The Boston Tea Party: A Parable of Networks
Contents
Part 1: A Parable of Networks, a Tale of the Global Corporation
Part 2: Disconnecting
Part 3: Regime Change Cascade
Pt. 4 – Looking Back With New Revolutionary Eyes
This is a story about corporations. The word “corporation” can fog the brain in the blink of an eye. In order to get around this, it may help to tell a familiar story about America, the Boston Tea Party, in a slightly new way.
Part 1: A Parable of Networks, A Tale of the Global Corporation
Stories like the Boston Tea Party have been traditionally been offered through patriotic filters that may have masked a more interesting reality. History written in the afterglow of victory, tells us, that the Founding Fathers, usually presented in schoolrooms as a semi-divine figures, marched toward an ordained future. In the mid-nineteenth century, new quasi-scientific filters kicked in. With Darwin, the story became an illustration of the scientific march of evolutionary progress toward a more evolved union. With Marx, the story line was class warfare between oppressed and oppressor.
Lately, this story and others have increasingly been told from a social network standpoint. A social network is just a group of people. Often, social networks form around a central hub, such as a church, city, club or nation. Using the arrangement of hubs and network members as a way of looking at social health isn’t a new idea. For example, Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. wrote
In a real sense all life is inter-related. All men are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny.
Using social networks to frame a discussion is new. It is partly an outgrowth of insights from the use of computers, the Internet and computer simulation in present-day culture. Relationships, and the networks they produce, can also make for pretty good reading at times.
With the network filter that boils everything down to relationship managment, a soap opera coating is applied to dry history. Who did what to whom? Network backstories put flesh on to historical stick figures. It’s fun and interesting to of trace who was hanging out with which set of friends, teachers and associates. It is useful to understand how rival groups attacked or supported the relationships of their own and disabled hostile networks. It is fascinating to see patterns emerge that can be applied in other historical situations and today.
With the network filter, time is back. In popular print and electronic fiction, multi-generational plots now sell. Back in the day, a Hero marched cleverly and violently through an obstacle course of increasingly challenging hazards to win his or her own redemption, victory over evil foes and true love. Nowadays, readers relish wading through a telephone book-sized novels dense with spaghetti strands of plot and counterplot, with a legion of characters worthy of19th century Russian writers.
History writing is getting the same makeover. The network version of history is told in patterns and parables.
Paying attention to networks offers the possibility of hearing old stories from a new and more human point of view. It offers the possibility of seeing current events as the outgrowth of supposedly inaccessible history.
Since human relationships tend to transcend the technology and ideology of the time, the new outlook provides a way to appreciate how actual people got though challenging situations, many of which we face today. Some were smart, some tricky, and some foolish. But each was acting on a stage where the final act hadn’t been written with people who may not have shared their views. The situation was “complex”. Even though a plan and vision was firmly in place, the future remained uncertain. What emerged may have been viewed through the rearview mirror as a done deal. But, as today, the reason to get up in the morning is to experience the world and try to change it.
Better storytelling and the ability to penetrate time is the product of a renewed respect for relationships between people, governments and nature. In other words, networks. In this sense, the Boston Tea Party can offer lessons for today. After all, what good is a revolution if you can’t look to it for ideas and inspiration? Its recent retelling shows how far toward the network and structural view has been incorporated into we look at the world.
Network insights can tell the story of Americans taking steps to opt out of relationships that had became increasingly dysfunctional, creating new social and political networks, which led to the cascade of opinion and action that created a nation. As the story unfolds, it becomes clear that the network lessons of the American Revolution apply today. Recent examples of how the story is told reflect increasing recognition of the importance of networks. The great man and ideological versions of history look increasingly stale. The fascinating process, which leads to cultural problem solving, is taking center stage as modern, simplified story lines loose traction.
The story begins with Britain’s man for all continents and all conflicts. Charles Cornwallis often gets credit for losing America at the Battle of Yorktown in 1781. He gets less credit for being England’s all-around colonial guy. After his defeat by Washington at Yorktown, he was knighted, reputation intact, in 1789 and shipped out to India, where he acted Governor General and Commander and Chief in India. There he carried on as usual, leading British and East India Company troops in the Third Anglo-Mysore War – this time successfully. He served as military governor in Ireland from 1797 to 1801, with more military pacification in his job description.
Cornwallis career path illustrates the role played by a neglected economic and political network, the corporation, in shaping of America. “Corporation” is the second problem word to make an appearance here. Each corporation is a slice of the sovereign. Whoever is in charge of government grants chunks of sovereign power to the people to act together to accomplish what the sovereign wants.
Think of the sovereign power as a pie with slices. Here are some of the pieces in this sovereignty confection:
- life not limited to one person;
- monopoly over land and people;
- the ability to take money from people by force;
- the ability to create and enforce rules;
- freedom from taxes; and
- the ability to give these powers to subordinate bodies, like corporations.
In video game terms, the player can pick up attributes or abilities which make his or her avatar temporarily harder to kill or otherwise offer an advantage over other players. The same goes for corporate powers. Today’s business corporations typically are bestowed unlimited life, tax breaks and limited accountability for managers and shareholders. This brand of corporation strides the Earth, shield and sword in hand, often crushing mere mortals.
Governments create corporations to do things they don’t want to do directly. Shakespeare’s dad was head of the Stratford Corporation, a town. The Virginia Company was a corporation that became the state of Virginia. Right now, San Francisco is a municipal corporation. Disney and eBay are business corporations. The sovereign that created them is the State of California.
Corporations have been around for a long time. When government wanted to run a city, create an industry, build a railroad or conquer the world, corporations got the call. Outsourcing dicey activities makes sense when you wanted to reduce risk of failure, not worry about details and operate at a distance and with deniability. Plus, everybody stood a chance of getting rich. In an age when crony capitalism wasn’t an issue, mixing policy and profit often drove decisions. As will be seen, this was the case with tea and America.
Elizabeth I set the stage. After the spectacularly profitable raiding and trading voyage of Francis Drake, she chartered a series of corporations colorfully identified as “merchant adventurers”. Over a span of 300 years, the style of corporation, now identified as Anglo-American, created an empire and shaped today’s world.
From the beginning, the wake of the corporate prow has been littered with debris. Benefits, for sure, but also problems. People have always resented monopolies, arbitrary power, cronies and tax avoidance. But these are the very features that made corporations work.
Then, as now, the large multinational corporation was the creation of and acted as arm of the sovereign. The usual term is a state within the state. It’s often hard to tell the difference, especially for an American “too big to fail”, Chinese state-owned oil company, or Russian “privatized” former bureau still controlled by the government.
In the 17th century, Queen Elizabeth I unleashed fleets of merchant adventurers to roam the world in order to extract wealth. In doing so, she creating economic and political networks that exist today. Slices of English sovereignty were served and digested worldwide. The use of corporations allowed the crown to project power and economic control without cost and with a degree of protective deniability. Corporate privileged led to control of markets and territory. Shareholders and the state were linked to the corporations both politically and economically. The crown and merchant adventurers were held in an embrace of mutual interest and control.
As Europeans emerged into the world in the 17th century, the corporation served as spear point and net. As an instrument and subdivision of state merchant adventurer corporations, in turn, ensnared people making political decisions in a network of the mutual interest.
Part 2. Disconnecting
The British monarchy created the East India Company to make money and project military power in the world opened to Europe by Columbus. Queen Elizabeth I chartered it in 1600 after the successful raiding and trading venture of Sir Francis Drake struck a blow for English maritime arms against Spain’s dominant position in the Americas. More importantly, investment in Drakes venture earned the Queen and other shareholders huge multiples on initial investment.
Elizabeth and her circle were hooked. The question was, how to turn Drake’s success into a long-term franchise. The royal power originally used to create municipal and mercantile corporations was repurposed. Generations of quasi-military companies of merchant adventurers, all sporting royal charters, followed. The shaping of today’s world flowed naturally from this simple process.
The pioneer was Elizabeth’s East India Company. Its 1600 charter granted a monopoly on Indian trade. The charter bestowed military and governing authority over conquests. This was a business. The Company became an arm of the sovereign — a state within the state. The company was like a municipal corporation, but with a need to acquire it’s own land. For the East India Company, it found that land in the Indian subcontinent. Other royal corporate and individual grantees applied this pattern to North America.
It’s worth noting that the same thing did not happen where the Spanish monarchs went. They opted for direct rule, administered from Madrid through governors reporting directly to the crown. The split in approaches by various European conquerors plays out even today. Looking at the English experience is useful in only a limited way.
East India Company success transformed India. From a set of independent principalities subject to Mughal rule events conspired to weld it into nation mixing English political institutions and historic cultures. The East India Company was a machine-like engine of profit that incidentally drove cultural and political change. So long as the Company ruled and made a profit, investors were satisfied. Some locals profited. Some suffered. Expectations and relationships grew.
This pattern repeated in British North America. India and North America responded to the ministrations of English corporate adventurers in ways that differed, but also reflected similar trajectories. Americans shed corporate rule and gained independence in its eighteenth century revolution. India, with a different set of initial conditions, shed corporate rule soon after the Great Mutiny of 1857, but took another century to gain independence from Britain. India’s and America’s stories deserve to be understood in parallel. India’s story is fascinating, but will not be told here.
The American story was driven by the sensibilities of Englishmen that grew out of hundreds of years of interaction between crown and subject. Englishmen were coming off a string of successes and took for granted that they could easily assert their rights. The monarchy was coming off a string of failures as it fruitlessly attempted to assert a claim to the divine right of kings.
By the time of the Boston Tea Party, English citizens had honed their resentments to a keen edge. They resented grants of royal privilege. And they intensely resented rule that lacked consent. By 1776, Englishmen had acted on this resentment by executing one king in 1641. They dabbled with a republic and then, for good measure, in 1689 deposed a second king.
The last remaining bastion of divine right was the sovereign’s free hand overseas. Only in foreign affairs did the English monarch retain absolute power. Granting land, power and privilege to royal corporations and individual grantees, like William Penn in 1681, was a residual well of royal revenue and power.
On the eve of the Tea Party, the English Parliament ruled England and the King answered to it. Overseas, it was different. Both directly and through corporations, George III could still rule absolutely. The king and his advisors, frustrated at home, made the most of it. The monarch and shareholders, many in Parliament, shared a common interest. They carefully guarded and nurtured the support system that protected merchant adventurers and their corporate vehicles.
In India this led to the profitable East India Company. In North America, it led to a series of ventures that tried hard, but always had a hard time making a profit. In India, military victories created instant fortunes. In America, the military spoils didn’t exist. Gold hadn’t been found. Finally, investors had trouble finding crops that paid off or workers and managers that didn’t quickly die. A series of shaky ventures dotted the eastern seaboard.
As time passed, an additional problem surfaced. That was the mismatch between corporate boards’ expectation of income and docile profit centers and the political expectations of Englishmen bred to the habit of popular rule.
The Massachusetts Bay Colony, the Virginia Company, Rhode Island, Maryland, North and South Carolina, Georgia, Connecticut and the Hudson’s Bay Company were envisioned initially strictly as business ventures. Residents were corporate charges, subject to rule from London by corporate boards or, in the case of Pennsylvania, by an individual owner. Local legislatures had advisory authority. Governors could veto local measures. On national issues, colonists could only lobby. They had no direct representation in Parliament. From the colonial standpoint, it must have felt like a kind of student government.
This set the stage for a showdown. As the 18th century closed, resentment blossomed. It only required a slight nudge to reach a tipping point. The East India Company gave them that.
The East India Company didn’t just rule India. It also had a royal monopoly on the American tea trade.[1] Colonists responded by smuggling tea. This didn’t initially create a problem. Local customs agents tuned a blind eye to smuggling, which, after all, was conducted by leading colonial families. Unfortunately, by 1770s, the East India Company was in financial trouble. The response of George III and Parliament was classic crony capitalism. To rescue sagging East India Company balance sheets, the Crown proposed and Parliament passed the Tea Act of 1773.
The Act allowed the East India Company to ship tea to the American colonies duty free, thus undercutting local business people who retailed smuggled product. It also provided for appointment of agents to sell the tea. The result destroyed the existing arrangement. It enforced a monopoly that would destroy livelihoods and communities. This was an 18th century version of Wal-Mart wiping out a local downtown.
The Boston Tea Party illustrates how a spiral of conflict between competing networks can triggered a political collapse. In network terms, the Tea Act began the cascade that led to the American Revolution. In England, George III’s circle felt it had no choice and dug in as it met resistance. In Boston and along the East Coast, communities viewed the royal response to protests with increasing alarm and organized to create a united response. The resulting spiral of provocation and response was set in stone.
The revolutionary cascade played out in a remarkable way. Once the Tea Act passed, seven ships were dispatched from English ports to deliver product up and down the coast. Word of this event passed within days of its arrival in America to every port. The response was uniform. In each port, politely worded threats of bodily injury were delivered to the captain of each vessel. Captains destined for Charleston, New York and Philadelphia turned back. Not so in Boston.
The arrival in Boston was a trigger to resistance supported up and down the coast.
Englishmen in America were acutely aware of their recent history of successful revolution. From the Magna Carta to the 1649 execution of Charles I, the fight was always the same. That fight carried over to Massachusetts Bay Company in December of 1773. In contemporary terms, East India Company was, in English eyes, “too big to fail.” On the American side, “no taxation without representation” summed up a much broader set of issues that included objection to receiving tax free tea from a corporate monopoly. It would be self-rule or eventual slavery.
So, how does this type of situation play today. The power of using networks behavior to frame political or economic issues is the ability to more easily apply the nuts and bolts of historic events to today’s headlines. When something happens suddenly, it’s possible to tease out the build-up, trigger and firework display in useful ways. Using the networks filter brings the Tea Party to astonishing life. Now, the unexpected is has become almost expected.
Recently, rapid, surprising political changes, such as Brexit, the 2016 American presidential election, the Arab Spring and the abrupt removal of Civil War Monuments, have been identified in social network terms as cascades.
Describing a revolution as the end result of information cascading from person to person through social networks has caught on. Networks can provide a useful way to take a second look at familiar events. This new lens sometimes helps tease out the fascinating byplay that can brings alive dry schoolbook history. The Boston Tea Party is no exception.
Here’s the Boston Tea Party in network terms.
Cultural, economic, religious, intellectual and political networks at first bound people living in North America to the English sovereign. In a real sense, the East Coast of North America was a suburb of London. Virginia planters sold their tobacco, borrowed, bought clothes, books and slaves, through London. London agents handled their affairs. For-profit trading companies founded most colonies, with head offices in London.
The Virginia Company’s board of directors sat in London. Printers ran English presses, printed on English paper and existed at the pleasure of crown and company officials. The power of local courts and legislatures were limited by those in London who held the royal charter. Informal “old boy” Freemasonic networks looked to a London home office. Those who could sent their sons to English schools.
The English planter, Thomas Jefferson, got his clothes, books and enlightenment ideas through London. His economic spiral into insolvency was typical of Virginia planters. Dependence on English markets for his single crop, borrowing to keep going, the cost and inefficiency of slave labor and the expense of imported goods, created what in later years would be called a “banana republic” economy. Jefferson could never entirely shake this system.
Benjamin Franklin got his start in printing in London and made a fortune from his crown appointment as postmaster. He lived in London for almost 20 years and, until the age of 70, thought of himself as a good English subject.
For some, as the Puritans, leaving England was a way to opt out of unacceptable bans of practice of their faith. For others, including Quakers from the northern Dane Law areas of England, the ties to the monarchy were traditionally fraught. Some recognized the need for local control. For example, by failing to say where the the Massachusetts Bay Company would meet, John Winthrop made it possible for it to meed in Boston and act as a self-governing political body. Other colonies had to go to London boards for decisions.
This canny gambit was not duplicated elsewhere. The expectation of self-rule was an issue that simmered for generations.
Over time, North Americans began disconnecting from a set of relationships that once bound them as loyal subjects. Benjamin Franklin’s journey from loyal subject to American began when he spent a decade in London trying to convince the heirs of the Penn family, who owned Pennsylvania, to allow a greater degree of local control. George Washington, frustrated with an unsustainable London-based plantation economy, opted out. He switched from tobacco as a cash crop to grain, particularly wheat in 1766. [2] Washington, in a moved later repeated in India by Mohandas Gandhi, made his cloth and refused the use of imported food or clothing.[3]
Opting out is what individuals and communities when existing networks no longer work to their benefit. That’s what happened pre-Tea Party in America.
Relationships that create networks, whether between child and parent, partners in an economy or political body, rely on ongoing exchange of need and response to live. Trust is the glue that holds relationships and networks together.
Eighteenth century North America resembled a company town where the proprietors began to gouge residents. London corporations wanted profit. The crown wanted revenue and no trouble. George III needed to vindicate his right to absolute rule. North Americans residents of corporate fiefs wanted the rights of Englishmen and feared for their livelihoods and freedoms. Both were boxed in.
By 1773, the stage was set for a triggering event. The British East India Company provided it.
[1] Klein, Christopher, “10 Things You May Not Know About the Boston Tea Party,” History in the Headlines, History, http://www.history.com/news/10-things-you-may-not-know-about-the-boston-tea-party
[2] —, “Farming,” Mount Vernon, http://www.mountvernon.org/george-washington/farming/
[3] —, “The Fabrics of Colonial Life,” American Art, 1700-1800, http://www.clevelandart.org/sites/default/files/documents/gallery-card/Colonial_Furniture_and_Fabric.pdf
Part 3: Regime Change Cascade
Networks are amazing things. Cultural networks can tenaciously stable over millennia. Political and economic networks float on top of cultural networks. They will last so long as they are trusted. The events leading to the December 16, 1773, tussle on the Boston docks, known today as the Boston Tea party, shows the power of networks to shape lives. The Tea party led to a fork in the eighteenth century political road. It led to the path America has traveled ever since. In order to understand today’s civic culture, it is worth the effort to take a closer look at what happened.
The Boston Tea party illustrates the characteristic interplay of networks linked to local community hubs with completing webs of connection grounded in non-local multi-national corporations. This interplay still operates. Corporate structure really hasn’t changed. The engines of local community life haven’t really changed. The conflict resonates in today’s headlines, just as it did in 1773.
In late 1773, seven ships sailed from England with cargos of East India company tea made duty-free by a British monarch and Parliament intent on rescuing it from insolvency. This was like planting Wal-Mart in every small town by government decree. American livelihoods, families and communities were at risk. The core of American aspirations for self-rule was in the English bulls eye. Word of their arrival spread. So, it was not surprising that the captains of these seven cargo carriers were met, thanks to an efficient network of committees along the entire length of the Atlantic seaboard, with polite letters containing sincere promises of lethal violence. Six captains took these letters to heart, turned and headed home.
Boston was the only port where the tea arrived and eventually docked. After a period of political by-play, the ships docked at Boston were boarded and the tea dumped in the harbor. This set off a chain of events leading to the Revolution. Attitudes hardened. King George III stepped in. To get a feel for how what happened in Boston in 1773 is viewed today, it’s worth looking at the following description, penned in 2013 by Oxford-educated Professor Andrew Jackson O’Shaughnessy:
It was not until the Boston Tea Party (1773) that George III suddenly became actively involved in the growing imperial crisis in America. He became more vehement from his conviction that the crisis had been caused by too much lenience toward the colonies . . . . George III saw the struggle as fundamental to the defense of order and Construction. . . . . George III strongly endorsed the Coercive Acts, which became the catalyst for the American Revolution . . . aimed to punish Massachusetts for the Boston Tea Party.[i]
George III was bucking the tide of history. He represented the desire of his elite set to assert elite privilege caused him to ignore both English public opinion and the desires of his government. Lurking in the background was self-interest. At every step in the process George and his supporters were mindful of the need to protect their sizable investments in the East India Company.
Once the king became involved, he successfully pushed for a hardline military solution for the American problem, and faced down a large body of opinion, including that of Lord Cornwallis, favoring conciliation. [ii] The king’s attitude, over time, drove the Americans to act and cowed British leaders, even though both sides tried repeatedly settle the matter short of independence on one side, and conquest and subjugation on the other.
At the heart of the dispute was the unacceptable status of Englishmen under corporate rule. By 1773, sovereign states, like England, Holland, Russia and France, had been creating corporate subdivisions for hundreds of hears. John Shakespeare, William’s father, was member of the board of Stratford on Avon Corporation, which received its charter in 1553.[iii] This form of government gave the corporation powers that cities enjoy today, including the power to tax and police and a monopoly on municipal functions. But it did not strip the right of town residents to vote in national elections. The constitutional rights of Englishmen developed from the local customs and usages that remained after the Norman Invasion of 1066. Gradually, rights accumulated in a lusty series of rebellions that, step by step, hemmed in royal power in and expanded the right of an elected Parliament. By 1600, the relationship between the limited monarch and parliament was clearly established. The monarch faced limitations at home, but was free to rule absolutely in foreign affairs and in the granting of monopolies in trade and creating corporations to put them into practice.
The voyages of discovery after 1492 created opportunities problems that led to a new form of corporation, and, ultimately, the American Revolution. When Queen Elizabeth created the East India Company, it set off a stampede of companies of merchant adventurers. After 1500, the Spanish, Portuguese, French, Dutch and English fought a 300-year hot war for trade and territory. The Spanish and Portuguese opted for direct state administration. The English, French and Dutch, states came in late. They needed deniability when dealing with the powerful Spanish. They needed a means of financing expensive fleets and campaigns. They needed to insulate the state from the cost of failure. They needed a means of rewarding members of government and merchants. The new corporations were subdivisions of the state acting overseas. The status of those living in lands conquered by these was never considered a problem until Englishmen began to follow their parent corporation as settlers.
The uncomfortable status of settlers was mirrored by the uncomfortable status of the monarch. In an effort to boost royal authority, French and English monarchs after 1600 attempted to assert the “divine right of kings”. Although it had been around since medieval times, by 1600 the rise of parliaments left divine right a mere wish list for royals and an off-with-his-or-her-head trigger for everyone else. Attempts to reassert it by English kings after 1600 led to disaster. The last English king to assert it by force, Charles I, was beheaded in 1649. France took until the French Revolution to experience the final rejection of divine right, with its own set of royal decapitations.
In England, the power of parliament, the corporation and the commons, put an end to the absolute monarch at home. After the Glorious Revolution of 1688, the English monarch was bound by parliament at home, but retained absolute right overseas. The crown created corporations that were free of need to consider the constitutional protections afforded ordinary Englishmen. The divine right of kings was dead at home, but alive overseas. This sliver of divine right met its demise in the American Revolution.
Things got serious in 1760 when governor Bernard of Massachusetts began issuing blanket search warrants, called Writs of Assistance. These allowed revenue officers to enter any ship or building to search for smuggled goods. The writs did not go down well. Arrests were made. It went downhill from there.
As Boston attorney James Otis demonstrated in the 1761 Writs of Assistance trial, the colonists knew their history, including the lethal risk to English kings or messing with the rights of their subjects. Americans were not overly impressed by the power of their sovereign. Here’s what John Adams captured in his notes, taken during Mr. Otis’ closing argument. The rights of Englishmen, he wrote, were “inherent, inalienable, and indefeasible y any laws, pacts, contracts, covenants, or stipulations which man could devise.”[iv]
These principles and these rights were wrought into the English constitution as fundamental laws. And under this head he went back to the old Saxon laws and to Magna Charta and the fifty confirmations of it in Parliament and the executions ordained against the violators of it and the national vengeance which had been taken on them from time to time, down to the Jameses and Charleses, and to the position of rights and the Bill of Rights and the revolution.
The structural defect in the English Constitution created by the multinational corporation and the attempt to assert kingly divine power to directly rule the English colonists, rather than through their elected representatives, could lead only one result.
Time and again, since the Norman Conquest, disagreements of this kind led to bloody revolution. The same happened in Boston. The idea of the American Revolution isolated from the rest of history is fading. The history of England framed the conflict. Networks help understand what triggered the American Revolution in ways that go beyond the simplified patriot versus king narrative of the past. This offers a chance to rethink American history in ways that bring it to life in today’s world. The dance of local network and corporate webs of influence that played out on the Boston Docks on December 16, 1773, still inflame citizens and motivate elites today.
[i] O’Shaughnessy, Andrew Jackson, The Men Who Lost America: British Leadership, the American Revolution and the Fate of the Empire, Yale Univ. Press, New Haven, 2013, pages
[ii] Id.
[iii] —, “Shakespeare’s Stratford”, Shakespeare’s Life, Royal Shakespeare Company, http://www.rsc.org.uk/explore/shakespeare/stratford.aspx
[iv] —, James Otis: Against Writs of Assistance: February 1761, The Humanities Institute, 1998, www.nhinet/ccs/docs/writs.htm.
Pt. 4 – Looking Back With New Revolutionary Eyes
The role of the corporation during the European expansion is getting increasing recognition. In 2009, activist-author Douglas Rushkoff offered a description of colonial American that no longer looked like the traditional description of colonists thirsting for freedom, with the British Crown in charge. The new story was about corporate rule:
Everything went through corporations; even the Pilgrims famous voyage to America was made on a Chartered East India Company ship, the Mayflower, which was actually on its fourth such trip to the continent. The corporation had already claimed – and been granted the same American coast. Successive waves of colonists were appreciated solely for their capacity to enhance the credit column of the ledger back home.
Leaving the role of corporations out of the traditional story made a difference. Without the corporate piece, the American story became a quaint and distant myth. With the corporate piece, it comes to life in today’s world. . In the new view, the American Revolution becomes not just near-religious story of good and evil, but the tale of a hostile corporate take-over.
Rushkoff, as many others are now doing, made the connection between the corporations that ran each American settlement and the East India Company. The Company was the first multinational trading company. Its stockholders included members of Parliament, George III and his circle. So, it was natural that, when the East India Company blew its nose, the Crown and Parliament held the hankie. It asked for monopoly status in America and an exemption from taxes. No problem in England. In 1773, it passed the seemingly sensible Tea Act. The Company got what it wanted. Residents of corporate fiefs in American didn’t. Businesses were threatened. Action was needed.
The Crown’s behavior was made doubly galling by the prohibition on any local manufacturing in America. To Americans intense displeasure, they were viewed, in the English circles that mattered, as residents of what amounted to banana republics, minus the republic.[1] This line of thinking couldn’t be sustained. An explosion was inevitable. A volatile divide grew from a rapidly-diverging interests.
On the one hand, English, Dutch, French and Spanish overseas trading companies and colonial administrations had never faced a pushback they couldn’t handle. On the other, Englishmen in Americans had the expectation of their rights under the English Constitution. They held tight to the hair-trigger inclination they brought with them from England to use extreme violence when these rights were offended. This situation would become a learning experience on all sides.
As with World War I and the Vietnam War, the parties staggered into a bloody conflict on the backs of unrealistic perceptions of the way the world worked. Nine years after the 1773 Tea Act, an English band would be playing The World Turned Upside Down as the marched defeated from the fields of Yorktown. England lost a war almost nobody wanted. George III lost a war he imagined would be a walkover. It became an extreme exercise in perception adjustment.
In 2002, historian Gordon Wood put this march toward reality testing in perspective:
Although the North government intended [the] Tea Act only to be a means of saving the East India Company from bankruptcy, it set off the final series of explosions.[2]
The story of American history hasn’t been told this way in the past. This build up and surprising trigger is not traditional American history. One traditional story tells of an inevitable clash of patriots and a despot. Marxists offered the Revolution as a step in the march toward a worker’s paradise. High School versions served up a meal that led with the Pilgrims’ appetite for freedom and turkey, followed by the wisdom of Founding Fathers and the blood of patriots, seasoned with Washington’s virtue.
The emerging network view merely adds a bit of soap opera to the mix. The network run-up to any regime change cascade mingles elements of a Greek tragedy with Keystone Kops and a good detective thriller. The idea of path dependence, a central idea for networks, never assumes predetermined outcomes. Dumb luck hovers in the wings. Alternative endings promise to bring the curtain down at any minute.
Washington could have been shot, as he almost was quite a few times. Crossing the Delaware could have ended, as it should, in an American disaster ending of the war. After Arnold defected, West Point could have fallen, splitting the northern and southern colonies. Franklin’s mission to France could easily have failed to bring in the French. Adding a network dash of the soap opera melodrama to history brings it alive. Framing the Boston Tea Party in network terms takes it from the realm of a somewhat boring cartoon to a story with blood in its veins.
Rethinking the Tea Party focuses on the Revolution as an accident based on sound business thinking. Any MBA today could embrace the moves that led to the war as normal practice. In 2011, Prof. Robert Allison described the almost routine step that lit the American fuse.
Neither the king nor his minister was thinking specifically of Americans when [Prime Minister Lord] North proposed the Tea Act. The measure instead had much to do with the empire and the North ministry. The East India Company had taken over the administration of India; this gave it great potential wealth, as well as immediate and tremendous debt. North proposed lending the Company £1.5 million (about $270 million today). In return, he would appoint the company’s governors. The company would also have a monopoly on tea sold in North America, and could ship its tea directly to the American markets without paying British revenue duties. .[3]
Who in England could have thought that this sensible bottom-line enhancement would be a problem for anyone or, if it were, it would matter. Surprise is what makes regime change cascades of network models so interesting. Arab Spring was a surprise in 2010. So was the sudden removal of Civil War Monuments in 2017. Cascades tend to come with gripping histories. Hope and despair get equal time.
Keepers of the status quo are cross. The previously testy are astonished by their unexpected good fortune. Everyone is shocked. History in the past tried to create stories that edited out the surprise. Network versions of history put the surprise back in. The surprise in Boston is how the locals, all along the East Coast, reacted. According to Allison:
The “Day is at length arrived,” a committed of Philadelphia merchants declared, “in which we must determine to live as Freemen – or as Slaves to linger out a miserable existence.” The Tea Act would make Americans subservient to the “corrupt and designing ministry” and change their “invaluable Title of American Freemen to that of Slaves.” American must not give Parliament the power to control their lives, the said. The Philadelphians insisted that no tea be landed.[4]
Bonding and trust are also features of a network approach. The Boston Tea Party was the event that demonstrated how a bond of trust and loyalty was shattered, almost overnight. Legitimacy is based on trust. Lose it and things may happen. Often they don’t. American Slavery and post-Civil War Jim Crow laws broke trust, but did not immediately trigger action. Force maintained the status quo for a century. In America of the late 1700s, it was different.
Americans knew their history. At the Boston of 1773, the locals had in mind the English Civil War of the 1640s, the Glorious Revolution of 1688 and the decade of fighting in the mid century French and Indian War. According to anthropologist Jack Weatherford,
Having learned the techniques of Indian warfare while fighting the French, the colonists applied these same lessons to their ensuing struggle for independence against the British Crown. [5]
The Americans also knew their branding and used it self-consciously. Per Weatherford,
When the colonists decided to launch a strong public protest against the British tea tax, the chose to dress in Mohawk clothing and stage attacks on cargo ships carrying tea. . . . [R]ebels dressed throughout the colonies undertook, similar protests. The always dressed as Indians to do so. This was not done haphazardly, or by chance; the colonists had already begun using the Indian as a symbol of resistance to authority and as an icon of liberty.[6]
Traditional historians offer up the Tea Party without offering the interesting bits that might connect it to today’s headlines. Getting inside the head of the best citizens of Boston is a wholly different experience from memorizing dates and facts, imagining impersonal dialectics or simplified causes. These are useful exercises.
Recent additions of sinew to the historical skeleton just adds interest and relevance. In 2003 Author Ted Nace, for instance “. . . the Boston Tea Party can’t be explained merely as an outburst of nationalism.”[7] Was the Tea Party just a knee-jerk reaction of patriots, burning for liberty? Or, something more nuanced? According to Nance,
Looking closely at events that led up to that night we can see it was a well-targeted attempt to block the British East India Company from carrying out a specific plan to monopolize American commodities markets, starting with tea. When respectable American businessmen took the uncharacteristically radical action of dressing up in disguise and committing wholesale vandalism, the motivating force was not abstract. It was literally to defend their businesses. In other words, it was a highly pragmatic economic rebellion against an overbearing corporation, rather than a political rebellion against an oppressive government. Or more accurately, it was a rebellion against a corporation and a government that were thoroughly entwined.[8]
Inflammable uncertainty lifted its head on both sides. For the Crown, it was not personal, just business. For the worthy leaders of Boston, it was the Art of the Deal – a negotiating tactic not intended to start a war. The Crown expected the other side to roll over. The Tea Partiers didn’t expect George III to play hardball. So, it ended in war. Who would have guessed? So, how are the issues of the Boston Tea Party playing out in today’s world?
Today, Anglo-American style multinationals enterprises following in the path of the East India Company are creating conditions that are leading to their own Boston Tea Parties. As with George III and his set, the quest for low-wage workers in the 1900s is leading to pushback. The same arguably goes for unchecked corporate environment damage and corporate capture of government. Recent historians using network tools are using the patterns that tend to appear in the fabric of networks to generalize lessons learned in history. Rough patterns emerge in types of network structure again and again. East India-style international enterprises tend to behave on recognizable ways, tend to created the similar problems and trigger their own Tea Party episodes.
The common feature is structure. Surprisingly little has changed in multinational corporate structure or behavior since 1600. The puzzle is how long it takes to fix a problematic institution. Absolute monarchies are gone. Totalitarian dictatorships are no longer viewed as useful. The absolute power of the East India Company-style Corporation remains as the last holdover of the era of European expansion.
Cultural learning takes generations. After a series of efforts in the twentieth century to tame the corporate beast, some promising alternatives are emerging. More nimble and resilient, and less toxic breeds have appeared.
Helping set the mood for change is the recognition that the Anglo-American style corporation is ailing. From a life expectancy of 60 years in 1950, the average life of a corporation has dropped to 12 years, along with a shortening of tenure of heads of Anglo-American style corporations. A culture of short term, grab and go, extraction, has led to a race to the bottom, damaging workers, shareholders, the environment and the notion of representative government.
The old design needs an overhaul. A new respect for networks makes this possible. Ways of anchoring business in the community and the environment exist. Employee owned and benefit corporations are on the rise. Multinational efforts to suppress wages and shop for underpaid employees are finding increasing resistance. Buying local is becoming popular. The Boston Tea Party and the American Revolution show that it intense dissatisfaction and a long search for better ways are needed to crystalized choices and trigger action.
Flaws built into the way unaccountable corporations operate have created a poorly defined desire for something better. People, even those who benefit from the status quo, want a livable future for their children and the environment.
While bloody political cascades like the Boston Tea Party are possible, so is a more orderly process. Fixes for corporate excesses were tried several times in American history, including the Age of Jackson, the early 20th century Progressive Era, the New Deal and in post-World War II Europe. The latter seems to be most successful. As Northern Europe forges ahead socially and economically with corporate forms better anchored to the local community and the environment, a path to a less toxic corporate way is revealed.
Everyone and no one is an expert on the future. The Boston Tea Party shows what is possible. But, as then, uncertainty wrestles with the hope that things could be better. That makes a network rethinking of history helpful and makes it worth getting up in the morning to see what might happen next.
[1] Rushkoff, Douglass, Life, Inc.,: How the World Became a Corporation and How to Take It Back, Random House, New York, 2009, page 11-12.
[2] Wood, Gordon, The American Revolution: A History, The Modern Library, New York, 2002, page 37.
[3] Allison, Robert, The American Revolution, Oxford Univ. Press, 2011, pages 16-17.
[4] Allison, Robert, The American Revolution, Oxford Univ. Press, 2011, pages 16-17.
[5] Weatherford, Jack, Native Roots: How Indians Enriched America, Fawcett Columbine, New York, 1991, page171-3.
[6] Weatherford, Jack, Native Roots: How Indians Enriched America, Fawcett Columbine, New York, 1991, page171-3.
[7] Nace, Ted, Gangs of America: the Rise of Corporate Power and the Disabling of Democracy, Basset-Koehler Publishers, Inc., San Francisco, 2003, page 42.
[8] Id.
