Tea Act

Amer. Hist.

an act of the British Parliament (1773) that created a monopoly unfair to American tea merchants: the chief cause of the Boston Tea Party.

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(1773) British legislation giving a tea monopoly in the American colonies to the British East India Co. It adjusted the duty regulations to allow the failing company to sell its large tea surplus below the prices charged by colonial competitors.

The act was opposed by colonists as another example of taxation without representation. Resistance to the act resulted in the Boston Tea Party.

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▪ Great Britain [1773]

      (1773), in British American colonial history, legislative maneuver by the British ministry of Lord North to make English tea marketable in America. A previous crisis had been averted in 1770 when all the Townshend Acts (q.v.) duties had been lifted except that on tea, which had been mainly supplied to the Colonies since then by Dutch smugglers. In an effort to help the financially troubled British East India Company sell 17,000,000 pounds of tea stored in England, the Tea Act rearranged excise regulations so that the company could pay the Townshend duty and still undersell its competitors. At the same time, the North administration hoped to reassert Parliament's right to levy direct revenue taxes on the Colonies. The shipments became a symbol of taxation tyranny to the colonists, reopening the door to unknown future tax abuses. Colonial resistance culminated in the Boston Tea Party (December 1773), in which tea was dumped into the ocean, and in a similar action in New York (April 1774).

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