TEA TRADE, PREREVOLUTIONARY

TEA TRADE, PREREVOLUTIONARY. The Dutch in mid-seventeenth-century New Amsterdam were the first people in North America to drink tea. The habit caught on more slowly among the British colonists who succeeded the Dutch. Although tea was available to seventeenth-century British colonists—William Penn quite likely carried tea with him when he arrived in Pennsylvania in 1682, and the first license to sell tea in Boston was issued in 1690—it was not until after 1720 that the consumption of tea blossomed in British North America. By the mid-century, nowhere in the Western world, other than Great Britain, was tea consumption more prevalent than along the eastern seaboard of North America. In 1774, approximately 90 percent of the affluent households in Massachusetts owned items associated with tea, such as teacups and teapots. Perhaps 50 percent of middling people and 42 percent of poor people also owned tea-making equipment on the eve of the American Revolution.

By 1760, tea ranked third, behind textiles and iron-ware, among the goods colonists imported from Britain. Like other goods imported into the colonies, tea was embedded in the British mercantile system of trade. The East India Company, which held a monopoly on the trade, shipped tea from China to London where wholesalers purchased it at auctions and then distributed it internally or exported it. The British government raised revenue through high import duties and heavy excise taxes on tea. Because of extensive smuggling, especially between 1723 and 1745 when taxes were at their highest, there is no way to measure accurately the amount of tea imported by the North American colonies. The illegal trade in tea, much of it from Holland, must have been sizeable, given that almost every ship the British seized or examined for smuggling included tea in its cargo.

The tea trade became a major point of contention between Britain and its American colonies in 1767, when tea was listed among the Townsend Duties. The nonimportation movement, which arose in response to the new duties, significantly reduced the quantity of tea entering the colonies. In New York and Philadelphia, the amount of tea imported from England fell from 494,096 pounds in 1768 to just 658 pounds in 1772. Exports to New England also declined from 291,899 pounds in 1768 to 151,184 pounds in 1772. When Parliament repealed the Townsend Duties in 1770, it retained the tax on tea as a symbol of the right and power of Parliament to tax the colonies.

The struggle over the tea trade climaxed in 1773 when parliament passed the Tea Act, lowering the tax on tea and enabling the financially troubled East India Company to export tea directly to North America. Parliament anticipated that the Tea Act would lower tea prices in America and increase profits for the East India Company. British colonists, however, interpreted the Tea Act as an attempt by the British government to force them to accept Parliament's right to tax them. In 1773, attempts to bring tea into the colonies resulted in a series of "tea parties" in Annapolis, Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Charleston. The efforts of revolutionaries to halt the tea trade never fully succeeded, however. In 1775, the British exported 739,569 pounds of tea to the colonies.