What exactly was the Tea Act and why did Parliament pass it?
There’s a credit crunch ahead of 1773; a series of major bankruptcies take place. The British government had spent heavily on the French and Indian War and they hadn’t quite begun paying back those debts, and these combined problems led to financial hardship in both Europe and America. The solution chosen by the British government is that it doesn’t give the Americans the tax relief they were asking for. Instead of repealing a tea duty that had been imposed in 1767, they give this significant tax break to the East India Company to unload its surplus of tea on the American market 17 million pounds of tea had piled up in the Company’s British warehouses, unsold in Britain because of competition from smugglers. How much of a bogeyman was the East India Company for the American colonists? Before the 1760s, the Company wasn’t much on the Americans’ radar. But after they start hearing the news of the Great Famine of Bengal in 1769 [where East India Company avarice and mismanagement led to as
