ABSTRACT
This chapter manages to deepen our understanding of the relationship between the tea protests that followed the arrivals of the British East India Company tea and the origins of the American Revolution. In specific, it first examines Thomas Hancock’s tea business before 1755 as a background, then reads his waste books of 1755–1757 and 1759–1762 closely to reconstruct his local tea trading network, and finally discusses how the network, inherited by John Hancock, would clash with the British East India Company after the Tea Act of 1773 and led to the American Revolution. At the end, it argues that tea protests before the American Revolution were food riots of a unique model.
