- \n
- Read more | Why does the United States of America celebrate Independence Day on 4 July?<\/a><\/strong><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n
The history of the Boston Tea Party<\/a> belongs not just to the United States of America, but to the world. The Tea Party originated with a Chinese commodity, a British financial crisis, \u00a0imperialism in India, and American consumption habits. It resounded in a world of Afro-Caribbean slavery, Native American disguises, and widespread tyranny and oppression. And for over 200 years since, the Boston Tea Party has inspired political movements of all stripes, well beyond America\u2019s shores.<\/p>\n
The history of the Boston Tea Party belongs not just to the United States of America, but to the world <\/blockquote> <\/div> <\/div> <\/div>\n<\/div>
To understand why tea had become so controversial in Boston, we would have to look at the history of how this plant had come to be embraced by Britons all over the world. Camellia sinensis grew among the foothills of the high mountains that separated China from the Indian subcontinent. For over a thousand years, it was the Chinese who had popularised and marketed the drink. Chinese merchants traded tea to Japanese ships, Mongol horsemen, and Persian caravans. Few Europeans had tasted tea before 1680. Yet by the 18th century, trading firms like the English East India Company were regularly negotiating with Cantonese hongs (merchants) and hoppos (port supervisors) to bring tea back to the west. As the tea trade grew, the price dropped.<\/p>\n
![\"A]( "\\"A")
\n<\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/picture>\n<\/div>Tea for two : A fashionable gentleman takes morning tea with a lady in her boudoir, while a maidservant looks on, in an 18th-century engraving. (Wellcome Collection)<\/span><\/figcaption><\/div>\n The bitter taste of tea might have been unpalatable to Europeans, had it not been for the trade in another commodity \u2013 sugar. The 17th century had seen the cultivation of sugarcane in the West Indies yield an enormously profitable crop. To raise cane and process sugar, West Indian planters relied on the labour of African slaves<\/a>. Britons did not organise an objection to slavery<\/a>, sugar and tea until the end of the 18th century. In the meantime, tea and sugar went hand in hand.<\/p>\n
- \n
- Read more | The American Revolution: your guide to the 18th-century war of independence<\/a><\/b><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n
Tea made its way to American ports like Boston, Massachusetts, and even into the outermost reaches of the American frontier. Some of it was legally bought, and the rest was smuggled to avoid British duties. It soon became the drink of respectable households all over the British empire, although it also pained critics who worried about its corrupting effects. They lamented that tea led to vanity and pride, it encouraged women to gather and gossip, and it threatened to undermine \u2028the nation. Nevertheless, the British government, reliant \u2028on the revenues from global trade, did nothing to stand in the way of tea drinkers. Indeed, in 1767, parliament passed a Revenue Act that collected a duty on all tea shipped to the American colonies.<\/p>\n
These were years when Great Britain, still groaning under the debts incurred during the Seven Years\u2019 War<\/a> (1756\u201363), began tightening the reins on its imperial possessions all over the globe. In America, this meant restrictions on westward expansion, stronger enforcement of customs regulations, and new taxes. In India, this meant increased control over the East India Company<\/a>.<\/p>\n
The employees of the East India Company were not just traders in tea and textiles. Since the reign of Elizabeth I<\/a>, the company had also been fortifying, making allies, and fighting rivals in the lands east of the Cape of Good Hope. It had a monopoly on the eastern trade, and its role took an imperial turn in the 1750s. Eight years after Robert Clive defeated the Nawab of Bengal at the battle of Plassey in 1757, he arranged to have the company assume the civil administration (and tax collection) in Bengal.<\/p>\n
General clamour<\/h3>\n
Many Britons had high hopes for this new source of revenue but then, in the autumn of 1769, Indian affairs took a horrific turn. A famine struck Bengal, killing at least 1.2 million people \u2013 this was equivalent to half the population of the 13 American colonies at the time. A horrified British public blamed the East India Company for the disaster. \u201cThe oppressions of India,\u201d wrote Horace Walpole, \u201cunder the rapine and cruelties of the servants of the company, had now reached England, and created general clamour here.\u201d<\/p>\n
- \n
- Read more |<\/strong> Famine and freedom: how the Second World War ignited India<\/strong><\/a><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n
The East India Company\u2019s troubles multiplied. In 1772, manipulations of its stock were blamed for a series of bank failures that sent a shockwave of bankruptcies across the globe. The company was losing money on its military ventures in India. The Bank of England refused to keep lending it money, and it owed hundreds of thousands of pounds in back taxes. What\u2019s more, competition from smugglers and excessive imports led the company to amass 17.5 million pounds of tea in its warehouses \u2013 more than the English nation drank in a year.<\/p>\n
To rescue the company (and gain greater control over it), parliament passed a series of laws in 1773, including the Tea Act. This law levied no new taxes on Americans, but it allowed the company to ship its tea directly to America for the first time. The legislation, Americans feared, would have three effects. First, it granted a monopoly company special privileges in America, cutting out American merchants (except a few hand-picked consignees). Second, it encouraged further payment of a tax that the Americans had been decrying for six years. Third, the revenue from the tax was used to pay the salaries of certain civil officials (including the Massachusetts governor), leaving them unaccountable to the people.<\/p>\n
- \n
- Read more | 7 things you might not know about the history of Thanksgiving<\/a><\/strong><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n
Americans were vitriolic in their response, and their pamphlets resounded in global language. \u201cHampden\u201d, a New York writer, warned that the East India Company was \u201clost to all the Feelings of Humanity\u201d as they \u201cmonopolised the absolute Necessaries of Life in India, at a Time of apprehended Scarcity\u201d. The new tea trade, he warned, would \u2028\u201csupport the Tyranny of the [Company] in the East, enslave the West, and prepare us fit Victims for the Exercise of that horrid Inhumanity they have\u2026 practised, in the Face of the Sun, on the helpless Asiaticks\u201d. John Dickinson, a Pennsylvania lawyer who gained fame as a protestor against British taxes, similarly attacked the East India Company. \u201cTheir Conduct in Asia, for some Years past, has given ample Proof, how little \u2028they regard the Laws of Nations, the Rights, Liberties, or \u2028Lives of Men.\u201d<\/p>\n
Having drained Bengal of its wealth, he wrote, they now \u201ccast their Eyes on America, as a new Theatre, wheron to exercise their Talents of Rapine, Oppression and Cruelty. The Monopoly of Tea, is, I dare say, but a small Part of the Plan they have formed to strip us of our Property. But thank GOD, we are not Sea Poys, or Marattas, but British Subjects, who are born to Liberty, who know its Worth, and who prize it high.\u201d<\/p>\n
Bostonians responded to these warnings. Under pressure from the Sons of Liberty (a group of American patriots) in New York and Philadelphia, they threatened Boston\u2019s consignees until they fled the town. When the first of the tea ships arrived on 28 November 1773, the Bostonians demanded that the cargo be returned to London without unloading. The owner, a Quaker merchant named Francis Rotch, protested that he couldn\u2019t do this, by law, and so a stalemate of almost three weeks ensued. Upon the stroke of midnight on 17 December, the British customs service would have the power to step in, seize the tea, and sell it at auction.<\/p>\n
They were beginning to think of themselves as Americans rather than British subjects, as free men throwing off the shackles of empire <\/blockquote> <\/div> <\/div> <\/div>\n<\/div>
Therefore, the evening before, on 16 December, the Bostonians got their Indian disguises ready. These were crude costumes, not meant to conceal so much as warn the community not to reveal the perpetrators\u2019 identities. Yet the choice of a Native American disguise was still significant. Americans were often portrayed as American Indians in British cartoons, and the colonists were often lumped in with the indigenous population and derided as savages. What better way to blunt the sting of this epithet than to assume an Indian disguise?<\/p>\n
The Bostonians may have been inspired by a New York City newspaper piece in which \u201cThe MOHAWKS\u201d wrote that they were \u201cdetermined not to be enslaved, by any power on earth\u201d, and promised \u201can unwelcome visit\u201d to anyone who should \u2028land tea on American shores. The tea destroyers of Boston selected a costume that situated them on the other side of the Atlantic ocean from the king and parliament. They were beginning to think of themselves as Americans rather than British subjects, as free men throwing off the shackles of empire.<\/p>\n
Although most of the tea destroyers were born in Massachusetts, some had more far-flung origins. James Swan, an anti-slavery pamphleteer, was born in Fifeshire, Scotland. Nicholas Campbell hailed from the island of Malta. John Peters had come to America from Lisbon. Although there were wealthy merchants and professionals among the destroyers, the bulk of them were craftsmen who worked with their hands, which enabled them to haul the chests of tea to the decks in a short time. Mostly young men between the ages of 18 and 29, they were thrilled to make a bold statement to the world.<\/p>\n
- \n
- Read more | What happened to the lost colony of Roanoke Island?<\/a><\/strong><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n
And the world responded. Prints of the Boston Tea Party appeared in France and Germany. In Edinburgh, the philosopher Adam Smith shook his head disapprovingly at the \u201cstrange absurdity\u201d of the East India Company\u2019s sovereignty in India. He stitched his ideas together into a foundational theory of free market capitalism in 1776. A Persian historian in Calcutta would write in the 1780s that the British-American conflict \u201carose from this event: the king of the English maintained these five or six years past, a contest with the people of America (a word that signifies a new world), on account of the [East India] Company\u2019s concerns.\u201d Many years later, activists from China to South Africa to Lebanon would explain their actions by comparing them to the Tea Party. As a symbol of anti-colonial nationalism, non-violent civil disobedience, or costumed political spectacle, the Tea Party was irresistible.<\/p>\n
In 1773, the diplomat Sir George Macartney waxed poetic about Great Britain, \u201cthis vast empire, on which the sun never sets, and whose bounds nature has not yet ascertained\u201d. Bostonians tested those bounds later that year. The Boston Tea Party is often spun as the opening act in the origin story of the United States. \u2028Yet it is better understood as a bright conflagration on the horizon of a big world \u2013 a fire that still burns brightly.<\/p>\n
The global legacy of the Boston Tea Party<\/h2>\n
More than two centuries after it took place, campaigners around the world are still inspired \u2028by the Boston Tea Party as a model of peaceful protest\u2026<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n
\n\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n
Temperance movement<\/h3>\n<\/div>\n
During the 19th century, Americans periodically drew upon the Boston Tea Party as a precedent for democratic protests: labour unions, the Mashpee tribe of Native Americans, women\u2019s suffragists, and both foes and defenders of the anti-slavery movement. As a lawyer in 1854, the future president Abraham Lincoln defended nine women who had destroyed an Illinois saloon in the name of the temperance movement. He argued that the Boston Tea Party was a worthy model for their actions.<\/p>\n
![\"Suffragettes]( "\\"Suffragettes")
\n<\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/picture>\n<\/div>American suffragettes picket a building bearing the name of the National Woman\u2019s Party, c1900. (Getty images)<\/span><\/figcaption><\/div>\n \n\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n
Mahatma Gandhi<\/h3>\n<\/div>\n
After the British government in South Africa mandated that resident Indians had to be registered and fingerprinted under the Asiatic Registration Act of 1907, Mahatma Gandhi adopted the practice of satyagraha, or non-violent protest. He led the Indian community in the burning of registration cards at mass meetings in August 1908. Gandhi later wrote that a British newspaper correspondent had compared the protest to the Boston Tea Party.<\/p>\n
\n\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n
US tax protestors<\/h3>\n<\/div>\n
Today the Boston Tea Party is proving a rallying point for conservative Americans. American tax protesters have often invoked the Tea Party as their inspiration since the 1970s. The libertarian presidential candidate Ron Paul held a campaign fundraiser on 16 December 2007. In February 2009, a business news broadcaster called for a \u201ctea party\u201d to protest against the US government\u2019s plan to help refinance home mortgages. With the help of national organisations and media attention, the movement stitched together local groups of protestors. The tea partiers have been calling for less federal regulation and lower taxes.<\/p>\n
\n\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n
Republic of China (Taiwan)<\/h3>\n<\/div>\n
In late 1923, during the struggle for power in China between the Kuomintang (Chinese Nationalist Party) and the Communist Party of China, Sun Yat-Sen, head of the Kuomintang, threatened to seize customs revenues from Guangzhou. The United States and other western nations sent warships to intervene. On 19 December (three days after the 150th anniversary of the Boston Tea Party), Sun wrote: \u201cWe must stop that money from going to Peking to buy arms to kill us, just as your forefathers stopped taxation going to the English coffers by throwing English tea into Boston Harbor.\u201d<\/p>\n
\n\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n
African-American civil rights<\/h3>\n<\/div>\n
In his 1963 \u2018Letter from a Birmingham Jail,\u2019 the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr<\/a> called for a \u201cnonviolent direct action program\u201d in Birmingham, Alabama. Discussing his historical inspiration, he wrote: \u201cIn our own nation, the Boston Tea Party represented a massive act of civil disobedience.\u201d Three years later, Robert F Williams would recall the Tea Party to rally more violent action on behalf of African-American civil rights: \u201cBurn, baby, burn.\u201d<\/p>\n
- Read more | What happened to the lost colony of Roanoke Island?<\/a><\/strong><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n
- Read more | 7 things you might not know about the history of Thanksgiving<\/a><\/strong><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n
- Read more |<\/strong> Famine and freedom: how the Second World War ignited India<\/strong><\/a><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n
- Read more | The American Revolution: your guide to the 18th-century war of independence<\/a><\/b><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n
![\"A](\"https:\/\/images.immediate.co.uk\/production\/volatile\/sites\/7\/2018\/01\/imageservgboston20v2_sml-87a4393.jpg?quality=90&resize=579%2C413\" "\\"A")
\n<\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/picture>\n<\/div>![\"Suffragettes](\"https:\/\/images.immediate.co.uk\/production\/volatile\/sites\/7\/2018\/01\/90002560_10boston_sml-9823998.jpg?quality=90&resize=496%2C413\" "\\"Suffragettes")
\n<\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/picture>\n<\/div>