Taxes & Smuggling - Prelude to Revolution: Crash Course US History #6

Hi, I'm John Green, this is Crash Course: US History, and today we begin discussing the American Revolution. So two things to keep in mind here: One, the American Revolution and the American War for Independence are not the same thing. And two, while I know this will upset some of you, the American Revolution was not really about taxes.

Mr. Green, Mr. Green! It was about tea, right? Also, it was not about tea. The Boston Tea party was about taxes and our God-given right to smuggle. It's a little confusing, me from the past, but that's why Crash Course is here! [Theme Music] So as you'll recall, the Seven Years War ended with the Treaty of Paris in 1763 which made the colonists cranky because it limited their ability to take land from the Indians, and it also left them holding the bag for a lot of war debt.

Wars, as you may have noticed, are expensive, and the British government had to borrow 150,000,000 pounds, and the interest payments on that money ate up half of the national budget. So in order to pay for the war, the British decided to raise taxes. And since the primary beneficiaries of the war had been the American colonists, the British government felt it was only fair if some of the burden fell to them.

Now, taxes on colonial trade were nothing new. The British government had placed taxes on a bunch of items in order to reduce competition with Britain, including wool and hats and “mole-asses.” Why did they place a tax on mole-asses? It doesn’t seem like that would be a huge market. Oh, molasses. Right, of course.

But those taxes were about trying to regulate trade in a mercantilist way more than trying to pay back war debt. And also they were easy to avoid via smuggling, which we did because this is America! [Patriotic Rock Music] But mostly the colonists were angry because they didn’t have any say about the new taxes that Britain was imposing.