Boston Tea Party

What were they thinking?Why did they think that?

Who cares about tea?

• Just drink the water?– Have fun with dysentery and cholera!

• Mix water with alcohol– Alcohol is a poison, it kills bacteria

• Boil the water– Warm water tastes better as tea.

Source of tea

• Tea comes originally from China• By this time, it is also grown in India– Introduced by the British East India Company

From Asia to the Americas

Legal Route

• East India Company grows the tea in India

• EIC imports the tea to Britain, paying taxes to the crown.

• Tea sold in London• Colonial merchants take it

across the Atlantic• Costs about 3 shillings (= 36

pennies) a pound• Fresh and tasty

Illegal Route

• Dutch merchants buy the tea• Colonials merchants buy it

from the Dutch– Violation of The Navigation

Act, which forbade the colonies to trade with anybody other than Britain

• Colonial merchants smuggle the tea to the colonies.

• 25 pennies / pound• Not as tasty

British East India Company

• Owned by rich merchants in London• Important source of British government revenues– £400,000 a year by contract– Tea import duties

• But the East India Company is in financial trouble– Ruling India is expensive

Saving the company

• Parliament really doesn’t want the East India Company to go bankrupt

• Colonials pay 3 pennies a pound in import duties

• Reduce the price of legal tea to 24 pennies a pound

• Solution suggested by Benjamin Franklin

Who Wins? Who Loses?

Winners

• East India Company that can sell the tea that is filling its warehouses

• The merchants who bring tea from England to the colonies– Governor Hutchinson’s sons

• Parliament, setting the precedent for taxation on the colonies

Losers

• Colonial merchants who smuggled tea to the colonies– John Hancock

• Colonial legislatures– Used to set their own taxes

Why oppose cheap tea?• Government officials used to get their salaries

from the colonial assemblies.• The tea duties would now pay the salaries of

those officials.• Officials that are paid by the parliament and

crown in London are a lot more likely to do what parliament wants, not what the colonists want.