The conflict which broke out in America in 1775 had its roots far beyond the Stamp Act or the accession of King George III. It was an internecine conflict between the British which grew out of the constitutional clash between Crown and Parliament that had rocked the British Isles in the 17th century. On the British side of the ocean, that conflict had established the absolute sovereignty of Parliament over all territories ruled by the British Crown. On the American side a significantly different conclusion was drawn - that Parliamentary sovereignty came from its representative nature and where that was lacking, Parliament itself could act illegally.
The clash started with Britain's crushing victory over France in the Seven Years' War, which and gave a misleading impression of a return to normalcy. But where the colonists saw only the benefits of peace, the government in London was faced with a huge bill to pay; there were few on the British side of the Atlantic who thought the colonists should not contribute to paying it. When the colonists vociferously disputed this, London was taken completely by surprise and outraged by the claim that it was acting unconstitutionally. As the government sought to find a way both to get revenue from the colonies and to uphold its constitutional right to do so, so colonial resistance grew, especially in the troublesome port of Boston. It is no coincidence that that was where the war began.
Everything in the war appeared to favour the British, whose highly professional army had only recently humbled the power of France. True, the British commanders were faced with enormous logistical difficulties, but the American side too was riven with divisions and personal rivalries. What tipped the scales was the entry into the war of Britain's old enemy, France. Instantly the transatlantic war was transformed into a global conflict, to be fought in the Caribbean, the Mediterranean, the Indian Ocean, even the English Channel, as well as in Continental America. Meanwhile, within Britain powerful voices were denouncing the war as an attack on the very liberties that had been established by their seventeenth-century ancestors. When the war ended in disaster and humiliation for the British, it raised a crucial question: liberty had been preserved in America: who would preserve it in Britain?
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