Tea Act grants East India Company monopoly

In May 1773, Parliament passed the Tea Act to rescue the financially troubled East India Company by allowing it to ship tea directly to the American colonies and undercut ordinary colonial merchants. Lord North's ministry left the existing tea duty in place, hoping cheaper tea would tempt Americans to accept Parliament's right to tax them. Tea consignees in ports such as Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Charleston thus became focal points in a renewed imperial contest.

Colonial opponents saw the Tea Act as a political trap rather than a bargain, because cheaper tea still carried the principle of taxation without representation. Samuel Adams in Boston and other patriot leaders argued that if Americans accepted this tea, they would concede Parliament's authority to tax the colonies by indirect means backed by monopoly privilege. The dispute therefore joined constitutional principle to commercial resentment, since merchants objected both to the East India Company preference and to the revived assertion of parliamentary supremacy.

Resistance to the Tea Act produced tea meetings, tea refusals, and finally the Boston Tea Party on December 16, 1773. Parliament's answer in the Coercive Acts then pushed the colonies toward the First Continental Congress and the chain of events that led to war in 1775.