FACT: American colonies’ “official” tea imports in 1772: 370 tons
THE NUMBERS: Vessel calls at Boston Harbor –
2020: 779*
1772: 845
* Cargo vessels; adding fishing vessels and cruise ships, the annual total is likely around 1,500.
WHAT THEY MEAN:
A post-Fourth coda:
The Declaration’s opening paragraphs speak to aspirations — “Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness” — and the responsibilities of government. The actual declaration of independence, “these United Colonies are, and of Right ought to be Free and Independent States”, comes at the close. In between is a list of 27 grievances, of which the sixteenth is a trade policy complaint — “cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world” — and the seventeenth is a general problem of taxation appearing in the form of tariffs. (“Imposing Taxes on us without our Consent”.) Apart from the patriotic images the list elicits – chests of tea falling into the harbor, red-coated soldiers patrolling colonial Boston, the Continental Congress meeting in Philadelphia — the grievances both refer to very specific events of 1773 and 1774, and raise larger questions about how trade policy and commerce interact with governance, personal rights and liberties, and war.
Background: Just before the revolution, the American colonies had a population of about 2.15 million spread out along the Atlantic seaboard, with the largest concentrations in Massachusetts, New York, Pennsylvania, and Virginia. They appear to have made up about 20% of the population and 30% of the “GDP” of the British empire, and had very busy maritime economies. Modern attempts to estimate a trade-to-GDP ratio for the early United States in the 1790s show imports at something like 17% of GDP and exports a bit less — figures very close to those of the 2020s — and these ratios were probably higher before the Revolution. Actual figures collected at the time illustrate: The Port of Boston served a Massachusetts population of about 280,000 and reported 845 ship arrivals in 1772, the year before the Tea Party.* Of this total, 93 came into port from Britain and Ireland, 20 from continental Europe, 216 from the Caribbean, and 427 from other North American ports. Adding New York, Philadelphia, Hampton, and Charleston to the Boston figures gives a total of 3,076 arrivals, including 393 from Britain and Ireland, 230 from Europe, 31 from Africa, and 985 from the Caribbean.
In financial and product terms, outbound vessels carried about £3.4 million a year in colonial exports, of which about half (by value) went to Britain and Ireland, a quarter to continental Europe, and a quarter to the Caribbean. These were mostly resource products and agricultural goods. The top 1772 export, accounting for a bit more than a quarter of the total, was £907,000 worth of tobacco from slave-worked plantations in the mid-Atlantic. Next came £397,000 of New England fish, £504,000 of flour and bread, £341,000 of South Carolina rice, and on down through indigo, wheat, furs, whale oil, horses, and a few manufactured goods including wooden barrels, pig iron, and ship masts. British “Navigation Acts” dating to the 17th century regulated several of these products quite strictly (for example, on grounds of naval need the colonies weren’t allowed to ship timber anywhere but Britain) but don’t seem to always been very energetically enforced in other areas. The Declaration’s two trade grievances, relating to events of 1773 and 1774, are as follows:
(1) “Imposing taxes without our Consent”: Parliamentary laws in the 1760s imposing a series of taxes — first document-stamping, then imported molasses, paper, glass, sugar, and tea — opened up the taxation-without-representation argument. The Tea Party event (December 16, 1773) was the last phase in this dispute, and adds vivid global-economy color to its more abstract intellectual and constitutional core. To recap: about three dozen “Sons of Liberty” raided three Nantucket-owned ships chartered by the British East India Company, which then administered Britain’s relatively new Asian empire (concentrated in present-day Bangladesh and the Calcutta hinterlands along with southern India and Bombay but quickly getting bigger) and handled China trade. The actual tea thrown into the harbor, collected in 342 wooden chests weighing about 125 kilos each, had all been purchased in Guangzhou in 1771. It included 75 chests of green tea, 240 of low-priced bohea, 15 of upper-class congou, and 10 of elite Fujian souchong. Together it weighed 46 tons, or about an eighth of the year’s British 370 tons of tea sales to the colonies.
The grievance prompting this event was a 3 pence-per-pound tea tax, kept in effect since 1768 though the other objectionable taxes had been withdrawn in 1770. In passing the May 1773 “Tea Act,” Parliament’s main ‘policy’ goal was to bail out the East India Company, which had nearly bankrupted itself during the conquest of Bengal. The Company had originally purchased the tea intending to auction it off in London, but found itself stuck with more than it could sell during an economic downturn. (Having sat in warehouses for two years, it might have gotten a bit moldy.) In more ideological terms Parliament wanted to (a) enforce Navigation Act regulations barring colonists from buying tea from other sources, amid probably exaggerated claims that as much as 85% of colonial tea came tax-free from the Netherlands via colonial “smugglers”, and (b) insist once again on the very grating point about Parliamentary rights to tax the colonies without their approval. Bostonians weren’t alone in their annoyance: Philadelphians boycotted a similar East India Company tea ship in the same month (the captain left without a fight), and New Yorkers had planned to do the same, but their tea ship got blown off course in a storm and wound up in Antigua. The last tea ship, sent to Charleston, off-loaded the tea but couldn’t sell it.
(2) “Cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world”: Parliament learned of the Tea Party in late January of 1774 — the trans-Atlantic voyage took about a month — and responded in March with five new laws collectively called the “Coercive Acts.” The first of these, the “Boston Port Act,” banned shipping from Boston with the exception of ships delivering food and fuel. The loss of 800 or more ship visits and nearly a million pounds worth of exports, and the presumed intention to wreck the Massachusetts economy as retaliation for the Tea Party, likely discredited whatever pro-U.K. sentiment remained, even apart from the four other laws. (Two of them involving “quartering” soldiers at local expense, the other two reducing local government and judicial rights. These points are noted in grievances #11, 14, 21, and 22.)
Massachusetts Bay diplomats in turn requested a sympathy boycott of trade with Britain from the other 12 colonies. The Continental Congress, meeting in September, agreed with an exception for rice exports. By 1775 imports had dropped from £2.59 million to £0.2 million, and most of this seems to represent flows of weapons to the British garrison in Boston. The export boycott program worked less quickly, but effectively enough that almost all trade had ceased by the time the Continental Congress reconvened in June of 1776.
PPI wishes you a happy, if slightly belated, Fourth.
* By way of context, this 845 vessel-call total compares very favorably to the Department of Transportation’s report of 779 cargo vessel arrivals in Boston Harbor in 2020. Cruises, non-existent in the 1770s, add another 115 or so, and two or three fishery vessels arrive daily, so a combined total is likely around 1,500.
FURTHER READING:
The National Archives’ official Declaration text.
The Massachusetts Historical Society’s Tea Party recap.
Colonial data on demographics, maritime economy, import/export, the 18th-century slave trade, and other topics from the Census Almanac of Statistical Abstracts.
… and the Department of Transportation’s Boston Harbor cargo snapshot.
From the World Green Tea Association in Japan, a concise piece on the British East India Company and the tea trade.
ABOUT ED
Ed Gresser is Vice President and Director for Trade and Global Markets at PPI.
Ed returns to PPI after working for the think tank from 2001-2011. He most recently served as the Assistant U.S. Trade Representative for Trade Policy and Economics at the Office of the United States Trade Representative (USTR). In this position, he led USTR’s economic research unit from 2015-2021, and chaired the 21-agency Trade Policy Staff Committee.
Ed began his career on Capitol Hill before serving USTR as Policy Advisor to USTR Charlene Barshefsky from 1998 to 2001. He then led PPI’s Trade and Global Markets Project from 2001 to 2011. After PPI, he co-founded and directed the independent think tank Progressive Economy until rejoining USTR in 2015. In 2013, the Washington International Trade Association presented him with its Lighthouse Award, awarded annually to an individual or group for significant contributions to trade policy.
Ed is the author of Freedom from Want: American Liberalism and the Global Economy (2007). He has published in a variety of journals and newspapers, and his research has been cited by leading academics and international organizations including the WTO, World Bank, and International Monetary Fund. He is a graduate of Stanford University and holds a Master’s Degree in International Affairs from Columbia Universities and a certificate from the Averell Harriman Institute for Advanced Study of the Soviet Union.
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