‘The Destruction of the Tea’ at Boston, as imagined by American artist Nathaniel Currier (1813-1888). Note the Mohawk custumes assumed as disguises and as a statement of American identity. Calling the incident ‘the Boston Tea Party’, a frivolous name which became current only in the 1830s, tends to obscure the fact that the protest sparked a revolution that, by hastening America’s exit from Britain’s strangling customs union, spurred an astonishing growth in the economies of both countries.
Part 1 of 2
EARLY in the reign of King George III, Britain’s thirteen colonies in North America were smarting under London’s heavy-handed regulation. The prevailing opinion in Westminster was that the nation’s wealth lay in maximising commercial tax revenue, and to achieve this Parliament insisted that the colonies trade through the Government’s exclusive trading partner, the East India Company.* The Navigation Acts required merchants to hire English ships and work out of English ports, and foreign competitors such as the Dutch were shut out. Inevitably, a lively smuggling industry sprang up.
One of the commodities affected was tea, imported from China.* By the 1770s, some 86% of American tea was smuggled, and the East India Company’s warehouses in London were full of unsaleable tea. To shift the surplus, the Tea Act of 1773 eased some taxes and (on Benjamin Franklin’s recommendation) allowed the Company to bypass English ports, but Americans still paid a premium for their tea to support a Government in which they had no Parliamentary representatives.
This economic philosophy is known as Mercantilism. It was believed that wealth is the same as money, and that there is only just so much money in the world. Consequently, other nations are rivals, and the only way to stay wealthy is to bind a sufficient number of countries or colonies into a customs union and cream off their taxes into the Treasury, while beggaring those outside with lopsided trade deals or sanctions backed up by naval blockades.
The Indian tea trade would not be established until 1834. British tea was superior to the tea of their Dutch competitors, but instead of allowing Americans to choose their own brand and price, they used trade tariffs to force non-Imperial merchants out of the market, with the result that many American bought the inferior smuggled tea as a matter of principle as well as price.
Part Two
Paul Revere (1734-1818), who was to play such a dramatic role in the American Revolution five years later, drew this somewhat sensationalised picture of the ‘Boston Massacre’ on March 5th, 1770. During a protest against Britain’s regulation of American trade, five civilians were shot by London’s peace-keeping forces in the city, in what the British preferred to call the Incident on King Street. The event only served to heighten the tensions that erupted in the so-called Boston Tea Party in 1773.
DISSATISFACTION with Britain’s customs union was especially strong in Massachusetts, and on March 5th, 1770, five civilians were shot during a demonstration on King Street. Westminster hastily lifted restrictions on other commodities but the taxes on tea remained, lest American lawyers infer London had given up her right to tax the Colonies.
On December 16th 1773, with HMS Dartmouth, HMS Beaver and HMS Eleanor waiting to unload in Boston harbour, Samuel Adams and some seven thousand angry residents gathered at the Old South Meeting House to demand that Governor Thomas Hutchinson send the ships home. He refused; and that evening, protestors dumped three hundred and forty-two chests of the Company’s tea into the water.
Next day, Samuel Adams’s second cousin John wrote admiringly in his diary, “The People should never rise, without doing something to be remembered”. Perhaps John was thinking of it when he was one of the five men who presented the Declaration of Independence to Congress on June 28th, 1776.
