ON THIS DAY ·
Boston Tea Party
16 Dec 1773 — Colonists threw three shiploads of taxed tea into Boston harbor. Parliament responded with the Coercive Acts; the colonies in turn answered by gathering a Congress.
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The moment in context
The Atlantic world of 1775 joined places that worked in strikingly different ways. At Potosí, silver came from an older mining economy shaped by coerced Indigenous labor. At Cap-Français, sugar wealth depended on enslaved plantation workers. Boston was a settler community with assemblies and the means to organize against distant taxation. All belonged to an imperial system that drew wealth from ports, mines and plantations, while claiming inland territories where Indigenous nations often continued to govern.
From Causes of the American Revolution, chapter 1 of The Age of Revolutions, 1775–1848 (APR 1775).
The place: Boston Tea Party — map and full story →
Teach this in 5 minutes
- Why it happened — Paying for an empire. Britain’s victory in 1763 left it with the world’s biggest empire and biggest debt, as well as a new American frontier to garrison. Ministers could…
- The turn — Boston harbor, 16 December 1773. On 16 December 1773, protesters destroyed tea whose price the Tea Act had lowered. The bargain still carried a duty, and opponents saw acceptance of…
- What it changed — A common deliberation. Twelve colonies with separate governments sent delegates to Philadelphia in 1774; they had never cooperated on anything before. Their Continental…
Then ask the room: Was the American crisis really about taxes, when the tea duty amounted to only a few pence? The argued answer is on the chapter page →
The atlas that shows it
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