"Bữa tiệc trà" lịch sử ở Boston

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...In the 1770s, the tea trade was a highly regulated (điều tiết chặt chẽ) global business (kinh doanh toàn cầu). The East India Company, founded in 1600, brought tea to London from China, but it wasn’t allowed to sell direct. It had to auction its tea to middlemen in London, who would then sell it in the colonies. As a result, there was a thriving colonial business of tea merchants, including many key political leaders in port cities across America - men such as John Hancock, who would later become leaders in the revolution (cách mạng). These merchants sold East India tea, but they also sold rival tea, sometimes smuggled (buôn lậu).

The East India Company was a stagnant (đình trệ, đình đốn) and corrupt monopoly (độc quyền). Insiders (người nội bộ) manipulated (thao túng) the company’s stock (cổ phiếu của công ty), and officers used their position in the company to retire with massive wealth, with nouveau riche (giàu xổi) named “Nabobs” buying seats in Parliament. The company was so systemically important to British finance that falls in its stock caused banking crises. It was a Too Big to Fail corporation. By 1772, it was borrowing from the Bank of England to stay afloat.

Prime Minister Lord Frederick North sought to foist the financial problems of this giant corporation onto the colonies with the Tea Act. He allowed the company to sell tea directly to the colonies, instead of on the London auction market. He also gave the corporation the right to ship its tea at a low tax rate, while imposing a tax on those who imported non-company tea. The East India Company would turn into a sort of 1770s version of a chain store.

This seemed like a perfect solution. Company tea would be cheap and irresistible to tea-loving Americans and meddlesome middlemen would get wiped out. What could go wrong? Who didn’t love cheap tea?

But colonists were afraid, because they knew what happened when the company monopolized a trade. In 1769-1770, just a few years before the uprising in Boston, there was a drought in a company-ruled province, the Bengal province in India. During the drought, the corporation continued to collect heavy taxes, control trade in the region and store grains for its own soldiers. Roughly a million people died in the resulting famine. William Bolts, an ex-company merchant, blamed corporate officers who, “after exhibiting such scenes of barbarity (hành động dã man) as can scarcely be paralleled in the history of any country, have returned to England loaded with wealth.”

Across the British empire, including in the far-flung outpost of North America, colonists feared that what happened in Bengal could as easily happen to them. First tea, then more vital materials. But beyond fears over national security, there was more to the resistance to a monopoly organized around cheap tea. Trade, money, and corporate power, was the center of colonial politics.

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