Parliament enacted the Tea Act to shore up the financially troubled East India Company. The Act actually placed no new tax on tea (this was still on the books from the Townshend Duties). Instead, it gave the East India Company a virtual monopoly on selling tea in the colonies. The British assumed that colonists would welcome the lower price of tea achieved by eliminating the merchant middleman. The Tea Act, however, angered influential merchants who feared the monopoly would affect them directly. For many more colonists, the Tea Act revived passions about taxation without representation. Soon the colonists again responded with a boycott of tea. Earlier protests had involved relatively few colonists, but the tea boycott mobilized a large segment of colonial society.
