Defiance of the Patriots: The Boston Tea Party and the Making of America

Edward Countryman, Defiance of the Patriots: The Boston Tea Party and the Making of America, Journal of American History, Volume 98, Issue 2, September 2011, Pages 506–507, https://doi.org/10.1093/jahist/jar216

Extract

The time is ripe for a fresh study of how Bostonians destroyed East India Company tea at the end of 1773. Defiance of the Patriots provides that account and much more. Benjamin L. Carp rehearses the familiar story, last told by Benjamin Labaree (The Boston Tea Party, 1979), in a broad, fresh context. He takes no side on the current political appropriation of the Boston events, but he shows that the Boston Tea Party long ago became an American political icon, open to all sorts of meanings. He also suggests that it is full of tragic ambiguity, rather than just a tale of heroes and villains.

The tea party's conventional image is of a local event that had very large consequences. Carp shows that it never was local in any sense. It emerged from a global web of connections, and it altered the terms of imperial conflict. Where did the tea come from? What do its origins and marketing reveal about late colonial life? What did tea, like coffee and chocolate, signify to the women and men who drank it? How did drinking tea tie freeborn Bostonians to sugar-producing slaves? Why was the East India Company too important to fail? How did Boston's leaders find themselves trapped in a situation in which they either raised the ante in the politics of transatlantic protest or looked like craven cowards to their counterparts (and rivals) in New York and Philadelphia? Why could they and local imperial officials not resolve the issue? How did the leaders deal with the ordinary Bostonians who gathered as “the Body” in Old South Church and with the faux Mohawks who boarded the ships and destroyed a large, valuable trove of property that was not theirs? Finally, who actually destroyed the tea?