How crappy tea started the American Revolution

The Boston Tea Party was about tariffs - and some really lousy tea

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Today is the anniversary of what was originally known as the Destruction of the Tea and became known as the Boston Tea Party. On this day in 1773, American colonists boarded an East India Company ship in Boston and threw the tea overboard, destroying it. They did it to protest import tariffs which had been placed on colonial tea importers and from which the East India Company - a well-connected company that was virtually part of the British state - was exempt. Similar protests had already happened in other ports, with the shipments being sent back to Britain rather than unloaded. But in Boston the local British governor refused to let the shipment be returned, provoking the colonists into one of the most iconic acts of the American Revolution.

By the time of the revolution, tea had become a staple of life in the colonies, enjoyed by rich and poor alike. The introduction of tea in the 1690s had produced some bizarre culinary experiments, such as the practice in Salem of serving it mixed with butter and as a side dish to vegetables, but by the 1770s most people were thankfully just drinking it. Tea’s ubiquity meant that it came to be seen as an agent of republican equality, a sign that the colonies were not developing the sort of stratified class system which existed in the Old World. That there was a large element of myth to this - the rich drank fine green teas from expensive porcelain and the poor drank inferior black teas - didn’t do too much to undermine the potency of the idea.

Tea originated in China, but by the late eighteenth century it had become a global drink. Leaves which had been roasted in a pan and then rolled - what we today call green tea - were the original form the commodity took. Over time black tea, which is much more heavily oxidized before it is dried, came to be favored by Western consumers. Corporations like the East India Company brought it from China in vast quantities, and it would be a century or more until attempts to grow tea outside of China became a commercial success. It wasn’t until the early nineteenth century that Westerners came to understand that black and green tea actually came from the same plant and were just processed differently.

Hyson tea

The tea in the chests at the Boston Tea Party reflected this history. All from China, they were a mixture of black and green, familiar and unfamiliar. The most abundant was Bohea (boo-hee), a low grade variety of what we now call black tea. This was tea for the masses, the Aldi Red Label of its day, but there were also some finer varieties: small quantities of a high-grade black tea called Congou, of Souchong (a forerunner of today’s lapsang souchoungs), and of a fine green tea called Hyson, which was favored by George Washington and Thomas Jefferson. Much as my tea seller always sends me a free packet of some monstrosity like “almond tea” along with the rest of my order, the East India Company had also bunged in a few crates of a green tea called Singlo which they were hoping would catch on in the colonies.

The modern consumer would have been unlikely to appreciate any of these teas, if only because they were so old. The oxidization process which produces black tea allows the flavor to be retained for longer, which is why many Western consumers preferred it. But the crates at the Tea Party had sat in a warehouse for nearly three years before arriving into Boston harbor, and they would have lost much of their flavor by then. It’s a wonder that the colonists didn’t add “extremely poor warehousing practices” to their list of grievances against the empire, right alongside “no taxation without representation”.

But there was a reason that the East India Company had so much old tea lying around, and that was because no-one wanted to buy it. Since 1698, the company had been granted a government monopoly as the sole importer of tea into Britain, and since the 1720s British colonies had been banned from importing their own tea. Instead, the company’s tea was sold in London to merchants who then shipped it to the colonies for resale, charging a hefty mark-up in the process. This made some American merchants rich, but it led to tea prices which were much higher than they would have been in an open market. After the British increased taxes on these official imports in 1767, most colonists started buying smuggled Dutch tea instead - sometimes to the tune of nearly half a million kilos a year.

The Dutch tea was cheaper and more patriotic than paying taxes to the British. Stores of tea built up in East India Company warehouses, unsold and unwanted. This became a major financial burden at a time when the company was teetering on the edge of bankruptcy, and so it leaned on its political connections to get bailed out. As a result, Parliament decided that it would just exempt the company from taxes and let it sell directly into the colonies rather than through middlemen. The result would have been cheaper tea for the American masses, but it also pissed off both the rich American importers and the patriots. When the company brought their old crappy tea to colonial harbors in 1773, the uprising began.

The Boston Tea Party became one of the opening salvos of the American Revolution, with the British responding with greater shows of coercion (“drink our crappy tea or else!”) and the colonists getting more enraged as a result. The Boston Tea Party became one of the examples of how the idea of “no taxation without representation” became a key slogan of the revolution, with Americans chafing at Parliament’s ability to tell them when and how they ought to be allowed to import tea. But this soon became besides the point - by the 1770s, it’s not like the colonists would have been satisfied with a few seats in Parliament, where they could easily have been outvoted anyway. As it often does, tea had set something in motion which took on a force of its own.

As a result of the revolution, tea began to fall out of fashion in the colonies. It came to be seen as the drink of the effete, British-loving upper class, with coffee slowly taking its place as the true American drink. Tastes in alcoholic drinks underwent a similar evolution, with rum sourced from British Caribbean islands - which had previously been the colonial tipple of choice - being replaced with cheap whiskey distilled from grain. It took tea a while to be rehabilitated, but soon American merchants were shipping it from China themselves, free of tyrannical British taxes.

Nowadays you can get a decent oolong from coast to coast. But Trump’s trade war is a threat to that and could lead to price increases of something like 60 - 100% on teas imported from China. On the anniversary of the Boston Tea Party, he might want to think about how trade, politics and freedom are intertwined - and how messing with people’s favorite commodities can lead to a backlash.

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