American Revolutionary War (Crisis)

The close of the Seven Years' War in 1763 (called the French and Indian War in America) saw Great Britain triumphant in driving the French from North America. Though triumphant, Britain had been forced to borrow heavily to win the war, in particular in using the American colonies as a base for invading and seizing French territories. In the year between 1763-4, the British revenue service in America cost four times more to administer than it collected in duties, and London therefore decided that it was time to end the policy of Salutary Neglect, and enforce a more vigorous approach to collecting legal revenues from the thirteen colonies. Since the earliest times, Americans had experienced an extremely relaxed approach towards smuggling. Nowhere in the British Empire were taxes as low as in the thirteen colonies - India and Britain itself were subjected to much higher levels of exploitation. For example, the 1733 Molasses Act, introduced to protect the plantations from their more productive French counterparts, imposed a tax of sixpence per gallon on imports of molasses from non-British West Indian colonies. But it was so heavily violated that it produced only a trickle of revenue; twenty years later, only 384 hogsheads of molasses officially entered Boston, a town housing 63 rum distilleries that together required an annual 40,000 hogsheads of molasses to maintain normal production.

Parliament passed the Stamp Act in March 1765, which imposed direct taxes on the colonies for the first time starting November 1. This was met with strong condemnation among American spokesmen, who argued that their "Rights as Englishmen" meant that taxes could not be imposed on them because they lacked representation in Parliament.[31] At the same time the colonists rejected the solution of being provided with the representation, claiming that "their local circumstances" made it impossible.