by 0xbadcafebee | 2025-05-13 18:15:47+00:00
Really the cause was the Indemnity Act and the Townshend Acts of 1766/67.

Before '67, England paid very high taxes on tea imported from China (>25%). So tea smuggling was rampant - mostly in England. But the Dutch government didn't charge any tax on the imported tea sold in the Netherlands, so that was smuggled into America.

Then in '67, the Indemnity Acts basically removed the high taxes on the tea sold in Britain. But this was followed up by the Townshend Acts, which added more taxes - specifically to the Colonies.

As you can imagine, this seems a little fucked up.... except the Colonies were already paying practically zero taxes. To the British, it was the Colonies who had been getting away with highway robbery, and these new taxes leveled the playing field.

But of course the Colonists didn't want to pay taxes. So they claimed this was unfair because they had no representation. The representation wasn't really the crux of the issue though... it was just that they wanted to weasel out of paying taxes. Only a representative in Parliament could levy taxes.

The thing is.... by this time, the Colonists had already set up a sort of shadow-Parliament. They had British representatives who were supposed to be telling the Colonists what to do.... but the Colonists basically just ignored them. By the time of the Tea Party, the British had already lost control of governance.

After several years of boycotting tea to protest the Townshend Acts, the acts were repealed in 1770, except for taxes on Tea. Yet they began importing tea again, mostly to Boston, as New York and Philadelphia were still mostly smuggling tea.

The East India Company was undergoing severe hardship during this time, for a couple different reasons. But basically they had too much tea and not enough people were buying it. So in Britain they returned the duty to the company that had been charged to them. They still needed a way to get the Colonies to buy this tea, rather than the smuggled tea. So in 1773, the Tea Act was passed. It granted the Company a monopoly on imported tea, cut out the middlemen, and added a tax due on delivery. This made the tea cheaper than smuggled tea, but added a 3 pence surcharge for each pound of tea.

One of the big purposes of all these taxes was actually for the Colonial Governors to receive their pay from British Parliament, so that they'd be loyal to Britain instead of the Colonists. Several Parliamentarians warned that these extra taxes wouldn't be accepted by the Colonists, but they were overruled. Without Lord North being a dickhead and insisting on the taxes, we wouldn't have our own country now.

So basically the reason for the Tea Party was 1) years of resistance to taxes (even though Colonists basically hadn't been paying any tax), 2) they wanted to have more Colonial control over Governors, 3) it took away money from both smugglers and legal colonial importers.

But there were other reasons too, like the fact that at this time in history, the British army was incredibly weak, with something like 40,000 soldiers total, due to recent wars nearly bankrupting the country and diminishing their fighting force. The Colonists had been calling the Empire's bluff for years, doing largely whatever they wanted. The Tea Party was a big middle finger, and the British had to respond, and so led to the eventual confrontation.