The Imperial Crisis Dbq

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The Imperial Crisis was a crisis that was fought for a long time between the colonists and the parliament. This crisis happened between the years 1763 and 1775. Before the Imperial Crisis the Seven Years War was fought between the main powers in Europe. This war caused a great deal of debt to England which then was put on the colonist’s backs. This led the parliament to create many acts that would tax the colonists on many items, unfairly. Another reason why the colonists were taxed so heavily and why these acts were created was because of mercantilism. Mercantilism was a belief that the colonies were there for financial support to the mother country, which in this case was Europe. The colonists, “The Americans” eventually got sick of how unfairly they were treated by England and fought back. This crisis had many events/consequences that became more aggressive as the years passed and as the acts got more unfair. 1
Some of these acts included the Sugar Act, the Stamp Act, the Declaratory Act, the Townshend Duties, the Tea Act, and the Intolerable Acts. These acts all had different goals, but were all extremely unfair to the colonists. The Sugar Act, also known as the Revenue Act, was passed by parliament in 1764. This act’s goals were to make custom regulations more strict and laid new taxes on foreign items that were imported into America, to the colonies. The Stamp Act, passed in 1765, was a tax on all printed materials, which includes: newspapers, stamps, playing cards, if you made your will, ect. This act basically put a tax on all materials that had to be printed, which is a lot of items and can add up in price. If the language being printed was foreign then the price of the tax was doubled. Another thing that was mandatory w...

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...this incident the Intolerable Acts were passed and the Americans were fed up, they agreed to send delegates to Philadelphia to attend the Continental Congress. The Continental Congress was the governing body for the Colonists during the American Revolution.1
These Parliamentary Acts eventually lead to the American Revolution because the colonists were sick of being treated unfairly and they were fed up with being deprived of their rights. The Continental Congress wrote The Declaration of Independent, which was a document that declared the colonists independence from Britain. The colonists resented the Parliament for taxing them internally and directly. The passing of the acts all started out as money issues, but eventually became an issue of having an imperial government.2 If the legislation never happened to the colonists, there may not be a United States today.

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