No, not the Royal Navy (Even though the merchant marine of the time sometimes thought of themselves that way) those taxes taxes went directly to shore up the East India Tea Company, who also had exclusive rights to all tea sales in the colonies. The colonies were the victims of a particularly pernicious monarchy-mandated circle-jerk without having a seat at the table, which is what eventually resulted in all that unpleasantness in the Boston Harbor back then.
As with all matters of import (or matters of taxation and export), if you want to know what really happened and why, FOLLOW. THE. MONEY.
It's funny how countries schools never teach their children the inglorious parts of their history. In British schools we're told lots of good things about ourselves but not about the grossest parts of our history. So, Winston Churchill is a hero, not the man who ordered the massive use of chemical weapons against Russian revolutionaries in Emtsa in August 1919, or their use against Iraqi Kurds in the early 1920's. The huge war crime of the fire bombing of the civilian population of Dresden by the RAF got no mention in my history lessons. I've never know a Briton who knew about these things from school history lessons.
Similarly I've never know an American who knew the fully story of the prelude to the US Revolution from what they had been taught in school. In US schools, little or no mention is made of the Royal Proclamation of 1763 which established a line down the Appalachians which was supposed to be the limit of British settlement in North America, leaving the area to the west of the Proclamation Line for the Native Americans (and Spanish territory from the west coast inland). European scholars conclude that it was objections to this restriction that ultimately sparked the American Revolution ten years later, not a principled stand against "No taxation without representation". American scholars, for some reason, take the exact opposite position. On the "follow the money" principle, which is more likely a motivator, skipping a bit of tax*, or a massive land grab for the purposes of property speculation.
* 18th century taxes were generally negligible compared to modern levels of taxation and the tax on tea, a highly taxed luxury good, was 3d a pound versus a price of 24d a pound including tax (12.5% gross, 14.28% net). There was no Income Tax in Britain until 1798, when it was at the staggering level of 0.83% for income over £60 a year (£7140 present value).
That tax structure was lifted from your domestic usage; the taxation on goods shipped over here was taxed as if imported (yes, that's right; taxed at a British territory, on goods "imported" from British merchants), and that taxation was based on
presumed value, which was a figure often created out of whole cloth by the merchants themselves who, like the East India Tea Company, received almost all of those taxes back as subsidy, or who were reporting back to their investors so that they could keep the seed money flowing. These figures had as much to do with reality as our FBI's accounting of the "street value" of drug seizures.
On top of this, those taxes were paid AT THE DOCKS, (docks that were built by colonist labor, using indigenous materials, and managed by colonial property owners in all levels except the highest, where the money was) to his Majesty's agents backed directly by British soldiers. Importers with subsidy by the crown like EITC were exempted from slip fees, which was where those property owners made their profit from the operation of those docks.
These people could see with great transparency the "glass ceiling" where all the money went up, and only a few crumbs came back down to them... and guess who it was that organized that little excursion?
That "Royal Proclamation" was made well after the fact; the Spanish expansion had already met up with considerable opposition from the descendants of many of the colonial settlers (most of whom were offspring of one variant or another of boatloads of religious zealots like John Calvin) moving Westward, and it was made entirely to appease and support the Spanish, not in any way for the "natives" who were caught in the crossfire and neither side considered them as anything more than vermin to be exterminated. Those "settlers" considered themselves to be the "true natives" as they were born here, and they were on a mission from God, and as such refused all other directive save those passed down by their
wingnuts religious leaders, even the orders of their titular King.
Getting back to the "Rebellion" and our "founding fathers"... A few scant decades after these men of property and good standing risked everything they had, mortgaged entire estates the size of counties to fund "the King's Colonies" over here, he starts using those colonies as a dumping ground for boatloads of every undesirable he could think of. Britain ran most of our ancestors out of the country literally at gunpoint; either because they were criminals or so fanatically religious that even the sociopathically repressive culture of the time couldn't stand them.
Sure, they risked it all in pursuit of massive profits... but what they saw was, at just the point where all their risk should start paying off, a monarchy taking most of that profit for themselves with new taxes and tariffs that were JUST FOR THE COLONIES, nobody else, and leaving them nothing to pay off their own debts back home, much less the massive profits that were promised.
So, like most such events... our "Rebellion" was a mix of starvation and feast, of greed (on both sides) vs desperation. And as always, "History" is "His story" as told by the "winners".
My mother was a proud student of HISTORY... and instilled in me a love of such things.
But as she said many times...
"History has very little to do with what you read in history books."A'aight... I'm late for lunch. Think I'm gonna set fire to some dead cow and hope it doesn't catch.
mnem
"Time is an illusion... lunchtime, doubly so."