What was the tax percentage paid by colonists to the British at the time of the Boston Tea Party in 1773?

Answer 1

It was completely negligible because the Parliament had repealed all the takes levied on the colonies with the sole exception of a small one on tea. The colonists objection was not to the size of the tax but to its very existence. Having no representation in Parliament, if they granted it the power to tax them at all, then there was nothing to stop a completely negligible level of taxation from becoming utterly ruinous. Michael Montagne

Answer 2

This is a popular but total misunderstanding of the origins and point of the Boston Tea Party (and the often forgotten revolts in other port cities to which the East India Company attempted to deliver tea). The objection was NOT to the LEVEL of this particular tax on tea. In fact, the legislation involved ended up LOWERING the overall price of tea as a means of 'dumping' it upon the American market and helping to bail out the financially strapped East India Company. This act, undercutting the market, would also likely have put many small local American businesses OUT of business (In this way, the distant government in London, which passed all sorts of trade limitations on the colonies, was in a sense seeking to RUN American business for its own ends and benefit... oddly missing the fact that the FREER practices of earlier times - so-called "benign neglect" - had in fact made BOTH the colonies & Britain much more prosperous. That is, their policies, including taxation & trade restrictions, were UNDERCUTTING prosperity of Americans and, indirectly, Britons!) The more general point of this colonial protest, and those that preceded, was to object to the PRINCIPLE of Parliament being able to pass any sort of tax it wished without consulting the colonies.. a piece of the British government (at the King's behest) attempting to assert ITS control over the internal affairs of the colonies, and to do so with no regard to the effects on Americans (and little effort to determine those effects). The fact that the colonies had, for most of their history (up through the end of the French & Indian War), run their OWN affairs -- defended themselves, tried their own criminals, made their own internal improvements and taxed themselves for these services, the salaries of their governors, etc -- and saw Parliament now starting to take away that self-government was the BIGGEST issue and the reason for objecting to the tea tax just as it had been the cause of the successful inter-colonial protests against the Stamp Act. Note also that the "tea party" itself was NOT the main protest. All the port cities refused to allow the ships to unload their tea. Most succeeded in sending the fully laden ships away. But the British-appointed Governor of Massachusetts, whose family stood to gain a lot from the tea sales, refused to let the ships out of Boston Harbor. Only when this could not be resolved and it was discovered that the city would be legally REQUIRED to pay the taxes on the tea after it had been in port a certain number of days was the "tea party" resorted to (the deadline was about the hit at midnight just after the tea party).