The Boston Tea Party was an act of protest on December 16, 1773 during the American Revolution. Initiated by the Sons of Liberty in Boston, the capital of Massachusetts, one of the Thirteen Colonies of British America, it escalated hostilities between Great Britain and the Patriots, who opposed British policy towards its American colonies. Less than two years later, on April 19, 1775, the Battles of Lexington and Concord, also in Massachusetts, launched the eight-year American Revolutionary War, which resulted in the independence of the colonies as the United States.

The source of the protestors' anger was the passage of the Tea Act by the Parliament of Great Britain on May 10, 1773, which allowed the East India Company (EIC) to sell Chinese tea in the colonies without paying taxes apart from those imposed by the Townshend Acts. The Sons of Liberty strongly opposed both the Tea Act and Townshend Acts, which they saw as a violation of their "rights as Englishmen" to no taxation without representation.

Disguised as Native Americans, on the night of December 16 members of Sons of Liberty boarded the Dartmouth, a merchantman that had docked in Boston carrying a major shipment of EIC tea, and set about throwing 342 chests of the tea into Boston Harbor. The British government considered the protest an act of treason and responded with several punitive measures. Nine days later, on December 25, during the Philadelphia Tea Party, a group of Patriots forced the merchantmen Polly, which was transporting a shipment of tea, to return to England without unloading her cargo.

Parliament responded in 1774 with the Intolerable Acts, which, among other provisions, ended local self-government in Massachusetts and closed Boston's commerce. Colonists throughout the Thirteen Colonies responded to the Intolerable Acts with additional acts of protest, and by convening the First Continental Congress in Philadelphia, which sent a Petition to the King for repeal of the acts and coordinated colonial resistance to them, culminating in the October 1774 Continental Association.