Augustine Sedgewick is the author of Coffeeland: One Man’s Dark Empire and the Making of Our Favorite Drug. His latest book is Fatherhood: A History of Love and Power.

Of all the explosive tax revolts in history, none has been as consequential as the one that saw chests full of tea tipped into the Atlantic, and sparked the founding of the United States.

The American colonists loved tea; by all accounts, they drank prodigious quantities of the stuff. Yet in the fall and winter of 1773, the colonists increasingly began to see tea as a “plague,” and the steps they took to defend themselves united them as never before.

The issue wasn’t exactly the infamous tax on tea itself; in fact, the hated Tea Act of 1773 actually proposed to lower tea prices by granting a monopoly on sales to the struggling East India Company, which had become a crucial source of revenue for the British government and Crown.

The problem, instead, was the tyranny. Tea quickly came to symbolize the dangers of government based on a “system of the favourite,” as the colonists put it – one that they believed was run to suit the needs of a distant corporation and its stakeholders.

If tea could be so manipulated, what new forms of corruption and flights of authoritarian whim would be next?

Up and down the Atlantic seaboard, colonists of diverse birthplaces, backgrounds and beliefs decided to fight. When they dumped tons of tea into harbours in Boston and beyond, they were met with escalating force that seemed to prove their fears and instincts right: military occupation, constraints on local assemblies, abuses of police power and indemnities for British colonial officials. The result, 250 years ago, was revolution.

Are we now at another point when caffeinated beverages might lead to political revolt yet again?

In the past year, more than half of goods imported into the U.S. have been hit with President Donald Trump’s unilateral tariffs – including coffee, a commodity that had been imported duty-free for more than 150 years and is consumed daily by as many as two-thirds of American adults.

As a result, the price of coffee has spiked by more than 40 per cent since last year, according to the government’s own data. American consumers, who together drink more coffee than any other people in the world, have been asked to bear the costs of those tariffs, along with our allies and trading partners.

And while the Trump administration announced last week that it would remove reciprocal tariffs on coffee beans from nearly all producing countries – an acknowledgment that its tariffs hurt Americans, too – Brazil, the world’s largest producer for nearly two centuries, was still being taxed at a staggering 40 per cent up until late Thursday. The reversal may not be enough to roll back the price surge.

The legality of these tariffs is now before a skeptical-seeming Supreme Court; the Constitution, the result of America’s long-ago, tea-inspired revolution, says that the legislature, rather than the executive, is in charge of raising revenue through taxation. But the question stands: Could tariffs’ impact on the price of the most popular drink in the U.S. stimulate a new mass protest against the government? Could the duties heighten larger fears of a new “system of the favourite”?

A Boston Coffee Party on the part of modern-day Americans........

© The Globe and Mail