Scandinavia and the World
Scandinavia and the World

Comments #9739942:


Every time 3 3, 9:22pm

@ItsAGiraffe

Everything you say is true (except for the part about putting resources through a "machine" - the industrial revolution was still only in it's infancy at the time of the American Revolutionary War) - but it also doesn't change the fact that the American colonies where also treated preferentially to mainland Britain in many ways.
Which, as I said, is what all colonial powers did initially, to encourage immigration to their colonies and financial growth in them.

What American colonialists saw as "exploitation" was actually the mother country beginning to peel back some of those preferential treatments, as they though the colonies where becoming strong enough to sustain higher taxation.

But it still wasn't a case of the colonies being taxed as heavily as mainland Britain - and even less so more heavily then Britain.

While the poor African slaves brought to the colonies against their will of course where treated terribly, the English settlers in the American colonies virtually all had a better life from the point of taxation and state control over them, then British subjects in mainland Britain.

Why else would people ever emigrate to a far of and strange land with dangerous natives and without many of the comforts of life they where used to at home?

That was the bargain made with the colonists as they left for the new world - you get this preferential treatment in return for daring to make the voyage and taking on the though job of building up a functioning economy from scratch.

But the colonial powers obviously never intended for this preferential treatment to last for ever - only long enough for the colonies to begin to thrive on their own.

But by then the American colonialists had grown accustomed to their low taxation and profitable conditions, and where in no mood to accept any change in their status.