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The Boston Tea Party was a confrontation over parliamentary authority, taxation and the commercial privileges of the East India Company. The Tea Act of 1773 offered the company a way to sell tea in the colonies on favorable terms while retaining the existing tea duty. To opponents, cheaper tea did not solve the constitutional issue. Buying it could acknowledge Parliament's right to tax, while the company's advantages threatened merchants involved in the trade.
Resistance in several ports prevented tea from being landed. In Boston, Governor Thomas Hutchinson refused to allow the ships to depart without complying with customs requirements. On December 16, 1773, protesters boarded the vessels and destroyed 342 chests of tea in the harbor. Some disguised themselves as Mohawks, an appropriation that did not make the action an Indigenous protest. The destruction targeted a valuable cargo and forced the imperial government to decide how it would respond.
Parliament answered in 1774 with measures known in Britain as the Coercive Acts and by opponents as the Intolerable Acts. Boston's port was closed pending compensation. Massachusetts government was altered to strengthen royal control, and other measures addressed trials of officials and the accommodation of troops. These laws were intended to punish defiance and restore authority. Instead, many colonists outside Massachusetts saw them as a warning that their own political arrangements could also be overridden.
Aid for Boston and opposition to the measures encouraged broader coordination. The First Continental Congress assembled in 1774 as the dispute moved beyond a single town or commodity. Not everyone approved the destruction of private property, and colonial unity remained incomplete. Nevertheless, punishment intended to isolate Massachusetts helped make its grievances an intercolonial cause. The sequence from the Tea Act to the Coercive Acts explains how a commercial policy became a constitutional confrontation and why attempts to enforce imperial obedience accelerated rather than ended resistance. The acts made the future of town meetings and local appointments part of the conflict, widening an argument that had begun around a shipment of tea.
Britannica: Boston Tea Party
Britannica: Intolerable Acts