TEA ACT

(1773), in British American colonial history, legislative maneuver by the British ministry of Lord North to make English tea marketable in America. A previous crisis had been averted in 1770 when all the Townshend Acts (q.v.) duties had been lifted except that on tea, which had been mainly supplied to the Colonies since then by Dutch smugglers. In an effort to help the financially troubled British East India Company sell 17,000,000 pounds of tea stored in England, the Tea Act rearranged excise regulations so that the company could pay the Townshend duty and still undersell its competitors. At the same time, the North administration hoped to reassert Parliament's right to levy direct revenue taxes on the Colonies. The shipments became a symbol of taxation tyranny to the colonists, reopening the door to unknown future tax abuses. Colonial resistance culminated in the Boston Tea Party (December 1773), in which tea was dumped into the ocean, and in a similar action in New York (April 1774). Additional reading William H. Ukers, All About Tea, 2 vol. (1935), deals with the historical, technological, scientific, commercial, social, and artistic aspects of tea production and includes extensive bibliographies. C.R. Harler, Tea Growing (1966), Tea Manufacture (1963, reprinted 1970), and The Culture and Marketing of Tea, 3rd ed. (1964), discuss methods and problems of the tea industry. Claud Bald, Indian Tea: A Textbook on the Culture and Manufacture of Tea, 7th ed., rev. by C.J. Harrison (1965), deals with the development of tea production in India, where the modern tea industry originated. T. Eden, Tea, 3rd ed. (1976), discusses tea production in Sri Lanka and the newly developing African tea industry. Also helpful is J. Werkhoven (comp.), Tea Processing (1974), which is a survey prepared for the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. Sinnathurai Sivasubramaniam