The UC Santa Barbara Undergraduate Journal of History

American political history commonly paints the revolutionary cries of the mid- to late-eighteenth century as a united effort to fight the oppressive mercantilist policies of the Mother Country. With reinforced Navigation Acts passed in 1763, the American economy was further limited in favor of Britain, reducing the colonists’ agency to trade with other nations or to develop a manufacturing industry. Adding flame to the fire, the Townshend Acts of the late 1760s further irritated colonists faced by higher taxes on British manufactured goods—an attempt by Parliament to recuperate the costs of the French and Indian War. Without representation in Parliament, certain pockets of elite colonists became increasingly frustrated—with merchants and large-scale planters vying to shift the political ground rules that shaped the parameters of capitalism. These patriot leaders, portraying the British policies as intolerable limitations of economic and political self-determination, both misrepresented the interests of the vast majority of colonial agriculturalists and damaged the planters’ own long term interests. Elite merchants, despite actively working in service of a vision for commerce detrimental to the plantation-based economy, capitalized on this support, deploying arguments about liberty and economic sovereignty to justify the elites’ desire to transform their prospects for commercial and territorial expansion.