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1754 to 1763 The French and Indian War
Between 1715 and 1771, French commerce had increased almost eight-fold. France was second only to Great Britain in trade. It was exporting sugar, coffee and indigo that had been developed in its Caribbean colonies. Transportation was improving. In the 1780s, for example, the 600 miles between Paris and Toulouse was only an eight-day journey, rather than the fifteen days it had taken in the 1760s. But the advance in commerce did not produce well-being for the common people. -
1764 Sugar Act
the Sugar Act provided for strong customs enforcement of the duties on refined sugar and molasses imported into the colonies from non-British Caribbean sources. The act thus granted a virtual monopoly of the American market to British West Indies sugar planters. Early colonial protests at these duties were ended when the tax was lowered two years later. -
Townshend Act
in U.S. colonial history, series of four acts passed by the British Parliament in an attempt to assert what it considered to be its historic right to exert authority over the colonies through suspension of a recalcitrant representative assembly and through strict provisions for the collection of revenue duties. The British American colonists named the acts after Charles Townshend, who sponsored them. -
Tea Act
Their resistance culminated in the Boston Tea Party on December 16, 1773, in which colonists boarded East India Company ships and dumped their loads of tea overboard. Parliament responded with a series of harsh measures intended to stifle colonial resistance to British rule; two years later the war began.
