In 1763, the powers of Europe signed the Peace of Paris bringing an end to the French and Indian War. The Kingdom of Great Britain emerged victorious, seizing from France several new territories throughout Canada and east of the Mississippi. But victory came at tremendous cost. The war debt incurred over the last seven years […]
On November 16, 1775, Robert Dixon lay dying not far from Quebec. Among the first American troops commissioned by the Continental Congress, he was a sergeant in Matthew Smith’s Company of Thompson’s Rifle Battalion. The previous July, he had walked with his company from the backcountry of Pennsylvania all the way to Boston, a distance […]
The increasingly turbulent years preceding the American Revolution were fueled by an exchange of laws promulgated by Great Britain to maintain political and economic control over its American Colonies and the reactions of her unruly colonies to those laws. One of the events in the lead-up to the Revolution was the issuance by Great Britain […]
Adam Smith, considered by many to be the Father of Modern Economics, was born in Kirkcaldy, Scotland, on June 16, 1723. His father, also Adam Smith, was a senior solicitor and judge advocate; his mother, Margaret Douglas, was the daughter of a well-landed gentleman. Smith entered the University of Glasgow when he was fourteen years […]
The threat of continued oppression and an encroaching condition of slavery was central to the American colonists’ call for separation from Great Britain and the corresponding shift to direct resistance. While the lack of effective political representation was crucial, importantly the colonists held other more acute concerns than the issue of representation in Parliament. Crucially, […]
On this week’s Dispatches host Brady Crytzer interviews JAR contributor Steven Neill on William Pitt’s 1767 proposal to tax the East India Company and strengthen trade with the American colonies and how the company influenced Parliament’s decision to set aside Pitt’s plan. Instead, Parliament decided to levy taxes on the colonies through the Townshend Acts. Thousands of […]
