A Review of American History
Uploaded by jamie83 on Jan 13, 2012
Although Britain’s North American colonies had enjoyed considerable prosperity during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, beginning with the Stamp Act in 1765 the British government began to put pressures on them, largely in the form of taxes and new trade restrictions, that drew increasingly resistance. (Out of Many, 133) One big reason that the loyal British citizens in North America were transformed into rebels is because of the taxes. It was not the prices of the tax, because Britain had one of the lowest taxes in the world at that time, it was the fact that Parliament had so much representation over them. The British Empire was a mercantile market. They wanted to control everything that was going on in the country. They also wanted control over the people. The whole purpose of the Parliament was to exploit the colonies. Here is a famous example that was taken from the book, of the Parliament exploiting the colonies. Parliament had passed a tea act, and colonists were major consumers of tea, but because of the tax on it that remained from the Townshend duties, the colonial market for tea had collapsed, bringing the East India Company to the brink of bankruptcy. This company was the sole agent of British power in India, and British Parliament could not let it fail. The British then transformed a scheme in which they offered tea to Americans at prices that would tempt even the most patriotic back on the beverage. The radicals argued that this was merely a device to make palatable the payment of unconstitutional taxes-further evidence of the British conspiracy to corrupt the colonists. This was called the “Boston Tea Party.”(Out of Many, 150) Another reason that led to rebellion was the persistent source of conflict between troops and townsmen over jobs. There was a point when British soldiers were permitted to work jobs off duty. This in turn put the colonials in competition with the people that already disgusted them. Here is an example I took from the book on this issue. In early March 1770, on off-duty soldier walked into a ropewalk in search of a job. The proprietor told him using an obscenity that he could clean the outhouse. The soldier left but returned with his friends, and a small riot began. On March the 5th a group of colonials gathered around the Customs House and began taunting...