Tea Party----The British government tried to ensure that the East India Company would recover sufficiently to pay back its debts. One of the company’s assets was an immense amount of unsold tea. Instead of just importing the tea to Britain and then letting wholesalers ship it across the Atlantic, the company was granted the right to export the tea itself to Britain’s American colonies. The arrival of this controversial corporation inflamed a flagging protest against Britain’s taxes on tea. The result was the Boston Tea Party of December 1773. Here, Chinese tea bought with Bengali money by a British corporation was dumped in the sea by American patriots dressed as “Indians.” This was globalization 18th-century style. The East India Company’s fall from grace provided a compelling case study for Adam Smith in “The Wealth of Nations.” Smith argued that the impositions placed on European colonies, and the practices of monopoly corporations, had prevented the Age of Discovery from resulting in a generalized spread of commercial benefits. bloomberg/news/2013-03-12/east-india-company-the-original-too-big-to-fail-firm.html
Posted on: Sat, 08 Jun 2013 13:29:11 +0000
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