Here’s to another 250 years. Sources: 1 Hampton Gazette (2026). Our Rural Heritage: Brewing Trouble: Tea in the American Revolution.2 Boston Tea Party Ships. (2019). British East India Company Ships.3 Blakemore, E. (2019). How the East India Company became the world’s most powerful business. Important InformationThis content has been prepared solely for informational purposes by Gemcorp (as defined below), is confidential and may not be reproduced.This content does not constitute an offer or solicitation of an offer with respect to the purchase or sale of any security and should not be relied upon when evaluating the merits of investing in any securities or form the basis of an investment decision. The information in this content has been obtained from various third-party sources, some of them forward-looking statements and/or projections. Any forward-looking statements and/or projections are inherently subject to material business, economic and competitive risks and uncertainties, many of which are beyond Gemcorp’s control. 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