Boston Tea Party, 1773

On the evening of 16 December 1773, colonists opposed to parliamentary taxation boarded three ships in Boston Harbor and destroyed cargoes of East India Company tea. The action followed a public meeting at the Old South Meeting House and was organised to prevent the taxed tea from being landed and sold.

Britain answered with the Coercive Acts, closing Boston’s port and altering Massachusetts government. Measures intended to isolate Boston instead encouraged intercolonial cooperation and helped transform a dispute over taxation and representation into a wider constitutional crisis.

For books and historical fiction, the Boston Tea Party provides a setting of political organisation, crowd action, merchant interests, disguise, surveillance and escalating imperial retaliation. Nathaniel Philbrick’s Bunker Hill places the event at the beginning of the chain that led from protest to military occupation and war.