Period between 1763 & 1776



Period between 1763 & 1776

Introduction

After the end of Indian and French war, tension between Britain and American colonies arises. The issues which created these issues were British taxes and the presence of British troops on the soil of America.

The 18th century witnessed a great increase in the colonial population of North America, particularly with the end of the struggle for supremacy between Britain and France in 1763. In just five years between 1769 and 1774, 152 ships from Irish ports alone brought over 44,000 new colonists. By 1774 Europeans in North America numbered two million over a quarter of Britain's population. This growth altered the nature of the colonies and the loyalty of their inhabitants. In Pennsylvania, a flood of German and Irish Protestant immigrants in the 1720s outnumbered the original English Quakers. German soldiers sent to the colonies by the Hanoverian dynasty ruling Britain further swelled the non-British populace; Scots and Irish settlers, many with Jacobite (anti-Hanoverian) sympathies, also arrived. After 1775 loyalist support was concentrated in those longer-established colonies whose inhabitants could claim English ancestry. Even so, Virginia and the Carolinas, which attracted few non-British immigrants and were developing a distinctive plantation economy based on mass importation of slaves, showed little enthusiasm for the loyalist cause.

Discussion

Reasons for break through

Certain reasons have raised the issues among American and British colonies such as, arrival of new immigrants, together with a rising birthrate in the colonies, is evidence of a flourishing economy. Agriculture was by far the most important activity, but it was commerce (particularly that of New England) that caused Britain most concern. Mercantilist theory maintained that colonial possessions should be developed to supply goods or raw materials unavailable in the home country, that these commodities should be paid for in manufactured goods for the ...