After the destruction of 342 chests of tea in Boston Harbor, Parliament answered with a set of laws known at the time as the Coercive Acts. This episode explores how Britain’s attempt to make an example of Massachusetts instead pushed the American colonies toward unity and revolution.

We trace the debts from the Seven Years’ War, the Declaratory Act, and the Tea Act bailout of the East India Company, then break down the Boston Port Act, Massachusetts Government Act, Administration of Justice Act, Quartering Act, and the Quebec Act. Finally, we follow the committees of correspondence, the First Continental Congress, and the Suffolk Resolves.

• Why the Tea Act threatened colonial merchants as much as it raised constitutional questions
• How closing Boston’s port amounted to collective punishment
• Why Washington called the Administration of Justice Act the Murder Act
• What the 1774 Quartering Act really allowed, according to historian David Ammerman
• How the Quebec Act’s borders and religious terms alarmed Protestant colonists