America in the British EmpireAmerica in the British Empire 3

CONTENTS

■A 1789 engraving of the Boston Tea Party by W. D. Cooper. The colonists

dressed as Indians.

81

Colonial fury was partly due to a change in how

London assessed and collected taxes. During the first half

of the eighteenth century, most taxes were set by colo-

nial assemblies and based on landholdings. But after

1763 the British government in London imposed new

taxes on trade. When ships entered American ports, cap-

tains were required to pay taxes before the “enumer-

ated” (taxable) cargos could be moved from the docks.

Whenever Americans bought a bag of nails or a tin of

tea, they were making indirect tax payments to London.

Tax cheats avoided customs officials by smuggling goods

into remote coves at night. But rather than evade the

“intolerable” tax burden, colonists increasingly decided

to eliminate it altogether.

Resistance to taxation was but one of the sources of

turmoil in mid-eighteenth-century America. The taxes

themselves had been necessitated by war, always a desta-

bilizing force in human affairs. Some people, too, experi-

enced a “great awakening” in religious faith; others

looked to the European Enlightenment and its enshrine-

ment of reason and science. Traditional ideas and institu-

tions were being scrutinized more closely. By the 1760s

and 1770s, irritation over taxes was symptomatic of a

more profound societal unease.■

■The British Colonial System

■Mercantilism

■The Navigation Acts

■The Effects of Mercantilism

■The Great Awakening

■The Rise and Fall of

Jonathan Edwards

■The Enlightenment in America

■Colonial Scientific

Achievements

■Repercussions of Distant Wars

■The Great War for the Empire

■Britain Victorious: The Peace

of Paris

■Burdens of an Expanded

Empire

■Tightening Imperial Controls

■The Sugar Act

■American Colonists

Demand Rights

■The Stamp Act: The Pot Set

to Boiling

■Rioters or Rebels?

■The Declaratory Act

■The Townshend Duties

■The Boston Massacre

■The Boiling Pot Spills Over

■The Tea Act Crisis

■From Resistance to Revolution

■American Lives:

Eunice Williams/

Gannenstenhawi

■Debating the Past:

Do Artists Depict Historical

Subjects Accurately?

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