Becky Akers is a historian who specializes in the American Revolution.
Tea. Warm, fragrant, and comforting, especially during the bustle of Christmas. It’s hard to believe this soothing potion once enraged a whole town and pushed a country toward revolution. But it did, 233 years ago Saturday in Boston.
The legendary Tea Party strikes us as quaint, almost childish: men disguising themselves as Indians, like kids on Halloween, then stealing out one night to destroy a shipment of tea. And all over a tax so tiny we smile. (Or so we think.) Oh, for problems as simple as our forefathers'!
But we actually confront the same problem. The issue was not taxation, with or without representation. The evil that sparked the Boston Tea Party stalks us today: the alliance of money, power, and weapons that subjugates the many for the benefit of the few. We call it fair trade, protectionism, corporatism, the military-industrial complex. The colonists knew it as mercantilism and fought it in the British East India Tea Company.
East India companies of various nationalities preyed on India during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Britain's government (in 1600) and Holland's (1602) were among the first to establish cartels for plundering the subcontinent to benefit the rulers, bureaucrats, and shareholders at home. The French followed suit in 1664, and the Danes in 1729. Though Britain's version started with only 125 shareholders and pound;72,000 in capital, it metastasized into a full-fledged government within 70 years. It even boasted an army and fortresses to prevent the other companies from poaching its suppliers and employees: talk about cutting out competitors! By 1858, when this force was folded into the British Army, it numbered 24,000 troops.
The Company ruled three large Indian provinces with bribes and brutality. An American lamented, It is shocking to Humanity to relate the relentless Barbarity, practised by the Servants of that Body, on the helpless Asiatics; a Barbarity scarce equalled even by the most brutal Savages, or Cortez, the Mexican Conqueror.
Another, the pamphleteer “Rusticus,” decried the Company's crimes in 1773:
Their Conduct in Asia for some Years past, has given simple Proof, how little they regard the Laws of Nations, the Rights, Liberties or Lives of Men. They have levied War, excited Rebellions, dethroned lawful Princes, and sacrificed Millions for the Sake of Gain. The Revenue of Mighty Kingdoms have centered in their Coffers. And these not being sufficient to glut their Avarice, they have, by the most unparalleled Barbarities, Extortions, and Monopolies, stripped the miserable Inhabitants of their Property, and reduce whole Provinces to Indigence and Ruin. Fifteen hundred Thousands, it is said, perished by Famine in one Year, not because the Earth denied its Fruits; but this Company and their Servants engulfed all the Necessaries of Life, and set them so high at a Rate that the poor could not purchase them.
Because the Company relied on coercion instead of competition, it faced bankruptcy by the early 1770s. Tons of tea piled up in its warehouses. How to dispose of it and, at the same time, make a killing for the Company's mostly royal and noble shareholders? Easy: exempt it from the three-penny-per-pound tea tax, undercutting other dealers, and dump it on the colonies. In case the lower price didn’t entice thrifty Americans, Parliament also granted the Company a monopoly on the colonial tea trade. Then they congratulated themselves on a Solomonic solution: cheap tea for cheap colonists who had groused about paying a cheap tax.
The resulting tempest shocked them. But the colonists understood the stakes. Hundreds of small, independent smugglers (and virtually all colonial businessmen smuggled in protest against customs duties) would be ruined so that the Company might flourish. Worse, Rusticus feared, Americans in like Manner [as the] Asiatics [would] be given up to the Disposal of the East India Company, who have now the Assurance, to step forth in Aid of the Minister, to execute his Plan, of enslaving America[.] . . . Thus having drained [India] of [its] immense Wealth . . . they now, it seems, cast their Eyes on America, as a new Theatre, whereon to exercise their Talents.
But the actors in that theater refused to play their roles. They threw a tea party instead.
Collaborative Tyranny
Then as now, some friends of freedom misunderstood how collaborative and cozy tyranny can be. They assumed that government alone destroys liberty. William Lee wrote to his brother, Richard Henry Lee, “The plan [to 'subvert the liberties and constitution' of England 'as well as that of America'] is deeply laid by the King, Lords Bute, Mansfield and Wedderburne; for which purpose they employ the most useful tools in the kingdom: Lord North, a tyrant from principle, . . . and his brother-in-law, Lord Dartmouth. . . .
Lee named these men because of their positions in the administration, not their ties to the British East India Company. Nor did the Company's directors make Lee's list. Yet the government and the Company were incestuous, symbiotic. They shared personnel, policies, and purpose. Each used its power and wealth to strengthen the other. Both cheated ordinary Englishmen and Indians of their freedom to choose where and what they would buy; how they would live, work, and worship; with whom they would associate; and what they would read and discuss and write.
Other colonists realized that the corporate class and government were entwined. Their response was the non-importation agreement, more familiar to us as a boycott. By refusing to buy English products they punished business's league with Leviathan. [The colonists] resent the behaviours of the merchants in London — those, I mean, who receive their bread from them — infamously deserting their cause at the time of extremity.
In the nineteenth century, Lysander Spooner noted the diabolical duet corporations often play with government: “So-called sovereigns, in these different governments, are simply the heads, or chiefs, of different bands of robbers and murderers. And these heads or chiefs are dependent upon the lenders of blood-money for the means to carry on their robberies and murders. They could not sustain themselves a moment but for the loans made to them by these blood-money loan-mongers. . . . They also, by unequal taxation, exempt wholly or partially the property of these loan-mongers, and throw corresponding burdens upon those who are too poor and weak to resist.”
Whether in eighteenth-century Britain or twenty-first century America.