The Boston Tea Party of December 17, 1773, is often viewed as a local American protest, but it was actually the climax of a global economic crisis involving the British East India Company (EIC) and its exploitation of the Indian subcontinent. The tea dumped into Boston Harbor was grown in the hills of Bengal and Bihar, produced under a system of indentured labor and heavy colonial extraction that ultimately linked the fates of India and America.
Boston tea party is an important event in American history and it is a matter of coincidence that the British East India company that liberally squandered India was indirectly responsible for the end colonial rule in America.
By the early 1770s, the East India Company was on the verge of bankruptcy. This was largely due to rampant corruption among officials in India and the devastating Great Bengal Famine (1770–1772), which decimated the workforce and local economy. Economic stagnation and trade depression in Europe further aggravated already the worst situation and now, the East India company was on the verge of going broke. Despite the company's military successes, it was drowning in debt and held a massive surplus of 18 million pounds of unsold tea rotting in London warehouses.
Above image: The British company took over the tribal lands in the hilly areas of Bengal, Assam and other NE Indian regions and engaged the tribes as indentured workers on the tea and coffee plantations. Here, every chest of tea was produced by squeezing innocent, gullible natives of Indian soil. The company paid pittance for the tea workers, while the British bosses were wallowing in luxuries and money...........
In Great Britain and the American colonies, the EIC faced stiff competition from Dutch smugglers who provided cheaper, tax-free tea. To save the EIC—which was "too big to fail" for the British crown—Parliament sought ways to force company tea onto the American market while simultaneously asserting its right to tax the colonists. When tea became a popular drink in the British colonies, to eliminate foreign competition, Parliament introduced an act in 1721 that required colonists to import their tea only from Great Britain.
Legislative Maneuvers and Smuggling
The British Parliament attempted several strategies to secure the tea trade:
The Townshend Revenue Act (1767): This levied taxes on various goods, including tea, in the colonies. The introduction of the Townsend Revenue Act of 1767, which levied new taxes, including one on tea in the colonies, only worsened the problem and now tea smuggling increased manifold in the colonies.
While most of these taxes were repealed in 1770 following widespread protests, the duty on tea was intentionally retained as a symbol of Parliamentary authority.
The
Tea Act of 1773: May 10,1773
King George III placed his royal assent on this act. This was the definitive turning point. The act granted the EIC a direct monopoly to export tea to the colonies, bypassing British middlemen and allowing the company to sell its tea at a lower price than even the smuggled Dutch tea.
The Tax and the Protest
The British strategy to stop smuggling was essentially an attempt to undercut the price of the competition. However, the American colonists saw through the "cheap tea" ruse. They realized that by buying the taxed EIC tea, they would be implicitly validating Parliament's right to tax them without representation ("
No Taxation Without Representation"). Furthermore, the revenue from these taxes was used to pay the salaries of colonial governors and judges, making them independent of the local colonial assemblies.
On the chilly night of December 16, 1773, a group of protesters, some disguised as
Mohawk Indians, boarded three EIC ships—the Dartmouth, the Eleanor, and the Beaver—and dumped 342 chests of Indian tea into the frigid waters of Boston Harbor.
Above image: The dubious effort by the colonial
government to undercut the tea prices to stay in business miserably failed, Further, the importers who had paid taxes before undercutting the price never received the refund as promised by the government. Since the duty on tea was not repealed a serious situation developed. On December 16, 1773, to vent their anger and frustration, the protesters 30 to 130 members of the
Sons of Liberty in the guise of
Mohawk Indians sulkily got into three East India company ships laden with tea anchored in the Boston harbor and dumped the tea cargo - 342 chests of tea into the sea. The sunken chests held over 45 tons of tea, worth almost $1 million today..........
Global Aftermath and the Rise of Coffee
The British responded with the Coercive Acts (known in America as the
Intolerable Acts), which included the closing of Boston Port. This aggression unified the thirteen colonies, leading directly to the American Revolutionary War in 1775.
Interestingly, the conflict became a global struggle. As the British fought in America, they were simultaneously battling the Kingdom of Mysore in India (the Anglo-Mysore Wars), where
Hyder Ali and Tipu Sultan were supported by the French. In America, the "unpatriotic" act of tea drinking led to a cultural shift; tea consumption plummeted, and coffee emerged as the preferred beverage of the new republic—a legacy that remains a defining characteristic of
American culture today.
Quite interesting to note that
General Charles Cornwallis, who surrendered the British army to General George Washington at Yorktown on October 18, 1871, was the governor-general and commander in chief in India from 1786 until 1794. He played a key role in the early years in the elimination of Tipu Sultan of Mysore, South India.
Ref:
Knollenberg, Bernhard. Growth of the American Revolution, 1766–1775. New York: Free Press, 1975. ISBN
0-02-917110-5
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