The Tea Party movement has been much in the news in the past year, as has the appropriation of America's Founding by Sarah Palin and other politicians. In light of the government's expansion under Barack Obama, Palin says we should "party like it's 1773." Tufts University historian Benjamin Carp is no Tea Party sympathizer, but his timely Defiance of the Patriots is the place to start for understanding the actual Boston Tea Party, one of the chief catalysts of the American Revolution.

Carp shows that the Tea Party was one spectacular event in a longer story of British imperial growth and colonial resistance. The Tea Act of 1773, which gave the British East India Company a monopoly on the American tea trade, exacerbated colonists' resentment against British policies, but it also reflected Americans' relatively new entanglement in a global network that stretched from China, which grew the tea, to the Caribbean slave colonies, which produced the sugar stirred into it. Although the Tea Act would have reduced the cost of tea, Massachusetts Patriots saw the monopoly as a "master-piece of policy for accomplishing the purpose of enslaving us."

The Party itself destroyed 46 tons of the "accursed leaf." Americans look back on that night as a "gauzy, harmless tale of American origins," Carp writes, but as with so many aspects of the Revolution, it is not clear that modern Americans—especially Christians—would approve of similar actions today. Restrained though they were, committing little violence against people, the Tea Partiers still brazenly ruined private property. "The Devil is in this people," a disgusted British admiral subsequently concluded.

The Tea Party, to Carp, "exemplifies an ongoing struggle in America between law and order and democratic protest." The Bostonians' radical act elicited a harsh response from the British government, leading to the clash at Lexington and Concord—and, ultimately, American independence.

Thomas S. Kidd is Senior Fellow at the Institute for Studies of Religion, Baylor University, and the author of God of Liberty: A Religious History of the American Revolution and the forthcoming Patrick Henry: First Among Patriots.

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