Empire: World History - 156. The American Revolution: No Taxation Without Representation (Ep 1)

Episode Date: June 3, 2024

From sugar to paper, a series of taxes in the 1760s spark outrage amongst American colonists that snowball into a revolution. Was it inevitable that thirteen of Britain's 26 colonies in the Atlantic would band together and break away from the British Empire? Listen as Anita and William are joined by Maya Jasanoff to discuss the beginning of the American Revolution. Twitter: @Empirepoduk Email: [e-mail] Goalhangerpodcasts.com Assistant Producer: Anouska Lewis Producer: Callum Hill Exec Producer: Neil Fearn Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

If you want access to bonus episodes reading lists for every series of Empire, a chat community. Discounts for all the books mentioned in the week's podcast, add free listening and a weekly newsletter, sign up to Empire Club at www.mpowerpoduk.com. Hello and welcome to Empire with me, Anita Arnan. And me, William Durhampool. So we've been bathing you in Founding Fathers. Have you enjoyed it? Have you been drowning? swimming or drowning, waving or drowning.

But we wanted to bring you the main people that we're going to be talking about in this incredibly important period in American history. And we are joined and we're so lucky because we had a one once before. And there was such an enormous, enormous amount of love for you. Maya Jasanoff, Coolish Professor of History at Harvard University, author of a number of books on Britain and the British Empire, including Liberty's Exiles, the loss of America, the remaking of the British Empire. I mean, such a brilliant writer and also such a brilliant historian.

And we've got to talk up the book, which is about this area. Liberty's Exiles, the loss of America and the remaking of the British Empire. A deeply moving masterpiece, says Neil Ferguson, who had the pleasure of teaching a course with. We were slightly different political perspectives at Harvard, I seem to remember. Yes, that was the point. We wanted to model for students that you can actually have a reasoned debate about history and arrive from the same body of facts at rather different conclusions. and it doesn't mean that the facts don't exist and that everything is made up or that it's all biased.

It just means that you can have different interpretations and we could have reasonable disagreement about it in the classroom in front of students. It was a very rewarding experience. Meyer is too modest to say this, but this was one of the great hot tickets of the Harvard History Foundation. Places on this course were absolutely snapped up in seconds. It went on for several years. Several years until Neil abandoned Harvard and teaching for the Hoover Institution and as many other imperial projects. I mean, I'm actually very jealous. There are sometimes I look back at my undergraduate days. And I am green with envy at the courses I couldn't do because you lot weren't around.

It's true to say, isn't there, that Harvard, though, was a little bit of a nursery for founding fathers. So many of them sort of went to Harvard. And even back in the day, was it a, I don't know, slightly rebellious place to be? Did they form opinions there? Or did they come fully formed with opinions and just learn how to argue them and reason them at Harvard, do you think? Wow. Well, Harvard in the 18th century, it was a very small place. It was a place that would have had students from the region, not much beyond that. Of course, like so many institutions, was dedicated toward the study of theology in the first instance

and would have expanded out from there into law classics. The people who studied there would have been boys, really, from the age of maybe 14 or something like that. And yeah, I mean, there were certainly tales in the period running up to the American Revolution of rather vigorous snowball fights in Harvard Yard between people of political, you know, differences, pelting pro-British people with snowballs. It's a nice hallowed tradition. So John Adams, I think, went to Harvard and Alexander Hamilton went to King's College, New York, which became Columbia. Yes, that's right. One thing that we need to remember about the colonies at that time is that there's a big difference geographically. culturally, intellectually, commercially between New England and particularly Massachusetts and the Middle Atlantic or Southern colonies, particularly Virginia. And so the life world and course of a George Washington looked pretty different from that of a John Adams.

And one of the things that you need to be able to get is how and why Massachusetts and Virginia ended up making common cause in what would become the American Revolution. What was that difference? What are you indicating by that? Well, you know, you have in New England. It's a commercial town, Boston. It's tied to Britain in many ways culturally, but it's also got its own institutions like Harvard, colleges that would become Dartmouth and Yale and Columbia and so on. It has its own very established urban culture in a city like Boston. You have a kind of influence of religion that's just a little bit different in New England from what it's going to be in the South. Again, much more sort of commercial maritime economy. And in Virginia, you have estates and you have slavery. And it's not that you don't have slavery in New England. I want to very much stress that. We tend in the U.S., I think, to get this rather simplified idea that slavery is a thing in the South and a thing about plantations.

That's not true. There was slavery in the North. And it was often, you'd have to say, domestic slavery enslaved to people working in workshops and chips and all that sort of thing. But there's no question that in the South where you have these plantations and they're growing tobacco and they're growing rice and so. on their heavily dependent on enslaved labor, big land at estates, different kind of class configuration, different sorts of trading relationships. More like the Caribbean? Could you have imagined a world

where the Caribbean and the South were one thing and New England another? Certainly more like. You have different commercial ties. So for example, South Carolina of all of the colonies on the Eastern seaboard most closely resembles the colonies of the Caribbean, has strong historical ties to Barbados. And, you know, again, the trade relations between these regions are incredibly important. And it's important, too, I think, to note that in the run-up to what became the American Revolution, there were 26 colonies in North America and the Caribbean that belonged to Britain. And ultimately, it was only 13 of those colonies that rebelled. Very interesting.

Another way to think about the continuity down the eastern seaboard is to put Florida into the picture, which is a colony that went back and forth between Britain and Spain. Florida did not rebel in the revolutionary era. It would end up being passed back over to Spain after the war. But you have this sort of long line of British possessions going from Nova Scotia all the way down to, say, Barbados and what we could call the lesser Antilles. And along that, a huge sort of cultural and economic continuum that ranges in its ties to Britain and its feelings of loyalty and its political relationships, in its. It's embeddedness with the slave labor economy and its interests in land expansion. It just ranges all the way down and you ultimately have that middle 13 that break away.

Well, we should list the 13. Shall we list the 13? Because New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, New York, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia. Of those 13 colonies, I mean, we always assume that Virginia had the most money because, I mean, certainly that was leveled against them because, you know, they had the big plantations and the big crops and the big landowners and the greatest dandies. But, I mean, how does it rank in wealth, these 13 colonies? I think one really important thing to stress here is that the richest colonies in the Atlantic world at that time were in the Caribbean, not on the eastern seaboard necessarily.

So when we think about the global picture for Britain and how it is that they allowed this set of controversies to get out of control in, the 13 colonies future United States, part of their calculus was that it was really Jamaica that was the most economically important to them. It's the biggest economy of all Jamaica. It's not anywhere on the mainland United States. Yes, I mean, it's the sugar. It's the sugar from Jamaica, from Barbados, from the other islands that is so commercially valuable in this period. And Massachusetts and Virginia are very important, of course, in terms of what they're doing, making, trading, but the wealth from the sugar is really on another scale. So this is really, I mean, it's a test case for Britain. I mean, that's why it gets so bad, because if they lose

control here, among these upstarts, maybe, who don't bring in as much money, they will lose the cash cows. And so this becomes everything and everything to the British Empire. The way I like to portray the coming of the American Revolution from a British perspective is to set it in the context of the seven years war, which runs up until 1763. And this is a conflict that Britain wages against France, notably, and France's allies, across the globe. It is Winston Churchill was one of those who referred to it as the very first World War. It was definitely that. It had conflicts in Asia and Africa and South America everywhere.

So it ends up as a big victory for Britain and the British Empire. And it's a great mystery in many ways to wonder how and why within a dozen years or so of this huge. victory in the Seven Years' War, the Peace of Paris signed in 1763, Britain is facing another war, a revolution in North America. So how do we get there? This is an extended answer to your question, Anita. We get there because Britain is trying to balance the interests of a massively and increasingly global empire. And it's having to keep in play the interests of the newly absorbed French Catholic settlers in what was New France, what is now the British province of Quebec, with those. of the planters in the Caribbean, with those of the now millions of subjects in Bengal, of the

East India Company, with those of the colonists in the Eastern Seaboard of North America. And it's in the course of doing all of this that we end up arriving at what will be these very provocative revenue raising measures that help accelerate the trajectory toward the revolutionary sentiment in North America. My, I was very struck by what you said a few minutes ago about third. 13 out of 26 of these colonies coming together and uniting. Was there any way that you could have predicted those 13 as being one thing as opposed to say Canada, Quebec or one of the Caribbean islands? Was there anything pre the American Revolution that bound those but excluded the others?

It's a tough question to answer. I think that you would see momentum toward it from the 1750s, but you could also see other kinds of groupings. You could. certainly see a grouping that would have included South Carolina, Georgia with parts of the Caribbean. You could have seen a grouping that would have included Massachusetts, which at that time included what's now Maine, with Nova Scotia. So there's nothing inevitable about the shape that this country that's now so firmly fixed in our head with that flat line at the top, separating it from Canada, with the sea separating it from the Caribbean. There was nothing particularly, which you would have said in 1770 was bound

to unite this. I would say 1750. I might not say 1770, but as your listeners will hopefully know, there is nothing inevitable about the way that history shakes down. And it was actually Benjamin Franklin, who was one of those who quite early on in the 1750s began championing the idea that the colonies needed to, as a famous banner has it, join or die with a snake, cut into separate segments. And this is a motif, which will end up being repurposed in the 1750, 60, 70s, to help promote the idea of unity among the colonies. Is it too facile to say, actually, you know, the seven years war was so depleting to British coffers. I think they were in debt, 137 million at the time. The interest rate alone was like five million a year. They'd had a hands-off attitude towards the American colonies for a very long time. But now they needed money back.

So they needed to squeeze until the Pips squeaked all over the place to try and, you know, sort of maintain their payments, if nothing else. And that changed the relationship more than anything else. It was just, you know, basically people in America felt they were getting, or in the colonies, I should say, felt like they were getting poorer at the expense of a government that was far, far away, and often treated them like second-class citizens. I mean, we did in the origin stories how George Washington was chafing at the fact that he wasn't paid as much as British officers were paid. And it's an observation Jefferson also makes.

They treat us like nonsense. Even Adams points out that they apply law differently in Massachusetts than they would in England, for example. So is it money? Is it all about the money, honey? Or is that what happens? I might inflect it just a little to say that the problem facing Britain after the seven years war with this great set of victories is not just that it's in debt. I mean, debt is a story that will hang with Britain, obviously, quite forcefully, down to the

present day. But it's also this huge amount of land that it's acquired and what the acquisition of land means, among other things, is the cost of defense. So for the North American colonists, I think that's really. at the forefront of the tensions with Britain. And they think they've fought hard for the British Empire in the seven-year world. Well, British feel they've fought hard for the colonists and that they've ended up footing the bill. Yeah, there are two real challenges that come out of this for Britain.

One of them is that they have to defend this big Western frontier against France. And to some extent, Spain, the Western frontier being essentially all along the Appalachians, sort of leaning toward the Mississippi, if you will, but the French at that time still have that region. So it's this massive border that they now have to control. And that means they need troops to defend those places. And the two problems are first that they want to pay for the troops and to pay for the troops. They want to have revenue from the colonists to help pay for their own defense, as the British see it. The second issue is that they're very concerned about the possibility of another war breaking out. And it's not just with the French or other European powers

that they're concerned. It's also with the Indians who, of course, are the original inhabitants of all of these territories. And there's a conflict between the interests of the land-hungry frontier colonists and the interests of the metropolitan government. The land-hungry frontier colonists want to just run riot across the West, take all the land, kill the Indians and be done with it. That's their view of it. But the metropolitan government doesn't want to start provoking wars with the Indians or their European allies and having to pay for that. So they pass something called the proclamation of 1763. There's the proclamation line, as it's called,

which essentially draws a line forbidding settlement west of it, restricting settlement to east of it. It runs down the Appalachians, and many, many, many white colonial settlers in places like, say, Pennsylvania, New York State and further south, are extremely aggrieved by this idea. that they cannot push further west. Including George Washington,

who's got grand schemes to found a land company which is going to absorb the Mississippi Delta? Part of the Mississippi Valley. The land companies are a huge source of colonial expansion in the 18th century. Land is cheap in North America. Big landowners invest in it, and then they get tenants to emigrate from Britain, from Ireland,

to go settle those territories. And it's those people who are, yeah, very eager to get in on the act of getting more land, getting it cheap, and settling it. To explore that a second. So you actually having large landowners based in Britain, say the Duke of Devonshire or someone like that, who would move his own tenants to his own land in North America, they have feet in both camps? The landowners definitely have feet in both camps. And you have major figures in Britain who are investing in large quantities of land in North America and then getting people to settle. And back to the point about whether or not the Americans

see themselves as being treated badly or second-class citizens. I mean, one of the big issues is that in Britain at the time, if you own a lot of land, it's your ticket to status. I mean, that's what gets you traditionally of peerage and place in the House of Lords and so on. But in America, land relatively easy. And the Americans with aristocratic pretensions like George Washington have all this land, but then they find that they don't get the same kind of status in the British pecking order that they want. They're provincials. They're provincials. And when they go, to London, when they interact with the British, they find themselves condescended to, and they do resent that. Even someone like Franklin, who's a kind of renowned scientist and is inventing things,

and is he talked down to by all the British? Franklin is a, let's put Franklin to one side. He's much older than the others and his own claims to fame sort of come much more from his intellect, his wit, his presence in society, and so on. But people of the landowning classes or who see themselves as highly educated, et cetera. They regard themselves as being talked down to, paid differently, as Anita pointed out. And it's really a, yeah, I think a metropolitan provincial split can characterize a lot of what's going on. Well, I mean, George Washington's quibbles are in print way saying, how am I being, how am I being paid like this? Were they are braver than you lot who run away at the mere howl of Indians? And that actually, I don't know whether you know the answer to this,

But it seems to me that it would be better for the indigenous people of America if the British side won out because they are trying, I mean, for their own selfish reasons, because they can't afford a war, not to take their land because they don't want to provoke them. Whereas the colonials are the ones who are trying to grab, is there also a difference in attitude in England towards the Indians than there is amongst those colonial people who have often fought and bled to take land and to settle themselves. I just want to start by saying that it's not better for any Indians to have white people there. Sure. Okay. Completely point taken. However, I mean, I think that we can say that the interests are different. The interests of those on the ground, the white colonial settlers on the ground, who include, again, lots of Scots-Irish, lots of Germans at this time, is to take the land. And there are horrible stories of the violence that's reeked on the Western frontiers of places like Pennsylvania, North Carolina, etc.

whereas the British metropolitan government is much more interested in keeping the peace. And there's recognition of Indian sovereignty that's been going on for a long time, notably in a treaty relationship that's forged between the British and the Haudenashani Confederacy in New York State and across the borders of Canada. And the British recognize that these are independent state-like agents that they recognize as having sovereignty and power. and they are not as, shall we say, unguarded in their ravages against native villages and communities as the people on the ground and the frontier settlements will continue to be going past the moments of

American independence quite savagely and vividly. And just to give an idea of the scale of this in the 1760s, what about two and a half million in North America, about eight million in Britain population? That's right. Yeah, it's about two and a half colonial settlers. And you also have a large enslaved population. It'll run up to about 500,000, certainly by the end of the war. One thing that's important to bear in mind as well is that the population growth is incredibly

high. So the general health and well-being of an American colonist is pretty good. They have good food. Their average height, their statistics which show that the average height is a couple which is higher than that of the average height of an Englishman in the same period. I think those stats may be subject to some refinement recently, but we get these from muster rolls, someone other things, and there's certainly plenty of evidence that the food provisions, for example, are much better.

So anyway, yeah, but the population is much smaller. About half a million Native Americans at this time, too, after disease has ravaged their numbers? Yeah, I mean, obviously it'll depend on what catchment area you're drawing here, broadly speaking, the population of North America is small, diffused. There's no cities that are more than in the tens of thousands as compared to, say, London at this time, which is a million. It's very provincial, very scattered. This is so, I mean, this is such a useful picture. So, I mean, even though the colonists are chafing George Washington among them, these lines have been

drawn without so much as a how do you do and what do you think. But they ignore them largely, and they carry on expanding. And the result of that is that Indians start fighting back, but they start attacking British forts. Just walk us through the conflagration that builds up because of this ignoring of the British edict by the Americans. So there's a lot of skirmishing going on the Western Frontiers, but there's also, of course, a lot of Native American resistance to the British.

And the relationships are kind of held in check with the Haudenoshani. We do see around the Great Lakes, the conflict, which is known as Pontiac's War, raised by the Odawa leader Pontiac in the Great Lakes region. And this really brings Britain into a conflict around, this is all happening sort of around Fort Detroit, which is an important Great Lakes court. It will later, you know, if the name Pontiac is familiar to listeners,

it may be that there were car companies that later, you know, took hold in Detroit and named the makes of the cars after some of these prominent Native American figures. In any event, Pontiac's rebellion, Pontiac's war, as it's called, was waged on that northwestern frontier as it was around 1763, and as a real indication to the British of why they want to keep colonial settlement in check, because they don't want to have these kinds of conflicts going on. So one of the consequences of Pontiac's rebellion is the effort by the British to draw borders that can be sustained between themselves and native peoples.

And you have a series of treaties that are important, but one of the things that's very important here is the royal proclamation of 1763. This is what gives us the proclamation line of 1763, which basically draws this kind of border down the Appalachians and tells the colonial settlers that they need to stay east of it and not get over into native lands. There are other treaties like the Treaty of Fort Stanwigs, for example, which is drawn with the Haudenoshani Confederacy. And these treaties are intended, basically, to establish these kinds of borders, which, in effect, recognize Native sovereignty and are deeply resented by the kinds of colonial settlers who want to get over into the land that's governed by these. What would their language have been about the Native Americans when they hear that they can't go and raid their lands and take them? Well, I mean, the language they use about it will end up coming into the Declaration of Independence later. they see it as incredibly unfair and unjust restrictions on their ability to expand. But, you know, from the British point of view, these are sovereign arrangements that are made

between the delegates of different sovereign powers. I think the question was one that I was trying to get to as well, which is who, if you can boil it down this way, who's more racist about the Indians? You know, are there people in Britain respectful that is an indigenous group of people and we have to take cognizance of where they live and not wage war on them or start a war that we can't pay for? Which is endlessly drive them westwards. You know, because we see that term savage creep in quite a lot.

I've seen it in Washington's words at the time when he's going and doing his surveys. So, I mean, what is the attitude of England versus the colonial gatherings towards the Indians? Yeah, so I recognize that you're asking the question and I recognize that I'm avoiding certain terms, like saying which ones are more racist and not. I don't want to get into a competitive racism thing. But what I will continue to say is that it is absolutely. the case that the British government is recognizing the sovereignty of indigenous powers. And in so doing, it is making arrangements that are seen by colonial white Americans as being at

odds with some of those colonial white Americans desires. I recognize your recognition. Thank you. Thank you. You don't get to be Coolidge Professor of History at Harvard University without diplomatic skills like this. Well, let me add one more thing, which is just to say that the language of savagery? I mean, you know, you look across the British Empire and the language of savagery is deployed by the British all over the place. But there is also this very kind of interesting, to pick a plain word here, deployment of the word savage and the concept of savagery by colonial Americans in all sorts of ways. So, for example, they certainly see their native counterparts as savages, and there's a huge kind of cultural buildup of practices such as

scalping as indicative of the savagery of the native peoples. And this has been going on for a couple hundred years in North America. There's also a deployment of the language of savagery against the British themselves. And the colonial Americans will not hesitate to what my colleague Phil Deloria describes as play Indian when it suits them to try to, you know, dress up in Indian in clothing and emulate Indians in ways that fall in a curious mix of things that on the one end could be related to things like practices of rough justice of the sort that you might see in rural England at that time, all the way over to kind of masquerading themselves as Indians in order to try to justify their own rebellious behavior. So savagery is deployed in all kinds

of ways in this period. It's very complex. We've talked about land a lot. We're going to take a break here, But join us after the break when we pick up the rather thorny issue of taxation and representation. You might have heard those phrases before in relation to the American Revolution. Join us then. Welcome back. So we saw in the last half how the British government had built up enormous deaths after the seven years war, just as happened after the other world wars, the First World War, the Second World War and so on. Britain has to find ways of paying off its debts.

And we are now going to come to the whole question. of taxing the American colonists, which is one of the main things that sets off the American Revolution Meyer. Do you want to take us through the different stages of British attempts to get some money out of their colonists and get them to pay for their own colony? And I think that that's an important little rider that you put on there. There's really two kinds of expenses the British have. One is paying down the debt, but the other one is paying for the cost of the defense of the colonies. So that cost has just gone way up because they have these big borders. So they try to do a variety of things. And, you know, when you learn this history in the United States, you learn about a series of offensive taxes that

are levied on the colonists. But when you look at it in the British global perspective, you really see them trying to balance the interests of a bunch of different stakeholders. So the first one of these that we can point to is more properly described as a duty than a tax, and that is the Sugar Act of 1764. And that is attempting to place a duty on molasses from the West Indies, which has coming from non-British West Indian colonies. Now, why? Because the sugar barons of the British West Indies are eager to make money and they want to make sure that their industry is protected and they want to stop what has been a very substantial trade in molasses and other sugar byproducts from non-British islands like, say, Sando Mag or Cuba, into the American colonies.

Which is the French rival to Jamaica, huh? Absolutely, yes. This is the land of Tucson Loveture. Remember we did that whole episode on that? Yes, this is a little bit later. In any event, yeah. So there's sugar coming from a bunch of islands. Some of them are Spanish, some of them are French, some of them are Dutch.

And the colonists can get their sugar from wherever, but the British planters, of course, want to make sure they get it only from Britain. So the Sugar Act is essentially a protectionist measure, which is trying to force the colonists into importing their molasses from sugar overwhelmingly from the British West Indian colonies. So that's number one. That's provocative to the colonists because de facto it raises the price of sugar byproducts, but it's a case where, in effect, it shows the British government supporting the West India interest, as you could call it, within Britain itself. This is followed in 1765 by a revenue raising measure, which is understood by the chief minister

in Parliament, Lord Grenville, George Grenville, as something that ought to be pretty uncontroversial. It's a tax that's paid by British subjects themselves in the British aisles on paper goods, pamphlets, newspapers, playing cards, anything printed. And it's called the Stamp Act. What Grenville is doing with the Stamp Act, which is passed in 1765, is essentially extending to the American colonies a type of tax that is paid already in Metropolitan Britain. Now, this is seen by him as a kind of uncontroversial thing. It's like, okay, you know, let's just tax them on this stuff that British people are paying taxes on too. But the effects of this tax are totally unprecedented.

All of the founding fathers mention it. They all say that this is the thing where they go, Britain's gone mad. I mean, why does it hit so hard? So I think that we can see this in a couple ways. So first of all, the principle of it is that it's a direct tax on the common. It's one thing to put a duty on non-British molasses, right, which is a kind of, you know, more in the customs realm and a sort of a protectionist measure. It's another thing to say, you're going to pay this tax on this product directly to us. And that has not been done by the British government to the American colonists until 1765.

The other thing to bear in mind is that by passing a tax on printed matter, on paper, on documents, who are you taxing? You're taxing the most literate and educated people in the colonies. The lawyers, they're all training as lawyers. The printers like Franklin. The printers, exactly. Paul Revere, the engraver, who also gets into printing. You know, all of the kind of educated, middle class, literate people who consider themselves to be very tied to Britain, find themselves on the receiving end of this tax.

And the explosion is completely. unprecedented and was totally unforeseen by Grenville and by Parliament by the British government. It is funny. It is funny. You see them sort of all suddenly overnight more from someone saying, don't like mobs, don't like trouble. You know, Britain will sort this out. There is the rule of law to overnight. They've gone nuts. We can't be doing with them anymore. It is an extraordinary transformative. It's incredibly explosive. And it is the stamp act that really galvanizes certain kinds of opposition that you will then see running in a straight line into 1776 and beyond. So you see, for example, when it comes to mob violence, you have these groups like the Sons of Liberty, which is organized in Boston, but has groups all over the colonies,

and they exercise mob justice. They go after the stamp collectors, and they'll make like effigies of the stamp collectors. They'll burn them. They'll attack the houses of the royal governor. They tar and feather, don't they, with boiling tar? Yeah, they also go after the royal governor of Massachusetts, Thomas Hutchinson, who is a colonial American by his own sort of self-understanding, but becomes, you know, the object of this furious mob about the Stamp Act. They raid his house. They chop down the trees on his property, slash the painting, steeled silver, all that sort of thing. And the other thing that you see in this period out of the Stamp Act is an incredible sense of coalescing of interest. So how is Massachusetts and Virginia? Pennsylvania, how do they all kind of come together? Well, they're all on the receiving end of the Stamp Act. And the sense of common interest is really forged in this period. And you will start to see so-called committees of correspondence, which knit the colonies together in a feeling of common interest as a result of taxes that are treating them all the same. Is it fair to say

that the Committee of Correspondence really is a thing that starts, as you say, so the rampaging mobs in Boston are the first to show themselves. But it is largely Boston and Virginia that lead the discontent in this, almost immediately. Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, Philadelphia is also a very important part of this, a nodal city in the mid-Atlantic. And the correspondence committees will really take off sort of in the 1770s. But the point in all of this is that we see, you know, from someone like Benjamin Franklin back in 1754 saying join or die, we're seeing in 1765, then, you know, things like the Sons of Liberty and ties being created across these different colonies and their leaderships into them the 1770s where you have more formalized mechanisms and it's a really

direct line but accelerating massively after the Stamp Act. So my the next up is the Townsend duty. This is a third tax, a slightly different tax. Out of the Stamp Act, a couple things follow. One of them is that the Stamp Act is repealed. And from this point of view, it's a huge victory for the American colonists and Granville Falls and it's all a big disaster. But on the other hand, the British are very explicit about their ability in principle to tax the colonists. So while the pragmatic specific, the Stamp Act is repealed, the principle of it, which was itself incredibly provocative to the colonists, is something that Parliament decides to lean into. And it's with that in mind that in 1767, just a couple of years later, a series of duties or taxes are passed called

the Townsend duties, which essentially double down on the idea of it that Britain can tax the colonies. And these are taxes that are paid on various goods, you know, glass and lead and paper and tea and paints and, you know, various kinds of things. And they're intended to be passed in order to defray the cost of defense that Britain has to mount to protect the colonies. But this one, again, you know, now we have the principle of it, right? So the principle of it is what becomes the object of opposition. And you have figures like, say, the Pennsylvania, Patriot John Dickinson, writing pamphlets against the principle of the taxation against the town's own duties. And are we already getting this phrase taxation without representation or is that a later thing?

So a lot of the opposition to the taxes will come to be known under the slogan, no taxation without representation. This is something that really starts to take off in the later 1760s. And it touches on this essential principle, which the colonists uphold, which is that they feel that they have no voice in the parliament that is passing the taxes on them. Now, how does this diverge from the situation for other people living in the British Isles at this time? It's an interesting question because actually, at this time, the vast majority of British people have no vote. You know, to imagine that Parliament is a, you know, democratic body, which every British person has a role in selecting it. I mean, that's so far from what it is. Who does have the vote? Householders?

It's maybe 10%, something like that. and it's selected in very localized ways. You know, this is the pre-reform parliament. If your listeners are familiar with the concept of, say, the rotten borough or the pocket borough or something like that, this is that era. This is the era in which in many areas, a handful of landowners or property owners can select who goes to parliament and so on.

So this is not a democratic parliament, the principle of so-called virtual representation, where a selection of delegates represent the interests of everybody else is what undergirds this whole system. And the idea in England is that this idea of virtual representation, which is what governs the British Isles, ought to govern the American colonies. But the difference, as the colonists point out, is that while the House of Commons is passing taxes, duties, whatever, that obtain for the British Isles, they themselves, as residents of the British Isles, are also paying those taxes and duties. Whereas for the colonies, the members of the House of Commons themselves are not answerable to people who are paying those taxes. They do not themselves pay those taxes.

And so they argue that virtual representation does not work in the same way for them that it does, even in its attenuated form for the residents of the British Ours. What the colonial Americans have is that they have the system of burgesses, where they too have nominated people to represent their interests. I mean, how much power do the burgesses have? And how are they selected? Is it just basically a boys club? Each colony has its own thing. You're probably thinking of the Virginia House of Burgesses. There are different arrangements in each of the colonies. They have their assemblies and legislatures, which have various powers. But by and large, in British imperial history, local, legislatures will have the ability to decide local affairs. And that means they do not have the power to decide things like going to war. They do not have the power to decide things like the taxes that they'll be paying to the metropolitan government. And this will be a constant source of tension across the British Empire in all sorts of places where you have these kind of subordinated legislatures, arguably up until, you know, look at recent experiments and devolution, right?

I mean, the Scottish Assembly does not have the right to do various things that the House of Commons does. You mentioned one name, which we haven't covered. Again, and I'm really fascinated with the names that we don't talk about and the part they play, John Dickinson of Pennsylvania, who was a Quaker, really interesting man, who, again, is suddenly roused, you know, quite a mild man. He calls himself what, the farmer from Pennsylvania. He writes these letters from a mere farmer from Pennsylvania.

And if he is riled enough to start speaking out against the king, pretty much they have no understanding of the mindset of their own colonies here in Britain, do they? So we need to make an important distinction, which is that he's not speaking out against the king. He's speaking out against Parliament. Right. Okay. So he does make the distinction. Absolutely. Yes, because that's going to be important later. In any event, the people like Dickinson are incredibly important in terms of mobilizing the language and the institution. that will ultimately lead us to things like the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. Pennsylvania, again, I mean, we think of Boston, we think of Virginia, but we really need to think of Philadelphia here as well. Pennsylvania is an important agricultural colony. Philadelphia is one of, if not the biggest cities in the American colonies. And someone like Dickinson is also

indicative of the range of voices that you have in play in the colonies. You have people with landed interests. You have people with commercial interests. You have people who are Quakers. You have people who are Anglicans. You have people who are congregationalists. You have people who are Presbyterians. I mean, there's a lot of different things going on. And that's why these things like the Stamp Act are so important in creating a sense of commonality of interest among these quite varied figures. So let's talk about when actually this discontent that is bubbling away, even among mild-mannered Quakers like Dickinson, it suddenly turns into action on the streets. And the Boston Massacre is one such flare up. Talk us through what happens there. The Townsend Acts are passed in 1767 and there's a lot of

resistance and in order to enforce the acts and generally keep discipline, Britain sends troops to Boston to basically bolster the authority of the royal officials there. The quartering of troops, the presence of troops in American cities, colonial cities, is obviously provocative. Think about where police forces are mobilized today. A kind of steady patter of low-level resistance and suppression kind of takes place in the streets of Boston. Back to the snowball fights, this is the kind of place where you'll have British soldiers being heckled by townspeople. You'll have groups like, you know, Sam Adams's sons of liberty. Sam Adams, by the way, a cousin of John Adams is one of the Boston patriots who's very important in creating this kind of street-level resistance.

And so this back and forth is already underway when it reaches a tipping point on a March day in 1770 when youth of the city of Boston versus troops of the royal government, who are themselves youths too, by the way, let's just bear in mind. Are the babies, they're children, yeah, yeah, yeah. The average soldier in the British Army at this time is not a privileged person by any means. Callow teens, hairless faces and shivering in the snow. Exactly. So you have these groups, you know, facing off, and there's a snowball fight and rocks thrown.

And oyster shells, sharp oyster shells. I remember reading the accounts of that. Yeah, yeah. Exactly. Any archaeological site in colonial America, once you dig down, you're going to find huge quantities of oyster shells because oyster houses were one of the great places of sociability. And yet they ignored lobsters, apparently, not considered to be delicacies at this age. Lobsters were not fit to be eaten. And in fact, I remember vividly from a children's book that I had, which is the kind of way that you first learned these stories. I had a children's book which was called, it must have been meet John Adams or something. You know, they were meat. So and so, and there was a scene in it which had the youth of the city of Boston running after the British soldiers calling them lobster back because of their red coats. So yeah, so this thing erupts into gunshots.

So you have the troops firing into the crowd, five people are killed, another several are wounded, and I think one dies very soon thereafter of the wounds. Another sign, by the way, of the diversity of the colonies at this time is that one of the men killed is mixed-race former slave called Crispus Attacks, African descent and also potentially Native American Wampanoff descent. And he is often considered one of the first casualties of the American Revolution. And then call back to barracks by their commander, Lieutenant Colonel William Dribble. Well, fancy that. The soldiers who had opened fire, will be put on trial, and the lawyer defending the soldiers is John Adams. Yeah, we covered this and how difficult it would have been particularly in his cousin,

Sam Adams, his cousins, the rabble rouser. I think one of his chief witnesses is also a black man who says, actually, no, it wasn't the British who fired first. And so this is such a pivotal point. We're going to leave this episode here, Maya, but this is all the prelude to the thing that breaks the relationship, which will also contain the name. name Boston in it and maybe some tea and maybe a social gathering of some sort. Is that enough of a clue? Yeah, we're going to be starting off with the Boston Tea Party in the next episode. But if you can't wait and you want to hear all of the episodes in this fabulous miniseries with Maya, do join our club. It is Empirepodukuk.com and you'll be just deluge with wonderful,

wonderful things. You can binge listen to Maya Jasanov to your heart's content. Till the next time we meet, whenever it may be, it's goodbye from me, Anita Arnan. And goodbye from me. William Droompool.