[This coming weekend marks the 250th anniversary of one of the most significant events in Colonial America, the Boston Tea Party. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of layers to that important moment, leading up to a special weekend tribute to some of the many BostonStudiers from whom I’ve learned a great deal!]
On a few
key 1773 moments along the way to the Boston Tea Party.
1)
The Tea
Act: One of the many (many many) crucial historical issues about
which I knew very little for much of my AmericanStudying life was the role of
the British East
India Company in American colonial and Revolutionary history (to say nothing,
as that hyperlinked article notes, of its roles in the whole world during this
period). It’s not just that the company dominated trade between so much of the
world, but also and even more importantly that the English government was
willing to do whatever it could to support that economic institution. One such
step was the Parliamentary Tea Act, which passed in April 1773 and went into
effect in May; the law granted the East India Company virtually
sole rights over the tea trade between England and the American colonies. This
was far from the first controversial such law—that would be the Stamp Act
of 1765—but it was another key step in the road toward Revolution.
2)
Franklin’s Satire: If laws were one form of
historical documents that helped precipitate those Revolutionary responses,
another of course were the impassioned and activist writings—often anonymous or
pseudonymous, but no less potent for it—produced by colonial leaders. In
September 1773, four months after the Tea Act went into effect, the London newspaper The Public Advertiser published such a work by none other
than Ben Franklin himself. Entitled “Rules by
Which a Great Empire May be Reduced to a Small One,” Franklin’s
essay was deeply satirical, poking fun at a number of British missteps but
certainly dwelling at length on precisely the kinds of economic extremes
comprised by laws like the Tea Act. It’s impossible to know whether the anger
that led to the Tea Party would have happened without this textual
encouragement, but again these different layers undoubtedly worked together at
the very least.
3)
The Dartmouth: Four
total ships left England in November 1773 with the first shipments of East
India Company tea affected by the new law; one (the William) was lost
at sea and the other three arrived in Boston a few weeks later, with the first
to dock being the Dartmouth. As that first
hyperlinked article above highlights, the Dartmouth
had originated in Nantucket, reflecting the complex interconnections between
American shipping and these English companies and laws. Indeed, as I’ve argued both here and in Of Thee I Sing about Revolutionary War Loyalists,
that community were just as much part of America (and thus the new United
States) as were the revolutionaries. The Nantucket Quaker Rotch family behind
the Dartmouth (and a second of the
four ships, the Beaver) offer one small window into those
multiple American communities, all of which were present at the Boston Tea
Party in December 1773 to be sure.
Next Tea
Party post tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What
do you think? Tea Party takes you’d share?
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