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The people of Boston dramatically rejected the Tea Act of 1773. This article imbricates Boston within the intercolonial, transAtlantic, and global networks that sustained its commerce. Like New Yorkers and Philadelphians, Bostoniane smuggled tea and other commodities (sometimes called the "Dutch trade") and joined the colonial nonimportation agreements. Unlike their counterparts, however, some Boston merchants had also violated the agreements by continuing to import British tea. This article argues that Atlantic smugglers trading with the Netherlands and other European nations helped create the conditions for the Boston Tea Part and helped provoke it.
The Boston Tea Party wasn't supposed to happen. In retrospect, it was ironic that the most dramatic rejection of the British East India Company's tea happened in Boston and not in New York City or Philadelphia. Given Boston's prior record of importing British tea, Boston should have been less inclined to host the destruction of the tea shipments on December 16, 1773. To understand why, it is helpful to imbricate Boston within the intercolonial and trans-Atlantic (even global) networks that sustained it. Had it not been for pressure from smugglers in the "Dutch trade" operating in New York City and Philadelphia, Boston might not have put nearly as much effort into its protest against tea. Atlantic smugglers trading with the Dutch and other European nations, as much as any Boston merchant, politician, or shoemaker, created the conditions for the Boston Tea Party and helped provoke it.
In the late 1960s and 1970s social history breathed new life into the study of the American Revolution. The social history of the colonial period flourished amid highly localized "town studies," because a proper understanding of social structures and social change required an in-depth understanding of particular communities. As a result, scholars blazed new trails by interpreting some of the famous events of the Revolutionary era through local lenses.1 In more recent years, quite a few historians have revisited imperial interpretations of the American Revolution, while others have analyzed the late eighteenth-century world from Atlantic and even global perspectives.2
Perhaps no scholarly debate has ignited the study of the American Revolution as much as the question of whether material interests or ideology was the principal motivation for the colonists to launch their protests...