Answer:
A) the provocation against the British authorities to enact and implement more coercive and authoritarian laws governing the colonies.
Step-by-step explanation:
The Townshend Acts of 1767 imposed taxes on various products imported by the British colonies, generating a series of protests. As a result, they were repealed in 1770 and only the tea tax was maintained. Boston merchants then received smuggled tea, helping Parliament pass the Tea Act, which granted the East India Company a monopoly on all tea exported to the colonies, among other perks. In New York, Philadelphia, and Charleston, merchants refused shipments, but in Boston Governor Thomas Hutchinson kept the law by allowing three ships to unload. On the night of December 16, 1773, a group of sixty men boarded the ships and dumped the tea boxes in the water.