Protesters dumped tea into Boston Harbor during the Boston Tea Party.
On December 16, 1773, colonists in Boston boarded ships carrying East India Company tea and threw 342 chests into the harbor. The protest opposed Parliament’s Tea Act and the broader principle of taxation without colonial representation. Many participants disguised themselves, although the event was not simply a spontaneous act by anonymous “Indians.”
The Tea Act did not impose a new tax on tea; it allowed the financially troubled East India Company to sell tea directly in the colonies while retaining an existing duty. Colonists objected to the law’s political implications and to the monopoly it strengthened.
Britain responded with the Coercive Acts, called the Intolerable Acts by many colonists. Those measures intensified colonial resistance and helped lead to the First Continental Congress in 1774 and eventually the Revolutionary War.