How Much Money Did Britain Lose In The Boston Tea Party

Almost everyone knows a little about the Boston Tea Party. Most of us learned in grade school nearly Samuel Adams, his ring of phony Indians, and the tea dumped in Boston Harbor. We might even know something -- or think we do -- nigh the significant of the effect. It was all about taxes, right?

Indeed it was. But not the way you lot might remember.

The Tea Political party has long figured prominently in the sociology of American nationalism. But it has too been the object of fierce contention, equally political factions have struggled over its meaning and importance. The modern tea party movement is only the latest in a long series of claimants to the mantle of the original result. The Tea Party meant ane thing to its original participants, but information technology has meant something else to the generations that followed.

All the same, information technology's worth recalling what the Tea Party first meant. The public retentiveness of this iconic event may be mutable, but that doesn't mean its original pregnant is lost to united states of america. Nor does information technology mean that all claims to the Tea Party heritage are as valid. It is, subsequently all, possible to get the history wrong.

So let'southward gear up the tape straight. What follows is a primer of sorts: Four things that everyone -- and peculiarly modernistic tea partiers -- should know near the events of Dec sixteen, 1773.

1. The Tea Party was non a protestation against loftier taxes. The Boston Tea Political party was certainly a tax protest, but information technology was non a protest confronting loftier taxes. In fact, it was sparked by a tax cut, not a tax hike.

The Tea Political party was role of a longer protestation confronting British taxation of the North American colonies. The conflict had its roots in the French and Indian War (known as the Seven Years' War in Europe). Having run up a huge debt fighting the state of war -- and defending the colonies from external threat -- the British thought the colonists should help pay it back. But the colonists had other ideas, and they resisted British attempts to collect new taxes. In 1765 they objected to the Stamp Human activity, insisting that Britain could levy taxes only to regulate trade, not enhance acquirement. London capitulated. The side by side year Parliament took another run at the colonial purse, imposing the Townshend duties on a multifariousness of goods imported into the colonies, including newspaper, pigment, pb, glass, and tea. Once more the colonists organized boycotts and protests, and once again Britain backed down. Just rather than repeal all the Townshend duties, Parliament chose to retain the revenue enhancement on tea, chiefly to underscore the government's right to impose such a levy.

For a while the colonists seemed content to ignore that regal assertion. Merely in 1773 Parliament passed the Tea Act, which left the Townshend duty on tea intact, just repealed some other tax on tea imported to Swell United kingdom for subsequent reshipment to the colonies. This amounted to a taxation cutting on colonial tea, promising lower prices for colonial consumers.

Bostonians responded by dumping their cheap imported tea into Boston Harbor.

two. The Tea Party was prompted by a corporate bailout. What's not to similar nigh cheap tea? Plenty, at least when it comes as function of a corporate bailout. Because that's what the Tea Human action was: an 18th-century version of corporate welfare.

After Parliament repealed all the Townshend duties except the taxation on tea, colonists seemed to ignore the assertion of the right to revenue enhancement the colonies. Boycotts petered out, and colonial consumers began buying tea again. Just not all that tea was taxed. A large portion -- by some estimates equally much every bit 90 percent -- came from smugglers, who sold Dutch tea unburdened by the British duty.

Meanwhile Parliament was struggling to rescue a corporation information technology had deemed too big to fail: the British East Bharat Company. The visitor was saddled with a large debt and even larger inventories. Its warehouses were stocked to the rafters with unsold tea (among other things), and lawmakers shortly hitting on a brilliant thought: lower the tax on company tea, let its direct exportation to the colonies, and let the company undercut the smugglers.

The colonists, nevertheless, were unswayed by the prospect of legal, affordable tea. Instead they invoked the specter of monopoly, insisting that the East India Company would shortly grow as well powerful to resist. Colonial merchants would be ruined, the company would tighten its grip on the market, and average consumers would be left at the mercy of a mercantile leviathan. Equally one author noted at that time:

The scheme appears too big with mischievous consequences and dangers to America, [fifty-fifty every bit we consider it merely] as it may create a monopoly; or, as information technology may introduce a monster, too powerful for usa to control, or debate with, and too rapacious and destructive, to exist trusted, or even seen without horror, that may exist able to devour every co-operative of our commerce, drain us of all our property and substance, and wantonly leave usa to perish by thousands.^ane

Such complaints carried the day. Rather than settling downwardly with a overnice inexpensive cuppa, agitators found their way to Griffin'south Wharf, boarded the tea ships, and tossed the imported Bohea overboard.

3. The Tea Party was a grass-roots movement -- with an element of AstroTurf. What moved Bostonians to activism? Ideology certainly played a part. But so did political leadership, particularly on the part of the Sons of Liberty, Adams, and Boston'southward merchant course.

Information technology bears repeating that the colonists were not objecting to the financial burden of the tea tax. Or whatever other tax, for that thing. Instead, they were making a point near political legitimacy. They were more than willing to pay taxes imposed past their ain representatives. But they were utterly unwilling to pay taxes imposed by Parliament -- a more or less conflicting ability, given the lack of colonial representation.

Historian T.H. Breen recently made that indicate in an commodity for The Washington Post. Even after the Tea Party, he noted, colonists in Massachusetts connected to pay taxes originally levied by the Crown. But instead of sending the money to British regime, they gave it to ane of their own leaders. "Anyone who misses this indicate risks missing the fact that ordinary American patriots accepted the legitimate burdens of supporting a government in which they enjoyed genuine representation," wrote Breen.

Just if complaints about taxation without representation were necessary to the Tea Party, they were non sufficient. Leadership proved pivotal in mobilizing mass action against the Due east India Company and British authority. Many of those organizing the Tea Political party -- and it was a highly organized event -- were drawn from Boston's mercantile class. The same class, as information technology happened, that stood to lose the almost if the East Republic of india Company were to get its monopoly. Popular complaints well-nigh revenue enhancement were genuine, historian Arthur Meier Schlesinger observed in 1917, but they were "the flowering, not the roots, of the tree that had been carefully planted and nourished past the beneficiaries of the existing business club."²

As it played out, the Tea Party itself was certainly a mass protest. While led by a pocket-sized cadre of activists, it was carried out by a much larger crowd. Amidst those boarding the ships were not just the invited leaders -- who donned the famous Indian outfits -- only possibly a hundred spontaneous volunteers, who smeared ash on their faces to gauge a disguise. Perhaps a one thousand more Bostonians lined the wharf as spectators, forestalling intervention past British government. All these participants were integral to the effect.

Merely for all its mass involvement, the Tea Party was hardly a mob action. Information technology was instead a carefully managed (if not entirely scripted) episode of ceremonious disobedience.

4. The Tea Party wasn't e'er a touchstone of American nationalism. The Tea Party looms large in the annals of American civil disobedience. Who can't warm to the notion of outraged citizens moved to public action against monopolistic tyranny?

Well, as information technology turns out, quite a few people. Equally historian Alfred F. Young has documented, the Tea Party was more or less ignored by proper Bostonians for virtually half a century after it occurred. The event was besides raucous, likewise uncontrolled to suit the bourgeois tastes of Boston's mercantile gentry. Its tinge of radicalism diluted the dominant American narrative, which cast the colonists as victims of British tyranny, not unruly provocateurs.

By the 1830s, the Tea Party had been rediscovered, rescued from obscurity by the forces of conservatism. Worried by the efforts of labor activists to claim the Revolution every bit a radical precedent for worker activism, conservatives advanced the notion of a tamer, more genteel tea party. Indeed, the name "Tea Political party" was itself an invention of the 1830s, adopted in place of the radical-sounding name used previously: "the destruction of the tea." Parties are just less threatening than whatever sort of destruction.

Conclusion

Since its rediscovery, the Tea Political party has been a political football game of sorts. It has been invoked by tradition-minded conservatives, too equally reform-minded radicals. Most recently, of form, it's been embraced by reform-minded conservatives -- an oxymoron of sorts, but real enough just the same. All of these claims are legitimate. Later on all, about every historical event has a protean quality, its meaning malleable enough to serve the interests of almost any political faction.

Simply even as we curve the past to our contemporary agenda, it'south important to stay honest. Over the centuries, the Tea Political party has been many things to many people. Simply it was however something specific to the people who lived through it. And don't you forget information technology.

¹ Quoted in Arthur Meier Schlesinger, "The Uprising Against the East Bharat Visitor," Political Science Quarterly, vol. 32, no. 1 (Mar. 1917), 74.

² Id. at 78.

Source: http://www.taxhistory.org/thp/readings.nsf/ArtWeb/1BB0C8F894BB490B852577020083A6F6?OpenDocument

Posted by: larsonoffichat1937.blogspot.com

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