So Here's some Tea

So sports. One of the things that a sports fan has to confront is the awkward trade or loss of a favorite player. The push-pull fandom between individuals and the team gets really complicated when a favorite player winds up on a team you hate, or even worse, your team trades for a player you reallllly hate. Yes, for all of you who don’t do spoartsball, hate is the actual word here. It’s not rational. It’s kind of petty. But it is the feeling.

What do you do? Do you continuing supporting the player you love? Do you begrudgingly give that evil player who screwed your team the benefit of the doubt? Do you turn on your former favorite and burn effigies outside the stadium? Do you blame management? The coach? WHO HAS DONE THIS TO ME!?! (note: I remember Kevin Durant leaving the OKC Thunder. THAT was some sports petty)

Before I mention the truly painful example, let me harken back to the early days of my Arsenal fandom. Arsenal are an English football club, in London, and I’ve loved and supported the team since around 1995. Well, in 2001, out of the total blue, we signed a defender named Sol Campbell from “our” (yes our) archenemy, Tottenham Hotspurs. Tottenham fans were outraged, and unlike the signing of several Chelsea players in the years since, I don’t remember there being any outrage from Arsenal fans because Big Sol was one of the best defenders out there, just in time to replace some legendary defenders of our own who’d reached the end of their careers. Tottenham fans literally burned effigies of him, and he had Jamaican parents, so you know… It was pretty bad. He was their club captain, and he chose Arsenal. Oh, and years later, you get this:

Honestly, hilarious. (Tottenham wore white, Arsenal’s primary is red, for context)

Well, then you have the absolute farce and tragedy happening in Dallas right now. Literally in the middle of the night, the Mavericks traded megastar/possibly all-time great Luka Doncic to the freaking LA Lakers. I have historic beef with the Lakers as a lapsed Sacramento Kings fan (yeah, I had only tenuous links thanks to my mom but it was a choice okay), given the way refs handed the Lakers a Western Conference Final against the Kings in the 90s when they were finally good. So I sort of hate them. Possibly really hate them.

The week I’m writing this, Luka came back to Dallas for the first time since the trade. It was emotional (I was busy tutoring so didn’t have to decide whether to watch or not), and afterwards, in the weirdest, strangest sports thing of all time, I have absolutely swung from team (the Mavs) to player (Luka). There was already basically a zero percent chance that anything good would come from the trade (so many contingent things would have to happen), but now it looks like an absolutely shit move that might go down in the annals of pro sports management history. That it also comes on the back of several years of “Get Luka Help” from the fans… Whew. Disaster.

All that to say, loyalty is a tricky thing. When you push people by bringing in unpopular folks or associating with awful groups, you’re asking a lot of their loyalty. Which is why, when Parliament passed the Tea Act in 1773, when they introduced a player to the colonies who North American colonists already had a reason to hate, on top of their already rising resentment towards the Crown and Parliament, minds were lost and the chugging train of revolution accelerated.

So how’d we wind up there?

The American colonies (and young George Washington) helped kick off a first global war between European powers in 1754. In the US, we call it the French & Indian War (because we fought against an alliance between the two), but in Europe it’s known as the Seven Years’ War, because it didn’t fully kick off over there until 1756. Britain and Prussia faced off against France and Austria (and eventually Spain) all across the colonial world - India, Africa, the Caribbean, the Philippines, and of course North America. North America was only one part of the war. In 1763, mostly broke, the British arranged an agreement with France and Spain to swap some territories, but Spain really wanted to keep fighting. Britain had to keep its military ready to go just in case the Spanish got feisty, which meant they needed the money to maintain that readiness.

Enter the colonies.

Just in case you’re unsure why colonists cross an ocean in the first place, the goal was economic opportunity and land. So when the King issues a proclamation in the aftermath of a war they won saying his subjects can’t settle west of the Appalachian Mountains, and colonists are going to pay taxes for the pleasure of enforcing that proclamation, you can imagine the chain reaction you get. Britain had more profitable colonies than the 13 North American colonies (perhaps you’ve heard of Jamaica and India?), so in order to ensure the other North American colonies were adequately rewarding the empire, tariffs and taxes and other trade restrictions were put in place - part of a continuing process called mercantilism. The Stamp Act is always the most famous tax (even though it was quickly repealed), but the most significant for me is the Tea Act, which isn’t exactly a tariff, but does involve tariff policy.

Once again, let’s zoom out.

The tea that the greater British Empire enjoyed so much came from India, which wasn’t precisely a colony, but was controlled by the British East India Company (BEIC), which largely made it a de facto colony. Long story short, this little Amazon with a mercenary army had defeated a Mughal army and taken control of taxation rights in Bengal (arguably the richest region, possibly even on the planet) from the Mughal Emperor. Just about a century later Britain would take formal control away from the BEIC and turn India into an actual colony, but for now, it was open to corporate plunder, and plunder the BEIC did. Five years after the French & Indian War ended, summers of little to no rain left Bengal dry and massively short of food. By 1770, up to 1.2 million people had died in Bengal, roughly one in five.

Drought and famine was not new to India, but the BEIC were. Instead of supporting relief efforts, the BEIC focused on collecting taxes from starving families, even increasing taxes by 10% in some places. Rather than losing revenue during the famine, the value of BEIC shares reached a new high and the BEIC voted themselves a 12.5% dividend.

And then everything crashed. Dead people don’t pay taxes and rents, after all, so the famine that the BEIC made worse to reach their short term heights created a bubble and the bottom fell out pretty quickly. In an unbelievable turn (that I think all of us can believe, since 40% of Parliament owned shares in the BEIC), the British government stepped in to help bail out the company.

Enter the Tea Act. Colonists in North America were already used to paying duties on Tea, and the restrictions of Britain’s mercantilist system meant that colonists couldn’t buy tea from other countries (particularly the Dutch). This led to a lot of smuggling, but then Parliament carved out a huge tax exemption for the BEIC to sell tea that undercut every other source. We don’t need to get into specifics for how the policy saved the BEIC money so they could sell cheaper, but colonists were pissed. They saw this as a sign that Parliament was ready to allow the BEIC to take a more active role in the North American colonies, and thanks to the relatively high literacy rate in the colonies, plenty of folks knew exactly what had happened in Bengal less than 5 years earlier.

They wanted no part of it.

The Boston Tea Party is often generalized as being anti-tax protest, but that is a massive oversimplification. Yes, they were upset about tariffs on tea, but that import tax had also been turned into a corporate bailout. They had no legal way to get around the tariff, because of other imperial trade restrictions. And they knew, without a shadow of a doubt, that the BEIC was a steaming pile of shit who didn’t care about colonists, just profit.

Britain’s legitimacy was already falling hard in the Thirteen Colonies. Then they blithely brought in one of the most unpopular groups around, and gave them special privileges to make up for their horrific failure. Whatever might have been left of loyalty after the Tea Act evaporated once the British imposed further punishments, the Intolerable Acts. After a long history of “repeated injuries and usurpations,” as the Declaration said, it was the bailout of the British East India Company and its aftermath that finally convinced the colonies it was time to say goodbye and find a new team to support.

Note: A lot of this comes from a wonderful podcast and a book written by one of the podcasters. I highly recommend The Empire Podcast for anyone interested learning about empires in world history - they start with the British Empire and India, and the following seasons include the Ottomans (you really should listen to the episode about Sykes-Picot and the Origins of the Israel-Palestine Conflict) and an eye opening season on the History of Slavery. It is so worthwhile to hear history from a non-United States perspective, and this podcast is really great.

Next up? Probably the aftermath of the war, and the government none of us remembers was ever the government of the United States: the Articles of Confederation.