this post was submitted on 24 Aug 2024
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What happened was England was turning a blind eye towards smuggling into and out of the American colonies because it cost more to try and enforce taxes.
Eventually England did seize a bunch of smuggled tea, diverted it to England to be taxed as a matter of principle, which made smuggled tea more expensive than legal tea.
So the smugglers dumped the legal tea into the harbor, driving it's price up and allowing the smugglers to sell at a high enough price they could stay in operation.
They 100% knew they were driving up the price of tea and negatively effecting their communities...
They just liked money more.
It wasn't a protest, it was economical warfare that only helped the rich smugglers and fucked everyone else over.
It makes sense the average American didn't know better back then, but it's 2024, there's zero excuse not to know this shit.
Do you have a source for that?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Townshend_Acts
Now, my first comment did make it sound like all of this happened in short order, but the back and forth over the Townshend acts went on for a very long time.
But due to those taxes and the efficiency of British naval shipping, smugglers just couldn't compete. They could only beat legal prices if they shipped straight to/from America instead of physically routing all goods thru England.
It wasn't just about taxes, it was merchants in England getting their cut. First crack at goods out of America, and a chance to beat prices on what was going into America.
I'm not sure if that's the part you wanted me to source though. I touched on a bunch of things in a summary from memory, it would take a lot of effort to go back and cite a source for every piece of information I just spit out.
So I'm not doubling down and saying I remembered it perfectly, just that it helps to be specific what you want a source for. Otherwise the other person just guesses.
I feel it's also important to keep in mind that part of the reason the British decided to care about this was an attempt to recoup the costs of the French and Indian War, which the colonists started.