202410160945
Status: #idea
Tags: #british_empire #united_states #history #economics
# The American Revolution was in many ways about status more than economics
The Boston Tea Party, seen by many as one of the boiling points for the American Revolution, was ostensibly about high taxes that the British crown was levying against its American colonies. The protestors purported that the British taxes were an unreasonable burden on American taxpayers. However, in reality, the taxes on tea in particular had just been lowered substantially prior to the protest. In addition, the American colonies enjoyed some of the lowest tax burden in all of the British Empire.
The true motive, then, behind the protest (and perhaps the revolution as a whole) was not economics but status. Ben Franklin once lamented that American colonists were treated as “subjects of subjects” by the British; as a “republican race, mixed rabble of Scotch, Irish, and foreign vagabonds, descendants of convicts, ungrateful rebels, etc.”, as if they were “unworthy the name of Englishmen”. John Adams wrote as Humphry Ploughjogger “we won’t be their Negros”. The upper class of the American colonies, enjoying huge economic growth, was now as wealthy as the British but did not enjoy the same respect. The fight for independent then was a fight to be on equal footing with Britain.
[[To understand the US, we must also understand the British Empire]]
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# References
[[Empire_ the rise and demise of the British world order and the lessons for global power]]