The Backstory of the Boston Tea Party: The East India Company Went Broke, So "A Fair Consumer" Suggested Beating the Black Market Smugglers by Dumping Surplus Tea on America

From the board, the desperate Laurence Sulivan came up with a plan to float a loan in Amsterdam, with the tea to be used as collateral: a rather lame suggestion, as the largest Dutch banks were also close to failure. An equally hopeless proposal came from Colebrooke, who wanted to ask investors in England for £1.5 million to refinance the business. With money so tight in London this was out of the question. But while these feeble ideas went the rounds, a more practical scheme had begun to emerge. In late September, a writer calling himself “A Fair Consumer” published a letter in the press that made a telling point. In London, wholesale Bohea cost three shillings and four pence a pound. In Amsterdam, where the taxes were tiny, the same packet of tea cost only one shilling and eight pence.

As everyone knew, this situation created the vast black market that ate away at the company’s position. The solution was obvious: turn the tables on the Europeans by slashing the price in London to the same low level even if the company took a temporary loss. By flooding the market with cheap tea, the company would drive the smugglers to the wall and cripple its competitors in the China trade.

It was only the germ of an idea, but gradually it evolved into a scheme to send the surplus tea to America. Before it could reach fruition, it would be warped out of shape by intrigue and political maneuver on both sides of the Atlantic. At times the story that follows will resemble an intricate jigsaw puzzle in the style of the rococo, but without it the Boston Tea Party would never have taken place.

--Nick Bunker, An Empire on the Edge: How Britain Came to Fight America (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2014), e-book.