Niall Ferguson, "Empire" wrote:
Everyone has heard of the 'Boston Tea Party' of 16 December 1773, in which 342 boxes of tea worth £10,000 were tipped from the East India tea ship Dartmouth into the murky waters of Boston harbour. But most people assume it was a protest against a hike in the tax on tea. In fact the price of the tea in question was exceptionally low, since the British government had just given the East India Company a rebate of the much higher duty the tea had incurred on entering Britain. In effect, the tea left Britain duty free and had to pay only the much lower American duty on arriving in Boston. Tea had never been cheaper in New England. The 'Party' was organized not by irate consumers but by Boston's wealthy smugglers, who stood to lose out. Contemporaries were well aware of the absurdity of the ostensible reason for the protest. 'Will not posterity be amazed', wrote one sceptic, 'when they are told that the present distraction took its rise from the parliament's taking off a shilling duty on a pound of tea, and imposing three pence, and call it a more unaccountable phrenzy, and more disgraceful to the annals of America, than that of the witchcraft?'
On close inspection, then, the taxes that caused so much fuss were not just trifling; by 1773 they had all but gone. In any case, these disputes about taxation were trivial compared with the basic economic reality that membership of the British Empire was good—very good—for the American colonial economy. The much-maligned Navigation Acts may have given British ships a monopoly over trade with the colonies, but they also guaranteed a market for North American exports of agricultural staples, cattle, pig iron and, indeed, ships. It was the constitutional principle—the right of the British parliament to levy taxes on the American colonists without their consent—that was the true bone of contention.
That's a wonderful account, but it leaves out some major details. The tax the East India Company paid was a tax on importing into England, from the East, not on delivering it anywhere else. This increased the cost of the tea, of course, but the colonists were not themselves forced to pay a tax. It was paid by whomever bought the tea in England and then shipped it to the colonies. And that tax was not rebated for the East India Company out of compassion for colonists who liked tea, but because Dutch tea was being smuggled into England at an insane rate and costing the Company hundreds of thousands of pounds a year in profits.
So what they did was eliminate the tax going into England, but substitute another tax on tea sold in the colonies. It was a smaller tax, but the point is that it was the first direct tax on the colonies themselves. They already had to deal with British laws which mandated monopolies in terms of who could bring goods in and out of the colonies, and now they were going to be taxed on top of that. Worse, this meant that the colonists were effectively subsidizing cheaper tea for people living in England, while they paid full price (in addition to increased costs for shipping).
The sentence "No taxation without representation" was the clarion call. And yes. It was absolutely about taxes. Had the British government not imposed a direct tax, it's likely that the colonies would never have broken away. So yeah. It was about the taxes...
