The Boston Tea Party and The British East India Company

With a little more prudence from the British, things could have turned out very differently...and tea might be a bit more popular today on the American content.

East India Company copper coin. Wikimedia Commons, Bill Jones.

“In 1600, the first global joint-stock company was thus born. Undoubtedly, Tudor England’s most revolutionary invention. Its name? The East India Company.”

 -Yanis Varoufakis, Former Finance Minister of Greece, from Another Now: Dispatches from an Alternative Present

You say

The price of my love’s not a price that you’re willing to pay

You cry 

In your tea, 

which you hurl in the sea 

when you see me go by

-Lin-Manual Miranda, Composer, From Hamilton

Hopefully, the Boston Tea Party and its context are still taught in schools today. This is a concern. Given the participants dressed up as Native Americans, this might be seen by some as appropriation and thus banished from our classrooms. Or the original story is replaced by a lecture on how the tea might have been an eco-disaster for Boston Harbor and, somehow, contributed to climate change. For those who like history and not indoctrination, here are the basics.  

The Boston Tea Party occurred on December 16, 1773, at Griffin’s Wharf in Boston, Massachusetts. American colonists, frustrated and angry at Britain for imposing “taxation without representation,” specifically the May 1773 Tea Tax, dumped 342 chests of tea, imported by the British East India Company, into the harbor. Though there were protests over British taxation before this date, the destruction of property and direct defiance of an order by Massachusetts Governor Thomas Hutchison provided a new level of tension between the thirteen British colonies and their mother nation.  

Eliga Gould, Professor of History at the University of New Hampshire, notes of the Party, 

“The ‘destruction of the tea’ – as the Boston Tea Party was originally called – was the pivotal event in the coming of the American Revolution. Before December 16, a peaceful resolution to American objections to Parliament’s repeated attempts to tax the Colonies without their consent seemed possible. Afterward, both British and American Colonial positions hardened. Within a year, Britain and America were at war.”

-Eliga Gould

Many wars have their origins in previous conflicts. The Peloponnesian War grew out of the Greco-Persian Wars. In many regards, World War II emanated from the first war of that name, which in turn had its roots in the Franco-Prussian War. A solid argument can be made that the US War of Independence grew out of the Seven Years’ War, fought between 1756 and 1763, also known as the French and Indian War in the colonies.

Though we think of global conflicts as a 20th-century phenomenon, the Seven Years’ War was also worldwide, with fronts in the Atlantic Ocean, the Caribbean, India, Western and Central Europe, and North America. Though Britain emerged victorious, wars are expensive. It was the British belief that since they had protected the colonies, these outposts ought to help pay the bill.  

This began a series of Parliamentary Acts imposing taxes on the colonists, followed by resistance and further escalations until 1775 when the shooting started. There was a Stamp Act in 1965, and in 1967, the Townsend Acts were a series of commodity taxes that included tea.   

Let’s be clear: no one likes taxes. Well, to be more precise, no one wants to pay them (governments love taxes). However, the specific issue was the imposition of taxes by a British Parliament in which the colonists had no representation. As George Washington stated, “What is it we are contending against? Is it against paying the duty of [three pence per pound] on tea because [it is] burdensome? No, it is the right only…that, as Englishmen, we could not be deprived of this essential and valuable part of our constitution.”

After several protests and the incident called the Boston Massacre, in which British troops opened fire on the colonists, killing five, the Townsend Acts were repealed, with one notable exception: Tea.  

Tea was not always the drink of choice for England. We have a stereotype of the English swilling tea as the national beverage, but given that it originated in China and Northern Myanmar and was a staple of East Asia for centuries, it came to Europe and England well after the Age of Discovery.

Green tea exported from China was first introduced in the coffeehouses of London shortly before the 1660 Stuart Restoration. Thomas Garway, a tobacconist (another crop unknown to Europeans before the 16th century) and coffee house owner, was the first person in England to sell tea as a leaf and beverage. Between 1720 and 1750, the imports of tea to Britain through the British East India Company more than quadrupled to over 6 million pounds, not all of which went to the British Isles.  By the 1770s, colonists were consuming 1.2 million pounds of tea annually. 

Thus, the exception of tea to the repeal of the Townsend Acts was a powerful exception. In response, the colonists boycotted tea sold by the British East India Company in protest. They also smuggled in Dutch tea, leaving the Company with millions of pounds of surplus tea at a time of financial calamity.  Some of the more prominent smugglers included John Hancock and the purported leader of the Boston Tea Party, Samuel Adams. 

It is essential to note the power of the British East India Company. Incorporated by royal charter on December 31, 1600, the company’s obvious goal was trade and profit with Southeast Asia and India. Starting as a monopolistic trading body, eventually, the Company became embroiled in local politics and morphed into a powerful, quasi-imperial entity. How powerful? 

In the Seven Years’ War, it was not a regular British Army but a force employed by the East India Company that won a crucial battle in 1757 that assisted in the British domination of India. When this particular Company ran into problems, they could exert considerable influence on the British government.  

In May 1773, the British Parliament passed the Tea Act, which allowed the British East India Company to sell tea to the colonies duty-free and much cheaper than other tea companies—but still taxed it when it reached colonial ports.  Gould notes,

“The Company was on the verge of bankruptcy – a victim of a devastating famine in Bengal and its own corrupt administration. [Lord] North’s solution was the Tea Act. Hoping to fix Britain’s problems in both India and America, Parliament gave the East India Company a monopoly to sell 17 million pounds of tea in America at a reduced price.”

-Eliga Gould

In November of 1773, three Company ships, loaded with tea from China, sailed into Boston Harbor only to be prevented from unloading their cargo by the people of Boston. Thomas Hutchison, Governor of the Province of Massachusetts, would not let the ships leave until the cargo was unloaded and duties paid. This was the backdrop when a group of colonists, purportedly following a Sam Adams plan, boarded the ships and threw the 342 chests overboard.

This was a costly dumping. The value of the tea in today’s dollars approaches $2 million, and the weight of the tea, 92,000 pounds, accounts for nearly 7% of all annual tonnage. And though this is a considerable amount, the damage could have been eaten by the Company without retaliation. But two things drove the next British steps: their loss of honor, including direct defiance of a British governor, and pressure by the East India Company for compensation. They were, after all, a for-profit venture, and losses were losses. 

Thus, the pattern of greater British impositions faced by colonial resistance persisted. In his A History of the World in 6 Glasses, Tom Standage, a journalist and historian, notes the response to the Party:

“In March 1774, the port of Boston was closed until the East India Company had been compensated for its losses. This was the first of the so-called Coercive Acts—a series of laws passed in 1774 in which the British attempted to assert their authority over the colonies but instead succeeded only in enraging the colonists further and ultimately prompted the outbreak of the Revolutionary War in 1775. It is tempting to wonder whether a government less influenced by the interests of the Company might have shrugged off the tea parties or come to some compromise with the colonists.”

-Tom Standage

Standage is going for one of my favorite parlor games, the historical “what if.”  However, the reality was that Britain and its colonies went to war. The colonies won, and the East India Company lost its colonial monopoly. As for tea, Standage notes: 

“Ten years after the Boston Tea Party, tea was still far more popular than coffee, which only became the more popular drink in the mid-nineteenth century. Coffee’s popularity grew after the import duty was abolished in 1832, making it more affordable. The duty was briefly reintroduced during the Civil War but was abolished in 1872.”

-Tom Standage

Though there is no longer a British East India Company (it was dissolved in 1874), there are many tea drinkers in our republic (this writer included). Yet, 44% of adults in the US consume 2 to 3 cups of coffee on average daily. In comparison, only 25% of American adults drank two tea beverages per day. With a little more prudence on the part of the British and a better evaluation of the business by the East India Company, those numbers might look very different today.  But that, again, is a historical what-if.  

AD Tippet is the founder and Publisher of the Conservative Historian. Aves has conducted extensive research in Political, Religious, Social, and Educational history across all eras and geographies. He has been writing and podcasting for over 12 years. In 2020, he published his first book, The Conservative Historian. He has degrees in history, education, and an MBA. @BelAves