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Thursday 26 August 2010
The Tea Partiers' Historical Fictions

Current Tea Partiers protest government, which they swear by-God threatens the existence of the private enterprise system they hold dear. The Tea Partiers of old, on the other hand, were not protesting an existential threat to private enterprise so much as an economic threat posed by one.

It was not government tea they threw overboard, after all. It happened to belong to a private enterprise known as the British East India Company.

The Tea Act imposed by the English parliament in 1773 did not make tea less affordable, nor did it even raise a new tax. It merely extended a three-penny tea duty, imposed six years previously as part of the Townshend Duties.

When these taxes, excepting that on tea, were repealed, colonists continued to boycott English tea, buying smuggled Dutch tea instead. What the Tea Act did do, however, was to endow the East India Company with a legal monopoly on the colonial tea trade.

By allowing the East India Company to bypass English middlemen, its tea, even with the three-penny tax, would now be cheaper than the Dutch tea, and it would be legal. By some accounts, it even tasted better.

The colonists were not being forced to buy English tea. Indeed, they had been boycotting it for years. And certainly it would be a stretch to claim that an unsold heap of tea posed a threat to anybody’s liberty.

Why then would anyone risk destroying the valuable cargo of a politically well-connected business entity? Was this a manifestation of political idealism? Or was it actually a preemptive economic strike against a private enterprise – a transnational corporation, in fact – that had the audacity to try to make a buck at the expense of American smugglers?

This is hardly textbook-heroic stuff.

Maybe that is why the term “Boston Tea Party” did not enter the American lexicon until 1834 – three generations after the act of vandalism it was invented to glorify.

32 notes

  1. the-abcs-of-life reblogged this from adailyriot
  2. meet-me-at-221b reblogged this from sleepswithangels and added:
    by god i hate the fact that my father is a member of the current “tea-party” i hope none of my friends ever have to...
  3. sleepswithangels reblogged this from robot-heart-politics and added:
    If you ask the majority of people at tea parties why They call it a “tea party” the most common answer you’ll receive is...
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