Tea Act

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Tea Act 1773

Parliament of Great Britain
Long title	An act to allow a drawback of the duties of customs on the exportation of tea or oil to any of his Majesty's colonies or plantations or farms in America; to increase the deposit on bohea tea to be sold at the East India Company's sales, and to empower the commissioners of the treasury to grant licenses to the East India Company to export tea duty-free.
Citation	13 Geo. 3. c. 44
Introduced by	The Rt. Hon. Lord North, KG, MP Prime Minister, Chancellor of the Exchequer & Leader of the House of Commons
Territorial extent	Great Britain British Dominions
Dates
Royal assent	10 May 1773
Commencement	10 May 1773
Repealed	6 August 1861
Other legislation
Repealed by	Statute Law Revision Act 1861
Relates to	Sugar Act 1763 Stamp Act 1765 Townshend Acts
Status: Repealed
Text of statute as originally enacted

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The Tea Act 1773 (13 Geo. 3. c. 44) was an Act of the Parliament of Great Britain. The principal objective was to reduce the massive amount of tea held by the financially troubled British East India Company in its London warehouses and to help the struggling company survive.^[1] A related objective was to undercut the price of illegal tea, smuggled into Britain's North American colonies. This was supposed to convince the colonists to purchase Company tea on which the Townshend duties were paid, thus implicitly agreeing to accept Parliament's right of taxation. Smuggled tea was a large issue for Britain and the East India Company, since approximately 86% of all the tea in America at the time was smuggled Dutch tea.

The Act granted the Company the right to directly ship its tea to North America and the right to the duty-free export of tea from Britain, although the tax imposed by the Townshend Acts and collected in the colonies remained in force. It received the royal assent on May 10, 1773.

Colonists in the Thirteen Colonies recognized the implications of the Act's provisions, and a coalition of merchants, smugglers, and artisans similar to that which had opposed the Stamp Act 1765 mobilized opposition to the delivery and distribution of the tea. The company's authorised consignees were harassed, and in many colonies, successful efforts were made to prevent the tea from being landed. In Boston, this resistance culminated in the Boston Tea Party on December 16, 1773, when colonists (some disguised as Native Americans) boarded tea ships anchored in the harbour and dumped their tea cargo overboard. Parliamentary reaction to this event included the passage of the Coercive Acts, designed to punish Massachusetts for its resistance, and the appointment of General Thomas Gage as royal governor of Massachusetts. These actions further raised tensions that led to the eruption of the American War of Independence in April 1775.

Parliament passed the Taxation of Colonies Act 1778, which repealed a number of taxes (including the tea tax that underlay this act) as one of a number of conciliatory proposals presented to the Second Continental Congress by the Carlisle Peace Commission. The commission's proposals were rejected. The Act effectively became a "dead letter", but was not formally removed from the books until the passage of the Statute Law Revision Act 1861.