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America in the British Empire
Introduction
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Although the relationship was intended to be mutually beneficial, England and its American colonies increasingly seemed to work at cross purposes as time progressed. The colonies were founded by a number of disparate groups independent of one another, and that is how they regarded themselves and were viewed in England, but even by the middle of the seventeenth century Parliament attempted to impose a mercantilistic order with various navigation acts and the 1696 placement of the colonies under the jurisdiction of the Board of Trade. Meanwhile, a more unified American character and identity was emerging in the colonies; one of the early examples of this is the Great Awakening of the early eighteenth century, which despite often splitting Americans along class lines, was a unique, collective American experience. Enlightenment thought was also making headway in America—not only did the era’s political thought influence Americans, but its followers’ scientific inquiry into the colonies' natural environment fostered a developing sense of America as a place profoundly different from Europe. In this whole process, the colonies were not necessarily growing apart from England, only gaining an identity as British subjects in a new land—growing apart came as a result of colonists' participation in the American theaters of England's wars with the French and Spanish, the final one being the French and Indian War, fought mostly on American soil. The colonists absorbed heavy losses and emerged from the war deeply in debt; a wartime economic boom quickly faded into depression, coincidentally at the moment that Parliament decided that the colonies should contribute more toward their own administrative and defense costs. The back and forth over Parliament's attempts to exact this due and assert its power—the Sugar Act, the Stamp Act, the Declaratory Act, the Townshend Duties—and actions such as prohibiting settlement beyond the Appalachians and the Quartering Act convinced colonists that Parliament wanted to deprive them of their rights as English subjects. Tensions came to a head with the Gaspee incident, the Tea Act (and the subsequent Boston Tea Party), and Coercive Acts leading to the convocation of the First Continental Congress, in 1774, and revolution.
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