Boston tea party - Research Paper Example

Protests may be successful because it awakens the government to revise its rule, as in Congress can amend legislations. In the history, Americans found their protests for exorbitant taxes for tea effective. Their protest actions led to recall of the 25% tax on tea leaves by the parliament. Finding that a protest is a significant weapon, nationalism among the Americans became a widespread action that eventually led to a revolt for a cry of independence. How this transpired will be the topic of this paper.

The Boston Tea Party The love for tea of the Europeans started importation, competition and monopoly. Since the tea leaves are not grown in the West, Europeans had to import it from the East Indies.1 Seeing fortune opportunities, many companies sought to compete and started importing tea leaves to the West. The costly war between France and India was just over and British storehouses were nearly empty. In subsequent events, the action of King George III was a fiscal monetary policy, because he imposed taxes to the American colonies.

He had two economic visions at that time. One was to regain money lost, and the other is to reinstate their authority to the American colonies which they have neglected because of war.2 Taxes and monopoly When the monarchy started to tax products sold to America, people began to despise the rule. People became angrier when the royalty declared the tea a monopoly of the East India Company. And this was seen by historians as the biggest mistake of the King because this sparked nationalism that started the revolution.

As a protest, the Boston Tea Party began. It was not really a party in the real sense, but a nomenclature given to protests to the levy imposition. On December 16, 1773, the first protest was done by a group of Boston patriots who posed themselves as Indians to gain access to the three English ships that held tea cargoes3. Protesters split open every chest and dumped its contents to the sea. Overall, the protesters in the first Boston Tea Party threw to the sea, three hundred fort-two chests of tea4.

Similar protest actions followed in several seaports. On the Second tea party, done on March 7, 1774, 16 chests of tea were again thrown off to the sea. Of course, throwing of the tea into the sea is a only symbolic gesture that is a lead up to revolt for independence and a sign of protest. Shown below is a manifesto urging the citizens to protest, posted all over Boston on November 29, 1773, shortly after the arrival of 3 ships carrying tea owned by the East India Company5 Since tea has grown to be of much importance to the Americans and they found English tea to be very expensive because of taxes, Bostonians looked for alternatives such as smuggling.

They found cheaper source from Holland thus evading the 25% tax slapped on them. Smuggling resulted to about half a million pounds and reduction of the English’ income6 This loss resulted to another economic policy from the parliament. To address these losses another fiscal policy repealed the 25% tax imposition on tea thus making the Dutch leaves much affordable.7 The Act further strengthened campaign for anti-smuggling. Seeing that Tea Law aroused more protests and was not very effective, The Stamp Act of was put into effect on March 22, 1765.

This required every Americans to “pay a tax on every piece of printed paper they used. Ship's papers, legal documents, licenses, newspapers, other publications, and even playing cards were taxed. The money collected by the