Lesson of Stamp Act: Colonies Are Costly
On March 22, 1765, the parliament of the United Kingdom passed the Stamp Act. It lasted less than a year. Repealed on March 18, 1766, the act was the first of many taxes levied on British North America between 1765-76, when war broke out between 13 of the U.K.’s North American colonies and London itself.
Why did London begin taxing its North American colonies so heavily? The U.K. went to war with France on behalf of the colonists in America. The war became worldwide and the U.K. expanded its territory significantly at the expense of France. The colonists were British citizens and considered themselves to be culturally and politically British. The British considered the colonists British, too, but the upper classes were disdainful of their counterparts in the New World, which led to grudges.
The tax on stamps (and the goods that followed) was put into place on British America to pay for the war that, again, London fought on behalf of its colonial factions. The Americans were doing what economists call “rent-seeking,” and they didn’t want to pay their share once the bill came due. Most observers at the time saw this clearly enough. Adam Smith was perhaps the Crown’s most eloquent defender, because while he correctly pinned the blame for the war on the colonists, he argued that it would be cheaper to let the colonists go instead of trying to forcibly tax them and risk a full-scale war. Edmund Burke, a conservative with political aspirations at the time of the Stamp Act, was also keenly aware of the fact that the colonists were to blame, and that it would be folly to try and make them pay for the war.
So what was the issue that the colonists wanted to go to war over? Land. Specifically, land that belonged to Native Americans in the “northwest,” also known as the Ohio River Valley. The problem was that the British Empire, of which the colonies were a part of, had signed treaties with various Native American powers in the region, as well as the French. (The predecessors of the current American world order - the Dutch and the British empires - had a long and storied tradition of signing treaties with “indigenous” polities. This can be hard to fathom sometimes because the United States only deals with nation-states rather than various types of political units. This has less to do with American ignorance and more to do with the fact that after World War II, the international world order that the Americans helped patch together was based on nation-states, a new approach to international relations. Colonists in British North America constantly, ceaselessly ignored the treaties their government had signed with foreign polities and the hostilities eventually boiled over into a global war between France, the United Kingdom, and numerous polities in North America, Asia, Africa, Europe, and Latin America. (The various Native American players in the region, as well as the French, were no angels either, but that’s a different story for a different day.)
The refusal of the colonies to pay for the war they initiated also led to the flare up of a simmering tension between elites on both sides of the British Atlantic: representation. The colonists wanted to send representatives to London and have them participate as full members of the body politic. The elite on the islands, however, were openly disdainful of American elites and probably did not want to disperse their power even more thinly by admitting new seats. Adam Smith was especially prescient on this matter, actually arguing that London could avoid most of its trouble by simply admitting American representatives to parliament.
The moral of the story? There are many (add your own in the ‘comments’ section), but one stands out: don’t have colonies. They are expensive, inefficient, and hard to govern without the excessive use of force. If you want to expand overseas, quickly admit the local populations as full members of your polity and try to do so without bloodshed!
