The Tea Act was the 1773 British law that allowed the East India Company to sell tea directly to American colonists.
Parliament passed the Tea Act on May 10, 1773. It let the financially troubled company ship tea directly to the colonies, bypassing colonial wholesalers and reducing some costs. However, the existing duty on tea remained, which many colonists viewed as an assertion of Parliament’s right to tax them without representation.
The law provoked protests across the Thirteen Colonies. In Boston, Massachusetts, colonial resistance culminated on December 16, 1773, when protestors boarded East India Company ships and destroyed hundreds of chests of tea in what became known as the Boston Tea Party.
The Tea Act is often confused with the Townshend Acts, which introduced the tea duty earlier. Britain responded to the Boston protest with the Coercive Acts, called the Intolerable Acts by many American colonists. These escalating disputes helped lead to the American Revolutionary War.