The historical significance of the Boston Tea Party is recognized more in the British response than in the event itself. As a result of the Boston Tea Party, Parliament passed the following laws designed to punish the Americans.
1.) The Boston Harbor Bill – This bill closed the harbor to all commercial traffic until Bostonians paid for the tea they dumped.
2.) The Administration of Justice Act – This act required the extradition (transfer) of all royal officials charged with capital crimes in America to courts in Great Britain.
3.) Massachusetts Government Act – This act ended self-rule in the colonies and made all elected officers in America subject to British appointment.
4.) Quartering Act – This was simply a new version of the 1765 Quartering Act which required Americans to provide accommodations (housing , food, clothing etc.) to British soldiers if necessary.
5.) Quebec Act – This act extended the Canadian border (British territory) into the Ohio River Valley and eliminated lands that were claimed by Massachusetts, Virginia and Connecticut.
These acts were called the Intolerable Acts in America and resulted in the formation of the Continental Congress.
Answer:
The ideas of the Enlightenment influenced American colonists like Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson because they read the works of Enlightenment thinkers and adopted similar views on politics and society. Political philosophers of the Enlightenment believed that using reason will guide us to the best ways to operate in order to create the most beneficial conditions for society. This included a conviction that all human beings have certain natural rights which are to be protected and preserved. The Enlightenment ideal was that individual freedom and equal rights and opportunity for all would be promoted and protected. Each individual's well-being (life, health, liberty, possessions) should be served by the way government and society are arranged. The American founding fathers accepted these Enlightenment views and acted on them.
Further detail / example:
John Locke, in his Second Treatise on Civil Government (1690), had expressed the idea of natural rights in the words that follow. Notice the similarities to what was later stated in the American colonists' <em>Declaration of Independence</em> (1776).
- <em>The state of nature has a law of nature to govern it, which obliges every one: and reason, which is that law, teaches all mankind, who will but consult it, that being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty, or possessions… (and) when his own preservation comes not in competition, ought he, as much as he can, to preserve the rest of mankind, and may not, unless it be to do justice on an offender, take away, or impair the life, or what tends to the preservation of the life, the liberty, health, limb, or goods of another.</em>
He wants to protect himself
Imperialists seeked possession of colonies that had extractive economies because they wanted to gain the advantage of the global resources.
