Today is the 250th anniversary of the Boston Tea Party. Stop rolling your eyes, this isn't a patriotic post! You know me better than that.
This is about spilling the tea... about the British East India Company's spilled tea, and what that had to do with Bengal, textile workers, and famine.
See, BEIC was using its private armies to open markets around the world to their trading policies, and to install local rulers who would keep the goods and money flowing. They did this in Bengal, one of the world's biggest producers of textiles in the mid-1700s.
Then, in 1768, drought hit Bengal and crops failed. People began to go hungry, but the BEIC's puppet rulers and agents just continued to collect taxes--and, in some cases, to profiteer off the sale of food. Over the next two years, these practices exacerbated the food shortages, leading to the Great Bengal Famine of 1770, in which 7 - 10 million people are estimated to have starved to death. That's at least 25% of the entire Bengali population of the time.
This put a big dent in the profits of the BEIC (oopsie, who knew famine profiteering could have negative economic impacts?), leading to a financial crisis in England. This is also why BEIC was unloading tea for cheap in the American colonies, to get some of those revenues back.
So yeah, "no taxation without representation" was the rallying cry, but isn't it interesting that we (USians, I mean) were never taught that the REASON colonists were worried about this is because they felt they had something in common with starving Bengalis: namely, the vulnerability to a multinational corporation which clearly demonstrated its depraved indifference to human suffering in pursuit of profit.
