You, emily. Thanks emily. And thank you all you for being here with us this evening at old south meeting house. So just a few days from now, on saturday, we will be marking 250 years since a very important meeting happened in this space. But we still use the space to convene people in dialog about history, about its legacies, about how it relates to the challenges that we face our country today in our democracy. And im so delighted to be here with you to share this program, this conversation with, you. So our program tonight is about dr. James fichter, his new book, tea consumption, politics and revolution. 1773 to 1776. And were just really delighted that he chose to be with us as part of a tour of different places that he has been on the last several weeks to talk about this new book and a beautiful book. It is as well. So this lovely book reveals a dimension to the Boston Tea Party by exploring a story largely overlooked for the last 250 years, the fate of two large shipments of east India Company tea that survived and were drunk in north america were not tossed into the harbor on that fateful night of december 16, 1773. So dr. Viktors book challenges the prevailing wisdom around the tea protests and consumer boycotts, and shows the economic reality behind the political rhetoric of the era. Colonists did not turn away from tea as they became revolutionary. Americans. So history records the protests and the prohibitions of patriots. But the merchant ledgers and other behavior that is unpacked in this lovely book reveal that tea and British Goods continue to be widely sold and consumed. So were going to talk more about that this evening. But first, i want to introduce our guest this evening, dr. James fichter. He is an associate professor of and american studies at the university of hong kong. So hes come long way to be with us this evening. He teaches courses there on maritime history and the revolutionary atlantic. Dr. Victor is also the author of so great a prophet how the east indies transformed angloamerican capitalism and the editor of british and french colonialism in africa, asia and the middle east. Connected empires the 18th to the 20th centuries. His next monograph suez passage to india, britain, france, the great game at. Sea 1798 to 1885 examines the interconnections between the british and french empires in asian waters from napoleons invasion of egypt in 1798 to the sinofrench war in 1885. Dr. Victor received a b. A. In history and international from Brown University in 2001 and a ph. D. From harvard university, our backyard here in 2006. So dr. , victor, please come on up and join us us. Great. So just a note about our format. So we are going to instead of do a formal lecture, we thought it might be easier if we could open up the book by having a bit of a conversation. So ill be sitting here and a discussion with dr. Victor to. Explore the work and its significance and were going to make sure that we leave plenty of time at the end for questions from the audience. Thats those of you in the room here. But we also have folks who are watching online and through our partners at the gbh Forum Network. Thank so much. And we know that there will also be folks viewing in the future on cc whos also recording the event tonight. So well take some questions from the audience. Were going to conclude little bit after 7 00 and we invite all of you who are here in the room to stay for a drink and a bite to eat and to talk with the author. There are copies of the book that you saw. You came in and there will be an opportunity to buy one of those and get it signed by dr. Victor. So please do stick around when were done. All right. So without any further ado, im going to sit here. Were going to take our our little podium away so its not in the way of the cameras. And well get started. So i thought, james, if i may, that we might just start off by inviting you to tell us what led you to this project and help us understand what you see as the contribution that it makes to our understanding of revolutionary america and the events that happened in this room 250 years ago. Oh, thank you. Yes, i think i came to the project through a bunch of slow realizations along the way that things i thought were true were wrong, and little statements and footnotes werent right. And a mistakes. And sometimes the lies just kept on adding up piece by piece until it seemed like a mountain. And i. I needed to work on it as a topic. I think what struck most was looking at newspapers that had big essays in them about how were never going to drink anymore. Tea is terrible. Its the worst thing ever. In the same newspaper, one column over is a tea advertisement. And i just. I struggled with that and i thought, how can i be the first person to have noticed that . What does this mean . How do i draw anything from that and it slowly built from there. So theres a little you have a little bit of a mythbusters instinct there. You you saw things that didnt add up you. You saw the the arguments were made about the time period and in the time period and digging. So what were some of the key sources that opened the story up . You in fresh ways . Yeah. In the digging process. Thats exactly it. There was a lot of myth and also just overt propaganda the time one of the key sources was newspapers and was the realization i think often historians, scholarly historians and non scholarly historians both take newspapers to literally that that would descriptions that read like reporting an event that people saw or attended those arent they dont they have a very similar tude thats a mislead thing and theyve been heavily edited. Theyve been heavily heavily rewritten or simply cooked up to describe an event in a different way. And so that happened enough. And then, of course, this was very useful because newspapers would print each others news copy. So one newspaper ran to story in massachusetts its and a newspaper in virginia or South Carolina runs it and while other boston fans might know, well, thats not exactly how it happened no one in rhode island, let alone virginia would be able to indict account. And so it became the as a result and so there this i began to realize there was this luring epidemic basically of press releases that were happening in the news from patriot leaders. And i started to pull on those. And then i really started getting into the merchant accounts and merchant ledgers that revealed such a different story. Thats great. So i were sitting here in old south meetinghouse right . And i think most americans at some point in their lives learned a thing or two about the events that happened in 1773. We have this idea of the Boston Tea Party that has been shaped, reshaped over time. And youve given us an account that helps us understand. That helps, correct some of the impressions that seem to have taken hold in our popular memory time. So one of the i think one of the ideas that many of us carry is that the actions that happened on that night in december of 1773 were sort of acting upon consensus in the town that the tea should be destroyed, that tea was the was artifact of this imperial struggle should be resisted. But you maybe dont see it quite same way. So i want to ask you two questions. One, help us can you help us understand what folks in this room or in the town of boston might have thought about the tea at that time . December of 1773, but also what is it like to be picking it away . Picking away at our at a at an Important National myth have what is the experience of being a scholar working in this been for you what to answer the second question first the experience has been very weird. Im a scholar that lives in another country and so im often trying to figure out what what you people here are still thinking about it because i dont live here. So it is theres a certain distance to it. But then just walking by. Yesterday i heard a tour guide outside at the burying ground, giving, talking about this that and consent and some other things that seemed very cooked up to me. And so i thought, well, im on the right track. Theres still theres still a lot of debunking debunk. But so this consensus question you mentioned earlier definitely the moment of the tea ships arrival was a peak moment in the political contest in boston. And it was a peak moment because because boston patriots, the sons of liberty, as well as the more polite accept politically acceptable leaders that presented the clean of the Patriot Movement to the public that its useful to think of them. And this divided sort of element and youve got sort of a sinn fein type type and then youve got the ira underneath them both agitating toward same goal. But the clean cut politicians and the paramilitary types underneath them and in in boston, boston patriots had really struggled in the previous several years after the end of the last boycott when up and down the colonies they had agreed, we will well stop our boycott of other British Goods, but well continue our boycott of tea. They were supposed to continue while new yorkers and philadelphians managed this quite successfully. Bostonians like virginians. Carolinians completely failed and ended up consuming and importing large amounts of tea in 1771 and 1772 and 72, i think about 40 of all the tea that came to north america duty british tea originally purchased in london from an auction from these India Company and brought here by private merchants. 40 of that was was coming to boston and that that says that patriots had to have been quite anxious about getting people to subscribe to these political ideas they had about consuming things because obviously lots of people didnt subscribe to these ideas and they demonstrated that every day when they bought consumer goods that they werent supposed to buy. And the arrival of this india t presented the possibility of being a final blow in pushing bostonians into more broadly accepting this arrangement. So particularly around this the tea tax which we probably all know this tax that parliament was putting on tea, it had been in place for years. There was no no real concern about establishing a precedent of the tax being in place. It had been in place for half a decade already, and bostonians had been paying it. But the the other problem the patriots had was this issue of consent. So if you dont consent or if you dont want pay this tax, theres a great way to do it. Just dont pay any tea. Problem solved, right . The tax is not a tax that everyone has to pay all the time. A tax thats levied on the goods when theyre imported and then passed on to the consumer only if he buys it. And so the easiest way to solve this problem is just to tell people dont buy any tea or, just dont buy any duty tea. I mean, the simplest solution, the least amount of work, the amount of trouble. But they obviously knew they couldnt really get away with this. This wouldnt work. And so the real was was that they it was that too many people actually did consent to taxation without representation. It wasnt really a big problem for them. They were happy to pay the tea and that this was their real problem. So what they needed to do was act like a government that imposed its will on everyone in a law, whether you like it or not, you have to obey it. And so this is what the tea party was forcing everyone to not consume it, whether they consented to consume or not. So youre really looking at two layers of change that are interacting with each other right . A long period of time there are changes in consumption that are bound up with Consumer Behavior that are really an artifact of culture as it was being shaped in the atlantic world. And then youve got another layer that is the politics that governs consumption, which intersects with an imperial crisis that is reaching a sort of critical impasse. Is that right . Yeah. So i know that your work is really focused on a this really critical inflection in the 1770s. But for our audience, who who may be just beginning to think their way into these issues, help us understand what the arc of that, the sort of behavioral piece looks like. What how does tea become a favorite in the colonies . And, you know, how deeply entrenched is it in peoples lives . By the time we get to the 1770s . Okay. So its a great question. So if you look at someone like Benjamin Franklin, who was fairly old by the time of the Boston Tea Party and longer in boston, but you look the arc of his life. People in the 1720s didnt have nice things. There werent many nice things they could to have. If you look at the material culture of how everyday people lived, the level of furnishings and homes were quite low. The amount of imported consumer goods that people could eat or drink were not very much. But this built over time, over the 50 years that followed by the time in the 1770s. Is this growing consumer culture that north american colonists, the british colonies, north america can engage. Its about having nicer furniture, imported furniture, perhaps even from elsewhere, if youre wealthy, but a proper tables and chairs and cabinets and cupboards that their ancestors may not have had, it may simply have been a stool and a table may have been. And as some sort of a have made bed may have been, all they had newly made linens, sheets that could have been woven in a mill in lancaster rather than lancaster share in england rather than made at home. You can be having imported drinks. Madeira coffee, tea in greater amounts than your father or your mother or your grandparents have. And so the problem one of the problems of the boycotts in 1770s is its saying now that we can have things, you cant have nice things and life is still a bit nasty, a bit brutish, a bit short. In the 1770s. And so its these things that make it endurable for people. And so its hard to take them away, right . Yeah, i we as we we do we meet a lot of visitors to our the old south meeting house, the old state house every year. Who here to learn about the revolution and i find i often have to remind visitors that the revolution is only a part of peoples lives. Right . Theyre living full lives. Theyre navigating the day to day of of their familys activities, their communities activities, and its not all politics the time, even though the the noise of politics is outside all the time. So we had a little hint of how that the tension between that political layer and the cultural piece might have intersected here in boston. But boston is not all of north america right much. I mean, i hate to break it to all of us who are here in boston. But there are other colonies out there. You you start the book with a chapter thats the tea party that wasnt which is about what happened down in charleston, South Carolina, because tea ships went to many different ports. Right so can you just give us a little bit of a glimpse of how things may have played out differently in other places . What happened in South Carolina . Yes, boston was very strange it was the only city that had a big fight over the tea that it couldnt resolve all the other places the tea ships went. They found a resolution, some sort of coming to terms between the local customs officials, the and the governor, the tea merchants that were set to receive it, and the sons of liberty and the Patriot Organization in South Carolina. The tea shipped arrived christopher gadsden, the sons of liberty campaigned against it and they had a huge meeting in the exchange, which was large building that housed Customs House facilities on the ground floor and above was the main meeting hall. It served the same political purposes this old southwood and they resolved that they were definitely going to let the tea in and wow, the firebrands and politicians signs were yakking away upstairs in the great hall of the exchange South Carolina merchants unloaded duty british tea off of the that had these India Company tea so not the companys tea but other private parcels of duty tea paid the duty at the Customs House underneath, while the politicians are still talking upstairs, put them in carts and, carried them to their shops and offered them for sale. And the talking politicians only work this out. Several days later. So this was not the greatest success. And then they went around after this meeting and started asking merchants to sign a boycott, saying or sign a pledge. They wouldnt sell duty till the merchants kept on finding ways to be at the shop. When the campaigners came by or to say, well come back tomorrow. I, i havent really made a decision yet and they did their best and then they did what all people do when they want to throw a spanner in a public meeting. They then cast doubt on what the previous had even agreed to do. Right. This is this is what you do when you want to mess up your board meeting. Right. You do exactly like that. So thats what the merchants did and eventually, despite all their struggles, they met the patriots in South Carolina, held on. They got the agreement to have the tea shop land tea landed. But the end for the local merchants to wash their hands of it, which happened. But the merchants couldnt the ship back and so the collector sees the tea, the 20 day deadline, the exact sort of 20 day deadline that the boston party was trying to avoid happening. He sees the tea he impounded for nonpayment of the duty, locked it up in the exchange, and it stayed there without any trouble right that that in boston they were worried that if they locked it up in the kings customs warehouse that it would then be broken open. People would steal the tea or, that merchants would unloaded and sell it to the. But in South Carolina they managed to come to a term sort of terms for the customs collector. I suspect in many of these ports, what happened is, you the merchants, many of them patriotic, offer a bit of a bribe to the customs. And so he knew how this job worked. He knew we had to come to some sort of Modus Vivendi with them, and they with him. So he impounded it and he never offered it for sale. And that was the problem. I saw no conflict, no struggle, no tears, no revolution. Well, a good reminder that the whole world was not boston in the 1770s, right . But even in boston, events happened that are not consistent with the memory that we have kept of this moment. You spend a little bit of energy trying to chase the fourth g ship, right . Which will make its way into the harbor. Tel