hello and welcome to our independence lecture so we're trying to figure out how those colonies went from thinking they were all solidly part of the british empire and pretty happy to be there and didn't have a whole lot in common with the other colonies to wanting to both declare independence from britain and to unite those 13 colonies into a new nation so our questions for today what events pushed colonists who were moderates to the patriot position and the patriot position is wanting independence from britain what part of the government did common sense and the declaration of independence attack so what part of the british government are they going after and what were the three aims of the declaration so for starters the next measure that britain passed had nothing to do with imperial reform or trying to put the colonists in their place to earn money the british east india company the largest trading company in the entire british empire was in danger of filing for bankruptcy they had no money and england wanted to bail this company out because if a company like that fails it really hurts the economy in that country and there's a lot of people who will then be hurt because they will lose their jobs so just like in the u.s today when a company that's really big is in in danger of going under and the government bails out that company or that industry that is what england is doing here so they want to bail out the company they want to save the jobs of those people who work for the beic the british east india company but they didn't want to pay a huge amount of money to do this remember they're already in debt and having difficulty paying off that debt so they need to convince both english and colonial consumers to purchase millions of pounds of tea sitting in the british east india company warehouses as opposed to the more cheap smuggled dutch tea that most colonists had been drinking so they're not supposed to be smuggling dutch tea into the colonies without paying attacks on it to the british empire but they're doing it anyway but to save the british east india company england basically established a monopoly for the company and began to enforce those taxes on foreign tea in ways that they hadn't done before so they're going to up their enforcement the tea act of 1773 exempted british east india company tea from the tax collected on all other teas in the town snacks at the same time it cracked down on smuggling of dutch tea that had been super prevalent so like the sugar acts before it it lowered the tax on a product but it prevented smuggling it actually enforced those laws finally it allowed british east india company salesmen to sell directly in the colonies instead of having to sell to the colonial merchants who then sold to the colonists so this cut out the middlemen making it even cheaper but it also threatened to put out of business those colonial merchants so the colonists construe the act as a tax even though it actually lowers the price of tea british east india company t was really cheap at this point but colonial merchants were outraged and other colonists supported them boycotts or non-importation agreements began again the most effective resistance was to actually stop the ships carrying the tea from landing in colonial ports and offloading their product the sons of liberty and colonists gathered in mobs and dared these company ships to drop anger or come ashore massachusetts governor thomas hutchinson said he was not going to allow hoodlums to intimidate the company governor hutchinson whose sons happened to be agents for the company said if he had to call out troops the company would come and deport and offload the t so the sons of liberty went ahead with their most famous act the destruction of the tea so proceed to the next part of the lecture to learn a little bit more about the boston tea party as it came to be known and note just how many pounds of tea they threw into boston harbor