The American Revolution

By the 1760s, British North America was a peculiar place. Thirteen colonies stretched along the Atlantic seaboard from Massachusetts to Georgia, home to roughly two million people of European and African descent. They shared a king, a language, and a loose set of English legal traditions. They shared almost nothing else. Virginia tobacco planters had little in common with Boston merchants. Pennsylvania Quakers had little use for South Carolina slave owners. New York's Dutch-descended manor lords lived in a different world from Connecticut's Puritan farmers.

What held these colonies together, to the extent anything did, was a system of benign neglect. For generations, Britain had let its American colonies largely govern themselves. Colonial assemblies levied local taxes. Colonial courts administered justice. And colonial merchants cheerfully ignored trade regulations they found inconvenient, smuggling molasses from the French Caribbean, trading with the Dutch, evading customs duties with a regularity that amounted to policy. The British knew. They mostly didn't care. The empire had bigger problems.

Then Britain won the Seven Years' War.