A Tradition of Neglect

• The British Parliament established growing supremacy over the king

• These parliamentary leaders were less inclined than the seventeenth-century monarchs had been to try to tighten imperial organization.

• Resistance to imperial authority centered on the colonial legislatures.

• By the 1750s, the American assemblies had claimed the right to levy taxes, make appropriations, approve appointments, and pass laws for their respective colonies

The Colonies Divided

• The colonists continued to think of themselves as loyal English subjects.

• In many respects, in fact, they felt stronger ties to England than they did to one another

• The colonies could scarcely avoid forging connections with one another.

• The growth of the colonial population produced an almost continuous line of settlement along the seacoast and led to the gradual construction of roads and the rise of intercolonial trade.

• The colonial postal service helped increase communication

• “Everyone cries, a union is necessary,” Franklin wrote to the Massachusetts governor, “but when they come to the manner and form of the union, their weak noodles are perfectly distracted.”

4.1: The Struggle for the Continent

• In the late 1750s and early 1760s, a great war raged through North America, changing forever the balance of power both on the continent and throughout much of the world.

• The war in America was part of a titanic struggle between England and France for dominance in world trade and naval power.

• The British victory in that struggle, known in Europe as the Seven Years’ War

New France and the Iroquois nation

• The French and the English had coexisted peacefully in North America for nearly a century.

• But by the 1750s, religious and commercial tensions began to produce new conflicts.

• French shared their territories with a large and powerful Indian population

• The English—with their more advanced commercial economy—could usually offer the Indians better and more plentiful goods.

• But the French offered something that was often more important: tolerance

• The most powerful native group, however, had a different relationship with the French.

Anglo-French Conflicts

• As long as England and France remained at peace in Europe, and as long as the precarious balance in the North American interior survived, the tensions among the English, French, and Iroquois remained mild.

• The wars had important repercussions in America.

• The Treaty of Utrecht, which brought the conflict to a close in 1713,

• In the aftermath of King George’s War, relations among the English, French, and Iroquois in North America quickly deteriorated.

The Great War for the Empire

• The French and Indian War lasted nearly nine years, and it proceeded in three distinct phases

• The first phase lasted from the Fort Necessity debacle in 1754 until the expansion of the war to Europe in 1756.

• The British provided modest assistance during this period,

• The second phase of the struggle began in 1756 when the governments of France and England formally opened hostilities and a truly international conflict (the Seven Years’ War) began.

• Pitt initiated the third and final phase of the war by relaxing many of the policies that Americans found oppressive

• The French had always been outnumbered by the British colonists;

• The French and Indian War had profound effects on the British Empire and the American colonies.

• It greatly expanded England’s territorial claims in the New World.

• At the same time, it greatly enlarged Britain’s debt; financing the vast war had been a major drain on the treasury.

Seigneuries- large estates

4.2: The New Imperialism

• With the treaty of 1763, England found itself at peace for the first time in more than fifty years

Burdens of Empire

• The experience of the French and Indian War suggested that such increased involvement would not be easy to achieve

• With the territorial annexations of 1763, the area of the British Empire was suddenly twice as great as it had been, and the problems of governing it were thus considerably more complex.

The British and the Tribes

• The Proclamation of 1763 was appealing to the British for several reasons.

• In the end, however, the Proclamation of 1763 failed to meet even the modest expectations of the Native Americans.

• The British authorities tried repeatedly to establish limits to the expansion but continually failed to prevent the white colonists from pushing the line of the settlement still farther west

The Colonial Response

• The Sugar Act of 1764, was designed in part to eliminate the illegal sugar trade between the continental colonies and the French and Spanish West Indies

• In 1771, a small-scale civil war broke out as a result of the so-called Regulator movement in North Carolina.

• Economic anxieties were rising in the colonies nevertheless, and they created a growing sense of unease.

4.3: Stirrings of Revolt

The Stamp Act Crisis

• The actual economic burdens of the Stamp Act were relatively light; the stamps were not expensive.

• What made the law offensive to the colonists was the precedent it seemed to set

• In several colonial cities, crowds began taking the law into their own hands.

• The Stamp Act crisis was a dangerous moment in the relationship between the colonies and the British government.

• But the crisis subsided, largely because England backed down.

• The authorities in London changed their attitude not because of the colonists’ defiance but because of economic pressure.

• Even before the Stamp Act, many New Englanders had stopped buying English goods to protest the Sugar Act of 1764.

Internal Rebellions

• The conflicts with Britain were not the only uprisings emerging in the turbulent years of the 1760s.

• To emphasize their determination, they stopped paying rent.

The Townshend Program

• Act of 1765, which required the colonists to provide quarters and supplies for the British troops in America

The Boston Massacre

• The withdrawal of the Townshend Duties never had a chance to pacify colonial opinion

• “Boston Massacre”—a graphic symbol of British oppression and brutality

The Philosophy of Revolt

• A superficial calm settled on the colonies for approximately three years after the Boston Massacre.

• Because humans were inherently corrupt and selfish, the government was necessary to protect individuals from the evil in one another.

• But because any government was run by corruptible people, the people needed safeguards against its possible abuses of power

• One basic principle, Americans believed, was the right of people to be taxed only with their own consent—a belief that gradually took shape in the widely repeated slogan “No taxation without representation.”

The Tea Excitement

• In an effort to save the company, the government passed the Tea Act of 1773, which gave the company the right to export its merchandise directly to the colonies without paying

• The Tea Act angered many colonists for several reasons. First, it enraged influential colonial merchants, who feared being replaced and bankrupted by a powerful monopoly

• The Tea Act revived American passions about the issue of taxation without representation.

• The boycott was an important event in the history of colonial resistance.

• Parliament followed these Coercive Acts—or, as they were more widely known in America, Intolerable Acts

4.4: Cooperation and War

New Sources of Authority

• Continental Congress convened in Carpenter’s Hall in Philadelphia.

• Parliament now proposed that the colonies, instead of being taxed directly by Parliament, would tax themselves at Parliament’s demand

Lexington and Concord

• For months, the farmers and townspeople of Massachusetts had been gathering arms and ammunition and training as “minutemen,” preparing to fight on a minute’s notice

• The first shots—the “shots heard round the world,” as Americans later called them—had been fired

• It was not immediately clear to the British, and even to many Americans, that the skirmishes at Lexington and Concord were the first battles of the war.