this post was submitted on 24 Aug 2024
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What happened was England was turning a blind eye towards smuggling into and out of the American colonies because it cost more to try and enforce taxes.
Eventually England did seize a bunch of smuggled tea, diverted it to England to be taxed as a matter of principle, which made smuggled tea more expensive than legal tea.
So the smugglers dumped the legal tea into the harbor, driving it's price up and allowing the smugglers to sell at a high enough price they could stay in operation.
They 100% knew they were driving up the price of tea and negatively effecting their communities...
They just liked money more.
It wasn't a protest, it was economical warfare that only helped the rich smugglers and fucked everyone else over.
It makes sense the average American didn't know better back then, but it's 2024, there's zero excuse not to know this shit.
Do you have a source for that?
In the "Resisting the Tea Act" section of the Wikipedia article, it notes that the East India Company was allowed to import tea directly into the colonies without first passing it through wholesale markets in England. The tea was then sold at a price of 2/- per pound, undercutting the price of smuggled Dutch tea, then priced at 2/1 per pound. This is secondary to the fact that the tea still was taxed at -/3 per pound, meaning the price was really 1/9 plus thruppence tax, but this tax was included in the sale price and paid quietly by the consignment agents after it was sold.
Mercantile pressure in America tried to force all the consignment agents in America to resign and were partially successful, except in Massachusetts, where the colonial governor urged the agents to stand their ground. The Sons of Liberty, an organisation of such people, attempted to force the first shipment aboard the ship Dartmouth to return to England without unloading its cargo (and thus causing the tax to be paid).
Being unsuccessful, the Sons of Liberty snuck aboard the Dartmouth, which was anchored in Boston Harbour but had not unloaded its cargo yet, and destroyed the tea aboard.
Ahhh, it all makes sense now