Tea & Sovereignty
Tea, Sovereignty, and an East Indies Trade for a New American Empire
By Caroline Frank, Brown University
The Boston Tea Party has legendary status in U.S. history as one of the initial acts of a “free-born” people resisting tyrannical rulers and oppression. But why did the importation of Chinese tea provoke such a radical response—political, martial, and rhetorical—when colonists had tolerated and excused over a century of antagonistic British mercantilist legislation? Even before the ink was dry on the peace agreement with Great Britain in 1783, U.S. merchants were fitting out ships to sail to China. Here we reexamine the global context of the American Revolution and the early U.S. China trade, asking why Americans were so quick to develop their own “East Indies trade”on the heels of independence.
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