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BOSTON TEA PARTY

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Boston Tea Party

The Boston tea party is seen as having played a gigantic role in providing impetus to the American Revolution . It refers to an incident that happened on December 16 , 1773 , pitting the colonists against the British . A group of Americans from Boston pretending to be natives dropped large consignments of tea in to the ocean as a form of protests against the selective and punitive taxation it was a culmination of anger that had been building over the British policies

p Earlier in 1770 , the Townshend Duties had been done away with following concerted protests by the colonists . The Townshend Duties refer to a number of taxes introduced by Charles Townshend aimed at the colonists to finance tax cuts in England . The Townshend duties were repealed but the tea duty still remained (Hawkins , 33

To circumvent such punitive charges , the American population boycotted the British tea opting to buy the one smuggled from Portugal . This resulted to huge losses and debts to the East India Company that was importing the tea . In response to this boycott and to help the company survive , the British introduced the Tea Act . This act sought to remove taxes on tea imports . The East India Company could now import the tea and sell it at a price below the smuggled one . The boycott though persisted with most colonists refusing the temptation of buying cheaper tea , as doing so would be bowing to the British and accepting the punitive tax . The smugglers were foreseeing a big dent in their ventures and were at the forefront with the boycotting campaigns . The call no taxation without representation took a new momentum (Ketchum , Richard 19

The Tea Act was greatly opposed with most merchants opting to send it back . In Boston however , this was not the course of action taken . The building up protests and strong opposition to the brutish taxation regimes was rife in the air . Bostonians led by a liberalist Samuel Adams , could not allow the offloading of the tea shipments and were demanding that it be taken back to England . Thomas Hutchinson , who was the governor then , was adamant that the ships had to pay the duty first This is what prompted a group of Bostonians to secretly board the ship emptying the contents in the sea harbour . Over three hundred chests of tea were dropped in to the harbour sparking a huge outrage back in Britain with most politicians pressing for compensation . The colonists were unapologetic and the parliament vowed to introduce even more punitive policies and hence the Intolerable Acts

Intolerable Acts refers to a number of laws introduced by the British aimed at Bostonians , in retribution for the destruction of the tea imports . It is ironical for these laws were supposed to serve as a lesson to those states that wished to put up a defiant face . However , in the real sense , they intensified resentment towards the British and helped fuel the calls to the American...

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