The Tea Party occurred in America on 16 December 1773 when the Sons of Liberty seized 340 chests of tea from three ships in Boston harbour and threw them into the water. The episode is worth considering in detail, as does Carp, a professor at Tufts, because a simple critique of the modern-day use of the events is best replaced by an understanding of the differing viewpoints that led to the action in the first place. Carp is also excellent on the details. For example, he uses the figure of 340 chests of tea, based on the East India Company shipping documents, rather than the more commonly used 342, which came from contemporary newspaper reports.

In the Seven Years War (1756–63), the British had conquered the French territories in modern Canada with significant assistance from their colonies, an assistance emphasized in what to the Americans is known as the French and Indian War of 1754–63. This war, however, had left Britain with unprecedented debt, as well as with pressing questions of imperial governance. Transatlantic economic and political links between Britain and its colonies entailed and registered pressures which were exacerbated by legislation that, if not inappropriate, was designed for different purposes than keeping the colonies happy.

This legislation rested on the principle of parliamentary sovereignty over the colonies, and in 1767 the British government imposed, by a Revenue Act, customs duties in the colonies on a variety of goods, most valuably tea, at that time only available by import from China and thus a luxury commodity. This Act was designed to pay the costs of civil government in the northern colonies such as Massachusetts, which would end the dependence of officials and judges on the colonial assemblies. The measure was unwelcome in North America, but served the needs of strengthening the empire as it helped the finances of the British East India Company, which bore the burden of Britain's position in Asia; it also had the monopoly of British trade with China. The taxation of tea was scarcely new, having been included in the very first Excise Act, of 1660, but the tea duty symbolized Parliament's right to tax and this led to a boycott by many Americans.

The issue was complicated because smuggled Dutch tea, also from East Asia, challenged Company sales in North America. As a result the government, in 1773, passed a Tea Act that abolished British duties on the tea re-exported to America and allowed the Company to sell the tea directly to consignees to the American colonies. This was a measure designed to cut the cost of tea there, and thus boost sales, helping the Company.

The Americans, however, would still have to pay duty on the imported tea, which was condemned by activists who were unwilling to accept Parliament's right to impose direct taxes on the colonies and who were concerned about the political implications of the government enjoying a larger revenue in America. Such a revenue was seen as a source of enhanced government power. They also rejected the monopolistic structuring of the trade around the Company and the consignees. The legalization made tea cheaper for consumers, but imposed a monopoly which cut out those American importers who did not smuggle their goods at ports. It was the merchant class, which was well represented in the colonial assemblies and the Sons of Liberty, that felt victimized by the Act. Opposition to the Act led to the resignation of intimidated consignees and to the departure of tea ships without having landed their cargo, and culminated in the Tea Party.

In throwing the tea into the harbour, colonial protestors, as Carp shows, fashioned a powerful symbol of resistance, one that dramatized the breakdown of imperial authority for at least some of the colonists. Thus the process of reaching, and endlessly redefining, a consensus that underlay and often constituted government in this period had broken down.

The current use of the Tea Party in American politics is direct and unambiguous, providing a different gloss on the frequent, and misleading, reference to the “United States of Amnesia,” a country that supposedly ignores its history. Sarah Palin, the Republican vice presidential candidate in 2008, told a Boston audience in 2010,

Reference to the Tea Party of 1773 encourages a sense of activism, and the empowerment that goes with it, and thus presents an attractive idea for populism.

Moreover, the long-standing American need to seek validation in the past is satisfied by this episode. The Tea Party serves as an apparent demonstration of the Declaration of Independence and Constitution in practice, one linking the Founding Fathers to the present. As such, the Tea Party apparently provides an opportunity to assert the constitutional appropriateness of conservative politics. Such an assertion is wide-ranging. Thus Palin claimed that the Founding Fathers had wanted Americans to “create law based on the God of the Bible and on the Ten Commandments,” which was no more the case for the Constitution than the argument that church and state were not treated as separate, an argument made by Christine O'Donnell, the unsuccessful Republican senatorial candidate for Delaware in 2010, and a prominent focus of Tea Party action.

Criticism of factual error is easy, as is the charge that reference to the episode is a classic instance of the fallacy of so-called presentism and, as a related point, demonstrates the folly of assuming that history has a clear message. Indeed, different groups will always find their own message in any historical episode. More generally, protest and defiance are much easier to understand and carry out than government, power and the construction of a system of administrative power.

The Tea Party movement today accords with the tendency in the 1770s to look to earlier episodes of alleged tyranny. Indeed, the extent to which American writers in the 1770s invoked Charles I's efforts to tax without parliamentary consent in the 1630s, a clear touchstone of tyranny in contemporary minds in Britain as well as in its American colonies, was indicative of a wider breakdown in links. This reference to history helped in drawing a distinction between what was legal and what constitutional. In practice, both laws and constitutions are always open to public revision.

Thus modern Tea Party activists use the past as those they are borrowing from also did. As with other major symbols, the use of the Tea Party has in fact been very varied, as Carp demonstrates. As it stands primarily as an instance of defiance of authority, for the sake of liberty, it has frequently been offered by those defending direct activism against government. Thus the Tea Party was employed to justify defiance of the law by a range of pressure groups, including temperance activists, the Ku Klux Klan, the civil rights movement, segregationists, and opponents of President Nixon, while the occasion was also invoked by foreigners justifying popular activism, for example Chinese nationalists opposed to Western economic dominance in the 1920s.

At the same time, each particular iteration is specific. Thus the current use of the Boston Tea Party serves to offer an account of the past in which African Americans do not play much of a role, even though the Civil Rights movement was also a protest against (unfair) local government regulations, and against taxation without equal representation. Civil rights are now defined by the Tea Party movement in a fashion focussed on their opposition to big government and taxation, Tea standing for Taxed Enough Already. Thus taxation itself, which in modern America comes from a democratically elected government, is re-presented as alien, authoritarian and excessive.

The latter approach captures the present-mindedness of this historiography, in particular a sense of the ready applicability of the episode to the present context. This approach is not the sole one taken in the public sphere, for this sphere frequently focusses on the issue of historical grievances. The Tea Party movement, in contrast, uses the past not as an inherited grievance but as an analogous call for action against what is perceived as a present grievance. Britain in 1773 serves to represent authoritarian government and refers indirectly to the argument that Obama is Europeanizing America; there is no call to arms against modern Britain, and, ironically, the forthcoming royal marriage of Prince William, a direct descendant of George III, whose father, Prince Charles, is a keen supporter of the reputation of that king, appears to excite much positive popular interest in the USA. Carp's excellent book offers much to those interested in America, past and present.