British Independence Dbq

Beginning in the 1760s was a time of unrest for the people in the thirteen colonies. As Great Britain was continuing to make more and more decisions for the colonists, the colonists were getting more and more irritated. After each new law was passed, the colonists had the same reaction. They felt cheated by the British and they wanted a say in these new laws. Even though the colonists’ actions and reactions to the British were not always appropriate, they were justified in declaring independence against Britain in order to create their own identity with their own laws and acts. The colonists responses to the British laws were not necessarily valid due to their violence. The British were imposing the new taxes and laws in the colonies in order
Both the Stamp Act and the Tea Act were laws that the colonists highly detested. The Stamp Act required that all legal documents contained a stamp that could only be purchased from an official tax collector. This angered the colonists because Britain was using it as a direct way to make money for themselves and the colonists didn’t get to decide how the tax should have been executed. This one act was seen as something that could open the doors to many more just like it. The classically heard phrase, “No taxation without representation”, was the biggest issue here. Even though the British did believe the colonists were being represented because the members of Parliament did think about all of their subjects when making laws, they were not. Parliament could not have been thinking about what was best for the colonists as they did not know. The Tea Act required that all tea be bought from the British East India Company in order to stop the company from going bankrupt. This meant that the colonists had no say in what they were drinking because they were forced to only buy from one company. It gave the British East India Company a monopoly on tea sales in the colonies. Once more this angered the colonists as they again had no say in this decision. A tiny island all the way across the ocean should not have been able to regulate the prices in the colonies. All of these requirements placed on the colonists made it impossible for them to look anything but weak to the rest of the world. The British gave them no leverage with any other global powers. These people in the colonies had been living on their own, far away for Britain for years and they deserved to be able to shape their own country and their own identities in any way they wanted because they were different than the British people.