British Taxes on Tea.

In 1721 Parliament had given the East India Company a virtual monopoly on the colonial tea market and had required a tea sold in the colonies to pass through England. The monopoly, however, was a paper one: in the late 1760s the American colonies imported an average of 562,281 pounds of tea each year from the East India Company, but they smuggled 900,000 pounds each year from French or Dutch sources. The Townshend duties had imposed a duty of three pence per pound on tea imported into the American colonies; in 1770 Parliament had repealed all of the Townshend duties except the duty on tea, which was maintained to prove the point that Parliament could tax the colonists.

Relief.

In January 1773 the East India Company, heavily in debt from the conquest of Bengal and with more than ten million pounds of tea in its...