The Boston Tea Party: Politics Brewed in a Teacup

On the night of December 16, 1773, around a hundred members of the Sons of Liberty — some, but not all, dressed as Mohawk warriors — boarded three British ships at Griffin's Wharf in Boston Harbor. Over the next three hours they smashed open 342 wooden chests and emptied 92,000 pounds of East India Company tea into the water. In today's money, the cargo was worth roughly $1.7 million.

**It wasn't really about taxes.** The Tea Act of 1773 had actually *lowered* the price of tea in the colonies. The East India Company, struggling financially, had been granted a monopoly on direct shipment to America in order to undercut Dutch smugglers and unload its surplus inventory.

**It was about monopoly and merchants.** The protest came from American merchants — the Hancocks, the Adamses, the Cushings of Boston — who were about to be put out of business by a multinational dumping product into their market with state backing. It was, in modern terms, a protest by local sellers against state-sponsored corporate dumping. The 'no taxation without representation' framing came later.

**The British response was disproportionate.** The Coercive Acts (or, as Americans call them, the Intolerable Acts) closed the port of Boston, suspended self-government in Massachusetts, and quartered British troops in private homes. Within eighteen months, the colonies were at war.

**A small footnote.** The tea itself was good Chinese stock — mostly Bohea, an early form of black tea from Fujian's Wuyi mountains. By morning, much of it had washed back up onshore. Local boys sold it on the black market for the next several years.