you, emily.

thanks emily. and thank you all you for being here with us this evening at old south meeting house. so just a few days from now, on saturday, we will be marking 250 years since a very important meeting happened in this space. but we still use the space to convene people in dialog about history, about its legacies, about how it relates to the challenges that we face our country today in our democracy. and i'm so delighted to be here with you to share this program, this conversation with, you.

so our program tonight is about dr. james fichter, his new book, tea consumption, politics and revolution. 1773 to 1776. and we're just really delighted that he chose to be with us as part of a tour of different places that he has been on the last several weeks to talk about this new book and a beautiful book. it is as well. so this lovely book reveals a dimension to the boston tea party by exploring a story largely overlooked for the last 250 years, the fate of two large shipments of east india company tea that survived and were drunk in north america were not tossed into the harbor on that fateful night of december 16, 1773. so dr. viktor's book challenges the prevailing wisdom around the tea protests and consumer boycotts, and shows the economic reality behind the political

rhetoric of the era. colonists did not turn away from tea as they became revolutionary. americans. so history records the protests and the prohibitions of patriots. but the merchant ledgers and other behavior that is unpacked in this lovely book reveal that tea and british goods continue to be widely sold and consumed. so we're going to talk more about that this evening. but first, i want to introduce our guest this evening, dr. james fichter. he is an associate professor of and american studies at the university of hong kong. so he's come long way to be with us this evening. he teaches courses there on maritime history and the revolutionary atlantic. dr. victor is also the author of so great a prophet how the east indies transformed anglo-american capitalism and the editor of british and french colonialism in africa, asia and

the middle east. connected empires the 18th to the 20th centuries. his next monograph suez passage to india, britain, france, the great game at. sea 1798 to 1885 examines the interconnections between the british and french empires in asian waters from napoleon's invasion of egypt in 1798 to the sino-french war in 1885. dr. victor received a b.a. in history and international from brown university in 2001 and a ph.d. from harvard university, our backyard here in 2006. so dr., victor, please come on up and join us us. great. so just a note about our format. so we are going to instead of do

a formal lecture, we thought it might be easier if we could open up the book by having a bit of a conversation. so i'll be sitting here and a discussion with dr. victor to. explore the work and its significance and we're going to make sure that we leave plenty of time at the end for questions from the audience. that's those of you in the room here. but we also have folks who are watching online and through our partners at the gbh forum network. thank so much. and we know that there will also be folks viewing in the future on cc who's also recording the event tonight. so we'll take some questions from the audience. we're going to conclude little bit after 7:00 and we invite all of you who are here in the room to stay for a drink and a bite to eat and to talk with the author. there are copies of the book that you saw. you came in and there will be an opportunity to buy one of those and get it signed by dr. victor. so please do stick around when

we're done. all right. so without any further ado, i'm going to sit here. we're going to take our our little podium away so it's not in the way of the cameras. and we'll get started. so i thought, james, if i may, that we might just start off by inviting you to tell us what led you to this project and help us understand what you see as the contribution that it makes to our understanding of revolutionary america and the events that happened in this room 250 years ago. oh, thank you. yes, i think i came to the project through a bunch of slow realizations along the way that things i thought were true were wrong, and little statements and footnotes weren't right. and a mistakes. and sometimes the lies just kept on adding up piece by piece

until it seemed like a mountain. and i. i needed to work on it as a topic. i think what struck most was looking at newspapers that had big essays in them about how we're never going to drink anymore. tea is terrible. it's the worst thing ever. in the same newspaper, one column over is a tea advertisement. and i just. i struggled with that and i thought, how can i be the first person to have noticed that? what does this mean? how do i draw anything from that and it slowly built from there. so there's a little you have a little bit of a mythbusters instinct there. you you saw things that didn't add up you. you saw the the arguments were made about the time period and in the time period and digging. so what were some of the key sources that opened the story up? you in fresh ways? yeah. in the digging process. that's exactly it. there was a lot of myth and also just overt propaganda the time one of the key sources was newspapers and was the

realization i think often historians, scholarly historians and non scholarly historians both take newspapers to literally that that would descriptions that read like reporting an event that people saw or attended those aren't they don't they have a very similar tude that's a mislead thing and they've been heavily edited. they've been heavily heavily rewritten or simply cooked up to describe an event in a different way. and so that happened enough. and then, of course, this was very useful because newspapers would print each other's news copy. so one newspaper ran to story in massachusetts it's and a newspaper in virginia or south carolina runs it and while other boston fans might know, well, that's not exactly how it happened no one in rhode island, let alone virginia would be able to indict account. and so it became the as a result and so there this i began to realize there was this luring

epidemic basically of press releases that were happening in the news from patriot leaders. and i started to pull on those. and then i really started getting into the merchant accounts and merchant ledgers that revealed such a different story. that's great. so i we're sitting here in old south meetinghouse right? and i think most americans at some point in their lives learned a thing or two about the events that happened in 1773. we have this idea of the boston tea party that has been shaped, reshaped over time. and you've given us an account that helps us understand. that helps, correct some of the impressions that seem to have taken hold in our popular memory time. so one of the i think one of the ideas that many of us carry is that the actions that happened on that night in december of 1773 were sort of acting upon

consensus in the town that the tea should be destroyed, that tea was the was artifact of this imperial struggle should be resisted. but you maybe don't see it quite same way. so i want to ask you two questions. one, help us can you help us understand what folks in this room or in the town of boston might have thought about the tea at that time? december of 1773, but also what is it like to be picking it away? picking away at our at a at an important national myth have what is the experience of being a scholar working in this been for you what to answer the second question first the experience has been very weird. i'm a scholar that lives in another country and so i'm often trying to figure out what what you people here are still

thinking about it because i don't live here. so it is there's a certain distance to it. but then just walking by. yesterday i heard a tour guide outside at the burying ground, giving, talking about this that and consent and some other things that seemed very cooked up to me. and so i thought, well, i'm on the right track. there's still there's still a lot of debunking debunk. but so this consensus question you mentioned earlier definitely the moment of the tea ship's arrival was a peak moment in the political contest in boston. and it was a peak moment because because boston patriots, the sons of liberty, as well as the more polite accept politically acceptable leaders that presented the clean of the patriot movement to the public that it's useful to think of them. and this divided sort of element and you've got sort of a sinn fein type type and then you've got the ira underneath them both agitating toward same goal. but the clean cut politicians

and the paramilitary types underneath them and in in boston, boston patriots had really struggled in the previous several years after the end of the last boycott when up and down the colonies they had agreed, we will we'll stop our boycott of other british goods, but we'll continue our boycott of tea. they were supposed to continue while new yorkers and philadelphians managed this quite successfully. bostonians like virginians. carolinians completely failed and ended up consuming and importing large amounts of tea in 1771 and 1772 and 72, i think about 40% of all the tea that came to north america duty british tea originally purchased in london from an auction from these india company and brought here by private merchants. 40% of that was was coming to boston and that that says that patriots had to have been quite anxious about getting people to subscribe to these political

ideas they had about consuming things because obviously lots of people didn't subscribe to these ideas and they demonstrated that every day when they bought consumer goods that they weren't supposed to buy. and the arrival of this india t presented the possibility of being a final blow in pushing bostonians into more broadly accepting this arrangement. so particularly around this the tea tax which we probably all know this tax that parliament was putting on tea, it had been in place for years. there was no no real concern about establishing a precedent of the tax being in place. it had been in place for half a decade already, and bostonians had been paying it. but the the other problem the patriots had was this issue of consent. so if you don't consent or if you don't want pay this tax, there's a great way to do it. just don't pay any tea. problem solved, right? the tax is not a tax that everyone has to pay all the

time. a tax that's levied on the goods when they're imported and then passed on to the consumer only if he buys it. and so the easiest way to solve this problem is just to tell people don't buy any tea or, just don't buy any duty tea. i mean, the simplest solution, the least amount of work, the amount of trouble. but they obviously knew they couldn't really get away with this. this wouldn't work. and so the real was was that they it was that too many people actually did consent to taxation without representation. it wasn't really a big problem for them. they were happy to pay the tea and that this was their real problem. so what they needed to do was act like a government that imposed its will on everyone in a law, whether you like it or not, you have to obey it. and so this is what the tea party was forcing everyone to not consume it, whether they consented to consume or not. so you're really looking at two

layers of change that are interacting with each other right? a long period of time there are changes in consumption that are bound up with consumer behavior that are really an artifact of culture as it was being shaped in the atlantic world. and then you've got another layer that is the politics that governs consumption, which intersects with an imperial crisis that is reaching a sort of critical impasse. is that right? yeah. so i know that your work is really focused on a this really critical inflection in the 1770s. but for our audience, who who may be just beginning to think their way into these issues, help us understand what the arc of that, the sort of behavioral piece looks like. what how does tea become a favorite in the colonies?

and, you know, how deeply entrenched is it in people's lives? by the time we get to the 1770s? okay. so it's a great question. so if you look at someone like benjamin franklin, who was fairly old by the time of the boston tea party and longer in boston, but you look the arc of his life. people in the 1720s didn't have nice things. there weren't many nice things they could to have. if you look at the material culture of how everyday people lived, the level of furnishings and homes were quite low. the amount of imported consumer goods that people could eat or drink were not very much. but this built over time, over the 50 years that followed by the time in the 1770s. is this growing consumer culture that north american colonists, the british colonies, north america can engage. it's about having nicer furniture, imported furniture, perhaps even from elsewhere, if you're wealthy, but a proper tables and chairs and cabinets

and cupboards that their ancestors may not have had, it may simply have been a stool and a table may have been. and as some sort of a have made bed may have been, all they had newly made linens, sheets that could have been woven in a mill in lancaster rather than lancaster share in england rather than made at home. you can be having imported drinks. madeira coffee, tea in greater amounts than your father or your mother or your grandparents have. and so the problem one of the problems of the boycotts in 1770s is it's saying now that we can have things, you can't have nice things and life is still a bit nasty, a bit brutish, a bit short. in the 1770s. and so it's these things that make it endurable for people. and so it's hard to take them away, right? yeah, i we as we we do we meet a lot of visitors to our the old south meeting house, the old state house every year.

who here to learn about the revolution and i find i often have to remind visitors that the revolution is only a part of people's lives. right? they're living full lives. they're navigating the day to day of of their family's activities, their communities activities, and it's not all politics the time, even though the the noise of politics is outside all the time. so we had a little hint of how that the tension between that political layer and the cultural piece might have intersected here in boston. but boston is not all of north america right much. i mean, i hate to break it to all of us who are here in boston. but there are other colonies out there. you you start the book with a chapter that's the tea party that wasn't which is about what happened down in charleston, south carolina, because tea ships went to many different

ports. right so can you just give us a little bit of a glimpse of how things may have played out differently in other places? what happened in south carolina? yes, boston was very strange it was the only city that had a big fight over the tea that it couldn't resolve all the other places the tea ships went. they found a resolution, some sort of coming to terms between the local customs officials, the and the governor, the tea merchants that were set to receive it, and the sons of liberty and the patriot organization in south carolina. the tea shipped arrived christopher gadsden, the sons of liberty campaigned against it and they had a huge meeting in the exchange, which was large building that housed customs house facilities on the ground floor and above was the main meeting hall. it served the same political purposes this old southwood and they resolved that they were definitely going to let the tea in and wow, the firebrands and

politicians signs were yakking away upstairs in the great hall of the exchange south carolina merchants unloaded duty british tea off of the that had these india company tea so not the company's tea but other private parcels of duty tea paid the duty at the customs house underneath, while the politicians are still talking upstairs, put them in carts and, carried them to their shops and offered them for sale. and the talking politicians only work this out. several days later. so this was not the greatest success. and then they went around after this meeting and started asking merchants to sign a boycott, saying or sign a pledge. they wouldn't sell duty till the merchants kept on finding ways to be at the shop. when the campaigners came by or to say, we'll come back tomorrow. i, i haven't really made a decision yet and they did their best and then they did what all people do when they want to throw a spanner in a public meeting. they then cast doubt on what the previous had even agreed to do. right. this is this is what you do when

you want to mess up your board meeting. right. you do exactly like that. so that's what the merchants did and eventually, despite all their struggles, they met the patriots in south carolina, held on. they got the agreement to have the tea shop land tea landed. but the end for the local merchants to wash their hands of it, which happened. but the merchants couldn't the ship back and so the collector sees the tea, the 20 day deadline, the exact sort of 20 day deadline that the boston party was trying to avoid happening. he sees the tea he impounded for nonpayment of the duty, locked it up in the exchange, and it stayed there without any trouble right that that in boston they were worried that if they locked it up in the king's customs warehouse that it would then be broken open. people would steal the tea or, that merchants would unloaded and sell it to the. but in south carolina they managed to come to a term sort of terms for the customs collector.

i suspect in many of these ports, what happened is, you the merchants, many of them patriotic, offer a bit of a bribe to the customs. and so he knew how this job worked. he knew we had to come to some sort of modus vivendi with them, and they with him. so he impounded it and he never offered it for sale. and that was the problem. i saw no conflict, no struggle, no tears, no revolution. well, a good reminder that the whole world was not boston in the 1770s, right? but even in boston, events happened that are not consistent with the memory that we have kept of this moment. you spend a little bit of energy trying to chase the fourth g ship, right? which will make its way into the harbor. tell a little bit about the story of the william and why it matters. the william is a fascinating story. so the east india company hired or has shipped its t en separate ships. the dartmouth the eleanor the

beaver and the william. and they arrived in they arrived a massachusetts in that order. and three of them arrived in boston properly. the dartmouth, the eleanor and the beaver fine, the william hit a storm and wrecked off of cape cod and it wrecked on december 11th. now, that could have been the of it. it's hard to imagine that crates full of tea are going to survive a shipwreck. it would have been a tea already, you'd think. but it wasn't the ships, the ships cargo was salvaged. and so one of the east india merchants with handling the east india companies affairs in boston, we call them the consignees one of the consignees got on his horse and rode out to the cape and sorted this out. he found some men to salvage the tea and he paid them in tea from. the williams consignment too, for labor, which was no small feat and potentially quite a dangerous job to be salvaging this off of the rocks the ship had wrecked. and of course, rocks and waves in a storm are dangerous places.

so we paid them in tea and after several days, he finally found another ship captain dumb enough. take the tea on board and bring it into town and. then he brought it to castle william, which is fort independence here, and which was then a free on a free standing island in the harbor. and so he didn't bring it into boston town itself. he didn't bring up to griffins wharf. he knew better than that. and the result was he got it lodged in the castle, safely under lock and key again of the customs officials. they it, they impounded it. they had the key it. but then their room was now a castle that was by the 64th regiment that was surrounded by stone walls. that was surrounded by an ocean that had the royal navy. it so it was much more secure than the king's warehouse in town. and it stayed there for the next several for the next year and a half. and for the longest time, i could not figure out what happened to it. no one had figured out. i think most people assumed

disappeared because the british blew up the castle when they evacuated in march of 1776. and so if the tea if the tea were still there, then it would have been blown up. and so there was there was a real possibility of that. and i kept on digging, trying to find out what happened. i thought, oh, i just if i can't find anything, the best guess is it boom so. but then eventually, after checking everything, after military records and checking private correspondence and this and that on a lark looking for something else was looking through, of course, the east india company records and they're not for 74 wherever in looks but from 1775 where no one bothered to check there was record of receiving payment for the tea from the william after it had been sold in boston. it was sold. boston was had been liberated by the british from patriot rule and where british were british loyalist massachusetts. massachusetts was had evacuated from the rest of the countryside

and fled boston. so the city population had collapsed from about 13000 to 2 or 3000 people, plus the royal navy personnel and the soldiers. but these people were now free from patriot government and the patriots in the countryside, free from the loyalists. so they had both gotten rid of each other and now in this market, suddenly there were consumers who would buy it. and so that's when i finally got sold. the that's such a great story and i want to invite you just to take a moment to tell us what that felt like personally, to find those records right. that's not something that happens all the time. right. here's something that nobody else has been able to down. you've spent a ton of time looking for it. you've given up the search and then you stumble across it in a place where you weren't expecting to find it. that must have been amazing. it was. and it was very anticlimactic, too, because the clerk that wrote down the note didn't know that i was going to care and.

so it was just a prosaic giveaway line or two in this big ledger. and i think also, annoyingly, the the it was in the minutes book of the east india company directors meetings and they had lost the index the beginning. everyone was too lazy to read the because it's like a thousand pages long. so what you is you just look under a for america or agents in america and you go to the pages that have been very carefully indexed for you. you just read those. but a was missing and like everyone skipped it because it wasn't worth doing. so i just thought, well, i have a day, just read this whole thing and i found it. and so there it is. kudos you. that's amazing. all i want to come back to the tension between the culture and the politics of consumption. you have a very provocative actively titled chapter called tea's sex, which explores women's place in both the the culture of tea consumption, the

politics of it. tell us a little bit more about that. i mean, was was drinking tea heavily feminized used in this moment? or is this a where views of sort of gendering of tea changes. so there's yes to so we have no evidence whatsoever that men or women drank tea at different amounts there's no proof that women drank t more or men drank tea left less. well we kind of had this american cultural assumption that tea drinking a somehow slightly feminine activity and i can never quite put my finger on it and a lot of people will say, no, not really. but then some people nod their heads as i see you're doing and yes, i've heard this, i sense this. people will say that's certainly not the case in england or or i think in canada. so. so one thing that i sort notice is first, we can't really prove was a difference in consumption.

what we do know, what really mattered in terms of a difference was that in terms of formal serving in a polite formal setting, a woman would usually be in charge of serving the tea a table, hence the the british expression and who will be mother who will pour the tea. right. but that's that suggests female leadership, not necessarily female like demographic dominance of tea drinking. so this reflects female leadership in the domestic space of the household at home. this reflects a woman's decision making to about what consumer goods to buy at the shop. and so you will find if you look at merchant ledgers, very rarely do women's names appear as the consumer of goods because they're buying it under their husband's accounts. and so, you know, you wouldn't have your name would appear if your your spouse goes and buys the tea. okay. so actually, women are making

all these consumer decisions. and so women's decision to support a boycott by not buying tea actually becomes a very important element of the story. and on one level is very attractive for us as historians to find to see a way in which women can be engaging in politics right there, making these decisions. but at the same time, it definitely gets heavily gendered because patriots start writing all these poems and jokes, essays and stories about women giving up tea and the gist they have of it is something along lines. of course, often the right in a male will write in as a woman under a female surname, and he'll say, well, know, i'm just a weak woman and i can barely control my or my emotions. but you know, even i've managed to give up tea. so what what does that say to you men who still drink it. so they were basically cooking other people into giving up tea. and to say it crudely.

and so that was that's political activism, right? that's propaganda that's not reality of how people actually behaved or drank. right. and it but it it begs the again, about policing behavior and who polices and who is policed. i wonder we can invite you to to share a little bit of your thinking about boycotts in general, right? i imagine, i mean, these questions about polices consumption and, purchasing decisions and that sort of thing have come up over, over in many different circumstances across time. and you've probably thought about so what are your thoughts about whether boycotts are success awful, what are your thoughts about what it takes to make a successful and how can help us understand this period

in the larger sweep of this of political movement across time that's a big question. it is so like part the thing is the boycotts are often confused with prohibitions or sanctions, a boycott be a voluntary solicitation of people to not do something whereas a prohibition like the prohibition on alcohol is a government that it doesn't invite you join. it mandates you join. and and so it bleeds these two issues bleed into each other. there's one boycott in the american well, one one government ban. and the american we never consider as such. that is the boston import act, which was basically the british government putting sanctions on the town of boston until it conformed to some other event. and that act was a complete disaster because it didn't provide any end date, it just said the port of boston is closed until boston pays or

massachusetts which pays for the tea and massachusetts never pays the port will stay closed forever. now, that's clearly you need to have some sort of it'll be closed 30 days as a punishment that would have been a more functional way because then you can declare victory and be done after 30 days whereas if you have a boycott, if you have a closure of the port and you say, oh, and it'll stay closed until you pay, then basically that gives the decision making about when this conflict ends over to the other side and that's often true with boycotts, right? if you're boycotting something and you declare that your boycott is to last in until. there is a change in policy of whatever it is you're boycotting, then all the real decision making is now on the other side about whether they will change policy to adapt to your requests and boycotts as voluntary actions are very tiring. people are not necessarily as motivated as. they may be on day one or day 30

or day 100 are going to be a lot less motivated on year three or year five to carry on with the boycott. sometimes they will be, but they need to be spurred on, continuously encouraged and renewed in their energy and vigor. and that needs constant and that is hard. and so boycotts have sort of a natural decay that goes on to and this boycott. so in the american revolution after that the boston tea party eventually continental congress declared that they would ban trade with britain and ban the consumption tea. so a ban, not a boycott. and this this and this ban that they declared eventually everyone started violating it. so much that it was completely untenable and they ended it. but it was not politically embarrassing because had moved on by the time they ended it. the war was well, well, ongoing

and it mattered a lot more. whether you fought a bunker hill. it did about what you drank afterwards. and so that boycott collapsed. but it didn't cause any problems because the tensions have moved on. well, if you don't have something else, distract people from after the boycott, then it can be quite embarrassing. and the previous of the early 1770s had collapsed for under that reason. so it's striking how hard. it is to make them work. but i think the best example of a boycott that worked well that i can think of is the montgomery bus boycott. that's a boycott where the consumers, the people, the bus tickets were right there locally impinging on the bus companies business by not driving that and they could see whether it was working day by day when you have boycotts are far away where you're boycotting another or boycotting a large with a headquarters. thousands of miles away, it's much harder have any real impact

i think for to be at best it has be local so that it can have real real impact that's yeah very helpful thank you. and i think the point about it being local is, is is very astute, but there was, of course, even even the boycotts of the 1770s where there was an ocean and it's a wide there are local. yes. so you are in your town or in your you are arrayed with a variety of, different opinions. and so tell us a little bit about some of examples you uncovered people's behavior trying navigate the calls or the bans on the behavior that was consuming t how did people navigate that if they chose not to abide by the call to not to

consume t how did make the case for drinking tea in ways that would not redound to them politically? well, there were of there were a lot of people who just sort of said one thing and did another because to join the association, as everyone asked to do, someone would go around town with the sign up sheet and you would sign to your pledge that you would support this. and of course, when you looked at the sheet and you saw that your neighbor had just signed, you realized that other neighbor down the road was going see whether your name was on the list or not the list, because you're free to not sign. but we all know you didn't sign. we'll boycott you for not signing, so you're not really free not to sign, but so you just signed then no one checks. there's no police checking. you and your house loyalists put out lots of scare stories about how there will be people going around to people's houses, checking what they do know. no patriot leadership was quite clever. might they said, you know, sign

this and not going to ask any questions what you actually do because we're too smart for that we're going to take your pledge at its word and not really follow up on it as long as you agree to the concept that we're in charge, we really don't care what you do at home privately and quietly. but then if people needed to buy more tea could be a problem. so one thing they did was they would go to patriot leaders and say, i need special permission to buy some tea. and one of the best ways to do that the boycott was to say, i'm sick and so i need a special medical to get tea. i mean, i know it's against the but i'm sick, so i need some tea. and we see this there are a number of these a survi from connecticut little permission slips individual we see them virginia from north carolina from south carolina from maryland these are widespread that people throughout the colonies without any coordination knew that they could ask for medical and that it would be sufficiently plausible to people because t

was thought to be vaguely somehow medicinal apothecaries would stock in their shops. okay you can have you can have some tea so you can have a quarter pound you can have half a pound. and then they worked out that the best thing to do was to get medical permission in another town so that they wouldn't know the people in your town might know you weren't sick, so you would go to the neighboring town and ask for permission and they wouldn't know you. and then you would get the tea from a merchant there. sounds vaguely familiar. you recent consumption debates? yeah. yeah, well there's a there's a lot we can find in the past that helps us understand the in new ways. right. i can we come back to the boston tea party given where are sitting and so we talked earlier how things play out differently in south carolina we've talked a little bit about how our understanding what happened in

boston is not really happened. we've we've that memory in some way can you help us understand why we've ended up with this myth that surrounds the tea party when when does that shape and and how can it help us tend to to read your book to to have this information as we navigate moment of sort of remembering, hmm it takes shape in waves and the first wave is in 1774 right after the boston tea party. so the tea party is inadequate. they only destroy three of the four cargos, but it also excessive because many in boston, even some in boston and many outside boston, including noted people like benjamin franklin and george washington disapproved of the violence of the tea party itself. they preferred a more peaceful

as it happened in new york or philadelphia, where they just got the ships to turn around or in south carolina. and so it was very divisive. in early 1774, about how people felt about even patriots quite concerned about the tea party and you see descriptions of the tea party patriot leadership that sounds lot like what governor hutchinson was saying about it. patriot leaders and other colonies, because they found it quite distasteful. but then what happens is this fourth cargo is stuck in william and it's not landed for sale but it could be landed any time. and of course, is the problem that the bostonians were particular poorly noted drinkers of, taxed tea and so landing it might find it tea like this might find sale and it might be a problem and so it needs to be kept. and so this forces boston to be

more and continuously radical after the boston tea party the tea party is remembered as a one and done, we destroyed this and that's problem solved. but the problem is it wasn't done. there were still and destroyed. t there and it had the risk of being a unique risk of being consumed compared to many other colonies and therefore they needed to keep the population stirred up. so all these controversies that come in early 74 about judges salaries being drawn from the customs administration and these are trumped up controversies to keep people riled up and concerned, to keep maybe keep judges from being involved in the courts and so forth as well, but this is a way to keep the tea out, keep the tea merchants that are handling out of town as well as best possible them away from town so they can't land tea and then notably there is no discussion of the tea from the william. it just sort of it's mentioned in newspaper item or two and then it just disappears i wouldn't say it's a cover up, it's just polite and thoughtful decision.

never to talk about it again. and then because it's not talked about other start to forget about it now boston remembers it though and it's threatening throughout the year. and so remembering the triumph of the three tea ships is really important because it covers up the failure about the fourth tea ship. right. but in fact, reality is this hammer and anvil dynamic where it is the the violence of the three ships that causes a a response from england, from the british government. but it is the that fourth cargo that's here that it impossible for colonists in boston to accept the port act. the port act said you to pay for the tea and allow normal trade to continue or that would mean allowing the tea from the william to get sold. and so basically colonists realize, oh could just keep if we don't pay for the tea from the first three cargoes then british government will keep the tea from the william out of boston for us by just keeping

the port closed and we can say we're victims. and so this becomes a much more convenient, politically useful. and that's the narrative that's going on. by the second half of 1774. so when we began write and tell stories about it, the william see disappears entirely because well, i mean, took 250 years to figure out what happened to because no one in the patriot movement had anything more to do with it. none of the records. they kept talking about it. none. the records from the consignees or the merchants it either. so it's just sort of disappears from the story but it's that impact between those two that are really driving events. that's fascinating. so i think the traditional narrative of the aftermath of the tea party is destruction of the tea provokes an overreaction on the part of parliament in the ministry. the not only the poor act, but the massachusetts government act, abrogation of representative government. that is what tips the town and the province of massachusetts.

open rebellion ultimately. you're saying that a missed piece of the puzzle is the the lingering about how to ensure that that additional cargo of tea is not brought into town and sold and the whole works be scuttled in that way right because if you imagine first you've got if you're in the position of the boston committee of correspondence the respective half of the patriot movement that's writing to other towns and other colonies, first you've got the problem of it looks because your tea party is violent and other people aren't too happy with it, then imagine if you also had the problem of despite excessive violence, people still drank the darn tea, right? this would be cratering to your political legitimacy at a time when the boston committee is still functioning as the central that's connecting the other committees together. so the south carolinians are not writing so much to new york and philadelphia, they're writing to

boston and the philadelphians are writing to boston and the connecticut ers are writing to boston. they're not writing to each other yet. they're that comes with the formation of congress and the creation of these new bonds. so there's this moment between the tea party and the seating of the first continental congress where boston is uniquely this communications node. and if they were then embarrassed by being as they been four years earlier, a complete failure on the t non consumption on importation front. this would corrode the legitimacy any claim that boston shouldn't pay the t to get the port act open. it should be simplest solution of the whole problem and that in fact paying for the t was one of the things that congress took up as a potential response to all of this. and could well have been a step forward. you've us so much to think about here and there. i know plenty more that we could that we could talk about in the

book. but i want to be respectful of our audience here and make sure that we reserve a little bit of time for any questions you all may have. so, emily, who opened the program, has a microphone since we are recording, make sure that if you have a question, raise hand and wait until emily brings you the those of you who are watching this live through gbh forum network. if you submit questions, there's an opportunity for us also to capture those and and emily can read them for for james. yep. it looks like we have a question already from remote viewers, so i will read that as it's coming in here and i see we have someone in person here with a question. so from one of our gbh viewers is the question is in of this commodity history that contributed, what other trends

are emerging in the study of colonial and revolutionary consume our history or america consumer history broadly. hmm so american this story of consumer history in this period been long been fraught by this debate about whether there was this consume more revolution this big growth and consumption. it's a very unresolved and i dare and stake a claim but i think one of the one of the big trends that's going on is our ability to use consumer history to talk about average everyday people right and so there has long an old fashioned trend in american history to talk about the contributions of everyday people and their contributions to events like the american revolution and consumer history material culture is a great way to get at exactly that to get at the material world of everyday and how they contributed. that seems to me like the biggest trend of this material

history got it. got it. thank you. and i saw a hand here. thank you. i was interested in the connection. your evaluation of the tea party, the tea boycott as a tactic before revolt actually happened to the montgomery boycott and. one of the things i'm curious about is. how much strategy to the revolutionary or the patriots, how were we defined them, took to defining their boycott because the montgomery bus boycott was it was very successful and one of its defining things is people need to see people suffering that when people took the choice not to get on the bus, they had to

walk or they had to pull together, do. right. so they couldn't just go home and hide what what they doing. and so the dr. king and bayard rustin, who was the main organizer of it, actually, that they really wanted people be seen having to take the stand and. was that a tactic that ever kind of was of the tea boycott or were there other variations because a way the way your it at least from what i'm hearing, i haven't read the book yet. it seemed like it was more of a you know, it wasn't a really thought tactic of how to make a boycott. yeah, that's a that's a great. so i would say there's three pieces that made that the montgomery boycott especially distinctive to what's going on here. one is the local element that we already now that's obviously related what you mentioned which is the visibility of it right. and a visibility where you're you're you're seeing people walking down the road or ride

sharing and it's visible and everyday thing. so that's not just it's not only seeing people suffer, but also seeing people. it's like watching people on a picket, right? you're seeing people in action opposing the bus. right. but the third element is, is that like black ridership was a really big part. the bus companies business, and they couldn't keep the business without black riders, at least not for more than about a year. so that's very different from the east india company, which doesn't need north american consumers at all. actually, it's just fine without north american consumers. and there's this fantasy in talking about the american revolution and the boycott that american consumers are often we're often imagined to be by contemporary americans, be way more important than they were the british popular notion outnumbered the north american population. in 4 to 1. so there were also many regions of north america that were less

had less wealth and less annual income than many regions of britain, which of course also had a lot of class differences within it. but british consumers could consume more per capita. they consumed tea per capita than north american consumers, not because they like timore, but because were richer. so the whole logic we will not consume tea in british goods is like, well, so what? not the big, you're not the main market, it's and so the other thing they boycott british manufactured products about a little more than a third of what's imported into north america at the before the boycott is british cloth but the mills in manchester and birmingham like it's a shame to lose the american but they don't really need it can continue selling to british consumers just fine to irish consumers. well and about the strategy so the whole boycott is becomes like so many boycotts it becomes about organizing internally for

your movement than it really does about effecting change. so it unites people together, people see each other agreeing to this one of the other things they often do with the boycott is send relief to boston and the port act. so cities like charleston, south carolina, will send rice and people drovers will be driving their sheep to boston to feed the population. and that can be seen as is being right and that has meaning. and in boston's committee is very thoughtful and send thank you notes to all of the cities contribute food and it's run and all the local newspapers. thank you for your contributions. that makes a real sense of common cause between people, as does the boycotting. but the boycott has no impact economically on britain. it's themed or it's framed as though it's going to affect the 1774 parliamentary election. but that happened before the boycott took effect. so election was over. you couldn't really affect it and everyone responded the boycott the same way. they said, oh no, there's going to be another boycott. quick, let's up extra on things

and. so they bought all extra supplies like everybody did with covid, right? they stocked up on junk and then, well, the merchants were fine. they had just sold more than they normally would in a year because everyone bought up their 1775 supplies early. so it had very little on the british economy. and so this logic of will use the north american economy to affect the british economy, to affect british politics just completely fell apart. if there even was a real logic there can. i just ask a just a follow up just invite you to clarify so i think i hear you saying as an economic strategy yeah. the the boycott and prohibition fail. yeah. they're really not exerting enough they're not effective enough to pressure political pressure. but as a as a mechanism for for for developing commitment on the part of the individual to

collective cause they're fabulous. they may have successful. so question for you. are there sources from the time period where that is made or is this insight that we have as looking back that may not have been clear at the time? i don't think anyone at the time they were in the association its bans on trade with britain, whereas really clear on how things are going to play out. there was a sense that maybe this ability have economic impact on britain was limited and perhaps local things would matter more but the the way local politics out. one of the tricks with the the boycott that puts out is framed in its associations the association completely bypasses the colonies it says congress asked the local towns or parishes or counties whatever whatever organization you have in your to go implement this on their own and. it's completely open ended.

and so it allows for a lot of local variation as virginia politics or georgia politics or or new hampshire politics proceeds in very, very different ways. thank you. additional questions. yes, another question over here. thank you very much. could you just comment a little bit on the the concept of what i think you call the tax loss tea and the the dutch tea, the the smuggle tea, whatever the words what is and its relationship to the boycott and whether you feel at all there was any conspiracy to stop that taxed coming in because those people who were part of the patriot cause also interested in in receiving the revenue from tax loss tea. way i lost you at the end. the concepts of the conspiracy theory you know as such that

suggests that hancock and others were interested in making sure that the british tea didn't arrive in order and was unloaded in order that he could sell and b receive the benefit dutch tea and other teas were being. that's not a conspiracy theory. that's a mainstream historical argument. but secondly on your use of conspiracy, it's a very good word, because the north american radical movement was a conspiracy that's the main conspiracy going on. that is the main political conspiracy it's a seditious criminal conspiracy with a paramilitary terrorist wing and it that's uncomfortable to. think about a lot of times that way. but that's the main conspiracy that's going on that the moneymaking part of it is a bit on the side. but, you know, it's more useful. lots of people in the patriot movement weren't merchants. most them weren't merchants. so what you really have is merchants and businessmen who see an opportunity and will take advantage of it. john hancock and sold lots of on

duty smuggled tea from the netherlands. he also imported sold lots of duty tax tea britain so he was like any good merchant or any good politician, a liar, a cheat and a hypocrite. so i think that makes him a great american by default, right? diversify his business lines. oh, yes, yes, of course yes. all right. i saw another hand over here. hello. this is very interesting. thank you. you mentioned that as a result, the tea party there was this over reaction by britain and that ultimately caused the massachusetts population to decide to go in support of the revolution. so i'm wondering now have you noticed in your research? what what was the goal the end

game for the or advisors of the tea party. was that really the end goal that they saw that happening or was it just to inflict damage? i say that, hey, you don't get the tax money and b, you don't get the revenue because of the is in the tea company was a british crown thing or was it just to say you know you know we don't want it or was it just simply one of these things that popped up with no real engagement mine like, the rodney king riots or something like that. people just had i don't think there was an end game. now, i would say caution that you senior company was not a crown thing. it separate business. it did. it was licensed by the crown and it paid taxes to the crown. but it a separate line. but yeah. was i don't see it as any clear long term plan. there was the short term problem of if the tea isn't destroyed. they clearly preferred to just it sent back to england. that was their preferred outcome. but my governor hutchinson, the

consignees the customs officers, they knew that this was a pressure point put on the patriots and to say we won't we won't let you send it back and the patriots because if you think about it, the tea ships, the party is weird. the tea ships didn't all arrive the same time the first three arrived in a staggered. and so this means that the 20 day countdown only applied the dartmouth the the eleanor had several more days to go and the beaver had another week after that before its 20 days would be over. and so what everyone's thinking is what do about the dartmouth is going to define what we can do about the eleanor so if if the if hutchinson had the dartmouth leave then he would have no ground to stand on for not letting the eleanor go and if patriots the tea from the dartmouth be landed they would have no ground to stand on for preventing the eleanor's tea from being landed as well. so they were both stuck in this game chicken about the 20 day

deadline on the eleanor that's really all they were focusing on they could basically bluffing other into trying to win everything if you win on that if you win on the dartmouth the eleanor and the beaver fall in line and that was i think as far as it went. any more questions from our audience here? let me go over here one moment. hello. thank you so much for the talk. it's been very interesting in regards to your chapter on the tea sex, in your research, you find any instances, women gaining any sort political agency during this time especially with the tea being boycotted as well as of the british manufacturing where women were making their own clothes things that more so going outside of their own

domestic sphere i think is what i'm thinking about in terms of political agency. yes, that's a it's a great question. i think the most striking place where i see consistent running political political by women is in south carolina, where you have women writing or maybe i assume they're women, although it's possible these are men writing under female. you never really know writing about a boycotting t and the political organization and the need for women to suppress, to support their fellow englishmen that they refer to their husbands as englishmen in this period, in this boycott movement. so worth noting that the limit of american nationalism. however, i would caution on that i'm a suspicious of that because if the end result of that is that women are choosing to or not to by woven cloth from the shop and instead choosing to

weave at home. that's a very funny kind of political agency that says i politically choose to wait for women have agency outside the home because as they are politically choosing to go back home and more housework that that is and we tend to write that a sort of a women's empowerment and i find that an interesting women's empowerment storyline. women are empowering themselves to do more domestic chores. that's but yeah. so but again, it may be true, right? it may it may well make sense. people tell themselves all sorts of things that it doesn't have to make sense just because they told themselves it. well, that is all of the time that we have this evening. so i want to thank our audience being here. i want to thank our audience that's joining us via the forum network for, being with us this evening. i want to thank for being here to to film this program as well. and i want to make sure that i invite you all to join me in,

dr. victor, for being here with us. thank