Tagged: smuggling

The Trade Deficit Britain Closed With Opium

Britain drank Chinese tea and China wanted almost nothing Britain made, so the bill was settled in bullion, roughly £30 million of silver between 1760 and 1800. The East India Company's answer was to build a second consumer market on the other side of its own empire, and it worked exactly as a balance-of-payments device is meant to.

The Tax Cut That Accidentally Lowered England's Death Rate

A 1784 law meant only to defeat tea smugglers pushed boiled water into English households at scale, and the parish records show a real, measurable drop in mortality that nobody who wrote the law intended or noticed.

The Tea Dumped in Boston Harbor Was on Sale

Parliament's 1773 rescue of a nearly insolvent East India Company cut the price of tea reaching the American colonies. The protest that followed was against a monopoly and a tax precedent, not against a high price.