The relationship ties between America and the British Empire should have been strengthened after bounteous years of French and Indian war. However, the bond between the two countries was strained by a series of laws enacted by the British to regain their financial prosperity and political control over the colonies.
Steadily, American settlers realized the dominance of the British and started to suspect and resist the control and rights of the English empire over them. The two sides soon realized that they have different views about politics, society, and the constitution. The severed ties ended up in internal insurgences against the British rule and led to the declaration and American Revolution for independence. The decree of 1763 concluded the war with Indian tribes, forbidding the advance of the colonial settlers beyond the west of the Appalachian Mountains. Northern traders suffered heavy losses as they were prevented from trading in the west. Planters in South America were enraged by the fact that they could not indulge in land speculating in the west anymore.
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In order to improve the trade and monetary activities of Great Britain, the businesses in American colonies were restricted from large scale manufacturing of products. These restrictions narrowed down the employment opportunities in towns and workers were shoved into poverty. George Greenville was appointed by the king as the Prime minister of England in the year 1763 and his ministry tried to extend their influence and power on the colonies by enacting a series of laws like the Mutiny act and Sugar and Currency act.
The Stamp act of 1765 was considered as the igniting torch beyond the string of revolts that took place for the next ten years in America. Until the resolution of the stamp act, taxes were collected from the colonies to regulate trade. However, the Stamp act was a direct tax levied on all the printed documents and it affected each and every colonist. The British government thought that it is appropriate to collect the cost of running the government in the colonies by levying taxes on them. But the Americans thought that the taxes should be levied and collected by their representatives and used for the development of their colony.
Virginia assembly was the first to pass a resolution prohibiting tax collection and came to popularly known as “Virginia Resolves”. The assembly of Massachusetts called for an intercolonial congress which was held in New York in October 1765 with representatives from nine colonies. Benjamin Franklin who represented the colonies expressed the same opinion in the British Parliament. Violent protests against the Stamp and Sugar acts erupted across the colonies and in protest many colonists boycotted buying goods from the British.
Goods like paper, lead, tea, and paint imports were subjected to heavy tax payments by the Townshend act. Declaratory Act, on the other hand, established the authority of the British Empire over all the American colonies. Coercive acts also called intolerable acts were a chain of four acts ratified to reprimand the revolutionary measures of American colonists. Some of the retaliation acts of the British Empire include the closing of the port of Boston for trade, trying British officers charged with a crime in other colonies or England, reducing the authoritative power of the local government, and permitting the quartering of troops in unoccupied houses and other buildings in the colonies. The laws passed by the British and the consequent revolts were discussed in institutions called Taverns. It was male-dominated like that of politics and set the stage for political and social discussions. Taverns became the source of communication wherein the leaflets and pamphlets containing the date and plans for demonstrations and protests were distributed.
As the Stamp act evoked widespread criticism from the colonists, untoward incidents of harassing customs officers in Boston forced few British regiments to be stationed permanently in the city. In another such incident, the firing of British troops killed five people and it came to be called as Boston Massacre. These incidents proposed the formation of the “committee of correspondence” in order to express and address their accusations and protests to the British rulers. Following Boston, almost all of the colonies established such committee’s and this became the first intercolonial political network.
In the year 1773, in order to sell the huge stocks of tea that were left unsold with the British East India Company, the regime conceded the Tea act. It enabled the company to trade tea promptly to the colonies without taxes and bypassing the intermediate colonial merchants giving monopoly for the East India Company in the trade. These actions enraged a large group of population led by a patriotic women’s society called “Daughters of Liberty” which demanded the boycott of tea. On December 16th of 1773, three groups of 50 people broke the tea chests stored in the ships in the Boston port and throw it out. The Lexington and Concord conflict was considered as the first battle of American independence as the first shots of the war were fired there. People living in both the countries of America and Britain considered the constitution of England as the best system of governance, as it distributed the power equally between the three pillars of a country namely the monarchs, aristocrats, and the public. However, Americans believed that the basic set of rules guiding the government, the structure, and the power allocation should be documented permanently and should not change with the rulers. The basis of the revolution was the taxation imposed on the colonies without actual representation. Americans believed that it is their right that the colonies were exemplified in the parliament of England like every other community living in that country.
This basic difference of viewpoint about the position of power was the fundamental reason behind the revolutions in America. In recent times, historians believed that the American Revolution commanded changes not only in political and economic interests; it also revolutionized the established features of society like gender relations and the role of women, religious tolerance, slavery, and the rights of Indians in the American society.
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