In an effort to save the troubled enterprise, the British Parliament passed the Tea Act in 1773. The act granted the company the right to ship its tea directly to the colonies without first landing it in England, and to commission agents who would have the sole right to sell tea in the colonies. Which therefore led to the Boston Tea Party.
THE ANSWER:
The colonists had never accepted the constitutionality of the duty on tea, and the Tea Act rekindled their opposition to it. Their resistance culminated in the Boston Tea Party on December 16, 1773, in which colonists boarded East India Company ships and dumped their loads of tea overboard.
Within the scope of the slave trade, African states- not all were tribes- already dealt in slaves within Africa. Such, British ships were simply another consumer with whom they participated in trade, often exchanging the human cargoes for gunpowder weaponry and the like.
