Actually Nick it is a question I have been trying to find an answer for for over twenty years. One of the catch phrases of the American revolution was "no taxation without representation". Did the founding fathers really want that? I believe not. The leaders of the revolution were not idiots. Let's suppose that Britain had said "OK". Lets imagine that the colonies were given 13 members in the house of commons. What chance would they have had to pass meaningfull colonial legislation? I contend that they would have had no chance at all. To drive home the point I need to know how many members there were in the house so that I can make an accurate comparison. I have asked college professors, spent hours on the internet, and any other way I could think of to get that one piece of information and thus, an accurate comparison. So far, no joy. I was hoping you might know. Paul
Two aphorisms:
All history is bunk (Henry Ford):
The winners write the history (Anon.) At the risk of being accused of being an AINO (American in Name Only) the real story of the Boston Tea Party etc. is not quite what you were taught in school. It was, in fact, not a protest against high taxes; it was sparked by a
tax cut!
The British had been fighting the French (who wanted a big stake in North America, including all of Canada and much of what is now the US west of the Mississippi) and the Indian tribes who - not unnaturally peeved at having their land stolen and game slaughtered - were conducting killing raids on the settlers. Collectively, this was known as the
French and Indian War over here, and the
Seven Years War in Europe. Just as today, fighting wars thousands of miles away was very expensive, and the British people were experiencing steadily increasing taxes to protect what they regarded as their ungrateful kin across the Atlantic. "Surely you wouldn't object to paying a
little bit of the expense? Perhaps a fifth of what we're paying back home?" they asked.
"Not without representation in Parliament," was the response. To the British, this was as absurd as, for example, the US Virgin Islands, Puerto Rico or Wake Island insisting on having Representatives and Senators in Congress today. The colonists objected to the Stamp Act, saying that Britain could only levy taxes to regulate trade, not to raise revenue. Parliament dropped the demand, but the next year imposed taxes (essentially a sales tax) on goods imported into the colonies (not just the American ones), including, among several other commodities, tea. Again Britain backed down in the face of protests, removing the tariffs on glass, lead, paper, paint and a score of others. But not tea. I mean,
tea! That was different!
At the time, several influential colonists - oh OK, Americans - were making a good living smuggling Dutch tea into the country. Among their numbers were several leading members of the independence movement including, it was rumored, such revered figures as John Adams and Ben Franklin. The problem was that the Dutch tea was awful, likened by one writer to "what I sweep up from my floor each day." At one point, as much as 90% of the tea drunk in the colonies was this Dutch dust.
Remember how such companies as GM and Chrysler were rescued with our dollars because the government maintained that they were "too big to be allowed to fail"? Corporate bailouts are nothing new. The same thing was going on in 1773. The East India Company, whose biggest mercantile product was the superior tea from India and Ceylon, was saddled with a huge debt and inventories of tea that it could not sell. Its warehouses were stocked to the roofs with chests of unsold tea. What to do?
Parliament lowered the tea tax, good English tea began to flood into the colonies, and the smugglers found themselves in the same situation as bootleggers at the repeal of the Volstead Act. "Sh*t!" Their response was to insist that the East India Company was a monopoly, and the press at the time labeled it
"rapacious and destructive, that may be able to devour every branch of commerce, drain us of our property and substance, and leave us to perish by thousands." Rather like what you hear from the unions about WalMart.
So, disguising the true motivation of Adams, etc. and the Boston merchants, the Tea Partiers coined the "No taxation without representation" slogan.
One could conjecture that, but for the French navy being at the right place at the right time, and a bungling general, Britain might well have prevailed in the War of Independence. Like Canada, the colonies might have come to an amicable agreement with London. Who knows. I have often pondered the result of a "Super Canada," covering all of North America except for Mexico, and the effect that this would have had on WWI and WWII - all the might and industrial potential of such a country coming into the wars in 1914 and 1939, instead of 1917 and 1941 (1942 really.)
