Boston Tea Party
Colonists dressed as Mohawks boarded three East India Company ships and dumped 342 chests of tea into Boston Harbor. The underlying grievance was not the tax. Parliament had granted the nearly bankrupt Company permission to ship tea direct to the colonies at below-market prices, bypassing (and wiping out) colonial tea merchants. The resistance was to a corporate bailout, not a tax.
The Tea Act of 1773 is one of the earliest clear examples of a state using legislation to favor a politically connected corporation at the direct expense of independent domestic merchants. The Sons of Liberty understood this precisely. Their pamphlets cited the Company's debt crisis and political influence, not just the tax.
02 · Central Banks & Chartered Co.
States outsourced finance to joint-stock monopolies. The Bank of England (1694) and the East India Company became quasi-sovereigns — they issued currency, ran armies, and shaped what 'news from abroad' meant in coffeehouses from London to Amsterdam.
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