3. The Boston Tea Party
Now that we have mentioned the United States, it is time for us to jump on the boat alongside the Pilgrim Fathers and join them in the New World. While the Reformation provoked thousands of people, predominantly from England and the Netherlands, to find their fortunes on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, it was not necessarily the reason that they left.
Many of those who made a new home in America were as loyal subjects to the British crown as one could have hoped to have found anywhere, and initially, there was no desire for the colonists to break from the mother country and strike out on their own. From the arrival of the Mayflower in 1620 to the Revolution in 1777, there were severe demographic, economic and political changes that occurred that made the latter event possible and indeed, inevitable.
Firstly, the passage of time weakened bonds to the motherland, as more and more Americans were born in the New World and thus had never visited Europe. Secondly, the material conditions of the Thirteen Colonies were different to those of Britain: it was more sensible, for example, for the colonies to trade with other colonies in America, such as those of France and Spain, rather than exclusively with other British possessions, which were often far further away. Thirdly, the politics of administering a colony thousands of miles away were grating on the Americans, as they lacked adequate representation commensurate to the taxes they paid.
These factors came to a head in 1773, when the British imposed a tax on tea. The Americans refused to pay it – “No taxation without representation!” being the slogan – and instead began smuggling tea into the colonies. (They were still at some level English and could not survive without tea).
As a protest, a group of American radicals, lead by future Founding Father Samuel Adams, dressed as Native Americans and dumped boxes of tea into Boston Harbour. The British cracked down on the Massachusetts colony, closing the Harbour until the Bostonians paid for the tea that they had destroyed. It would be one of the first acts in the gradual drive towards war with Britain and the splitting off of the Thirteen Colonies from the mother country: two years later, the American Revolutionary War would start and, by 1776, the Constitution would be in place that still exists in the United States of America to this day.