iamnotfromthis t1_iznw6tj wrote on December 10, 2022 at 2:53 PM

Reply to comment by [deleted] in Simple/Short/Silly History Questions Saturday! by AutoModerator

I am not fully certain but I'll argue that the american colonies where profitable due to the taxes that the crown charged from them (the spark of the revolution was raised taxes after all), I would also think that any colony trying to be independent would be a serious issue, if for no other reason thay it could be an incentive for other (and more valuable) colonies to revolt if they were sucessful

TheGreatOneSea t1_izot0ng wrote on December 10, 2022 at 6:44 PM

The profit from the American colonies came mostly from the food that was exported to the more lucrative Caribbean islands, and the lumber industry, which was needed for the ships.

The English tax system itself had trouble taxing America, because Americans didn't have enough gold or silver to make that easy, and customs officials in America were practically on their own, which made them easy to threaten.

The only practical method of tax was thus forcing all goods to come in and out of Britian, which probably caused more problems than it solved.

19seventyfour t1_izoilh5 wrote on December 10, 2022 at 5:33 PM

My understanding was that even though there were high taxes, most were not being paid or even enforced by Americans. I wish I could remember where I heard that (most likely YouTube)

phillipgoodrich t1_izqfv1p wrote on December 11, 2022 at 2:03 AM

Along the lines of financial value of the American colonies to the British Empire, the simple fact that Great Britain enjoyed a monopoly on colonial goods was huge. At the outbreak of the Revolution, the fear was that the colonies if independent would seek favored nation status with British rivals like the Bourbons (France and Spain) along with the United Provinces. In reality, the Revolution changed very little in terms of dealing with the Brits. The French Revolution soured relations with the U.S. remarkably rapidly.

But the reasons for the American Revolution had almost nothing to do with taxes. As pointed out previously, the taxes assessed to American colonists were chump change compared with what the British citizens were paying (and most Brits were also subject to "taxation without representation" as only about 3% of them had suffrage rights (had to be a land-owner in Great Britain in order to vote)). The true reasons for the American Revolution were two-fold: 1) the ongoing quartering of British soldiers in the northern colonies, with the ongoing threat of violence in the streets (along the lines of the Boston massacre), and 2) the threat of abolition of human chattel slavery in the wake of Sommersett v. Steuart at the Court of King's Bench in 1772, which potential absolutely enraged the southern American colonies, and led in turn to the Dunmore Declaration and subsequent escalation of hostilities in the American south.

It was only in the wake of the successful Revolution that leaders like the Adams cousins, Franklin, and Jefferson realized that the story of the Revolution would not sit well with subsequent generations of Americans, and concocted the "taxation without representation" chestnut that filled the history books of the next 50 years. In the last years of Adams and Jefferson, when they had more or less "reconciled," Adams begged Jefferson to come clean and tell the truth of why the southern colonies had joined Massachusetts in revolt. Jefferson politely but firmly refused, as he had spent the last 20 years of his life building a false legacy that endured until the last 25 years or so.