re: #290 wheat-doggha — oo bird outside my window

Sounds like the 18th century Stamp Act and similar tariffs. Tax the colonies to enrich the crown, as it were.

This totally has nothing to do with anything, but the Stamp Act is actually fascinatingly convoluted. Basically, the UK kept a big standing army, but Parliament didn’t like having it in the UK in case a Napoleon type situation occurred or a crisis between the monarchy and the parliament. So most of the troops were garrisoned throughout the empire. The US didn’t actually need as many troops as it had to defend against American Indians, the British campaigns probably just inflamed problems and most actual indian attacks were beaten back by Colonial forces. This is complicated by Britain and France using the US as a proxy battlefield, but it was mostly Britain as the aggressor.

The Stamp Act was part of a series of taxes to get the Americans to pay for these troops, even though they were mostly just part of the political favor system in Britain; it was a good place to stick lower sons of the nobility and for middle-class guys looking to get ahead to get some service time. So it didn’t really wind up enriching the crown, but it enriched the people selling commissions.

The Americans didn’t like this shit first because of economic reasons, it was a big admin cost as well as the direct cost of the ‘stamp’, and most of the British manufacturers didn’t like it because it lowered their exports to the colonies and raised overhead for those that had invested in stuff in America. It later became important as an actual ‘constitutional’ issue for the Americans.

The Stamp Act was basically something that benefitted a certain narrow class (the officer class) and was opposed by a lot of other British interests. It got repealed in 1766, but the power to enact such taxes didn’t get repealed, so the Americans who had agitated against it weren’t satisfied by just repeal.