The Causes Of The Enlightenment And The American Revolution

The world would not have been the same if these four major events in history never occurred. There are no similarities many say none between these events. All these events were caused by a rebellion or country uprising against the ruling state whether it was about taxes, slaves or monarchy the end events were always the same.

Towards the middle of the eighteenth-century people started to think differently. This was known as the Enlightenment. There was a lot of different causes of the enlightenment like Revolutions in science, society and politics and philosophy these different thoughts were the Enlightenment era. There was a lot of Enlightenment figures including Diderot, Voltaire, and Rousseau. These men were influenced by the scientific

In the way that they both had unfair taxes forced by the government. There where many causes of the American Revolution but the main reason was taxes. In 1756 to 1763, the British were in the French and Indian war, these wars were very expensive. To pay of the debts Britain decided to start taxing the American colonies. There were several tax acts such as the Townshend Act, Stamp Act these act was put forward to pay for the war. The Townshend Act was a tax on paper, glass, tea and lead these tax goods lead to the Boston tea party. The Boston tea party was a protest on the taxes of the goods that were part of the Townshend Act. A group of colonist dressed as Indians, they boarded the ship at night and tipped all the tea overboard into the water ruining the tea. The Boston port was closed till the Dutch East Indian Company had been repaid for the destroyed tea. The Americans thought it was unfair that their parliament was British and thought that they weren’t represented enough. King George sent soldiers over to America to check if the colonies were behaving and enforce the Acts in October 1768. Because of these unfair taxes and the Enlightenment ideas that people should be able to represent themselves, Revolution occurred in

For one the monarchy was making decisions not in the favour of its people and inevitably leading French to its death. The wealthy didn’t have to pay taxes that were unfair and bringing down the middle class. 97% of French were middle class and were struggling to survive. In Europe the quality of life was determined on the status you held, and to get an upper class status you had to born into it. You couldn’t earn a higher status no matter how hard you tried. France was in debt at this time because of losing the wealth in the Seven years’ war this is the same circumstances as the American Revolution. In 1788 the French government went bankrupt. The lower class were getting annoyed with the upper class wasting money while the poor go hungry and are offcourse poor. The peasant was also hungry because all the harvest was wiped out by bad weather and all that was left was expensive food and very little of it. The French Revolution in a way was similar to the American Revolution because its was an argument that went out of control resulting in these historical events and there government going bankrupt.

In conclusion all these events in history drastically changed the way people view the world and what people believed in. In this essay we have talked about the causes and the similarities of the historical events that lead to the world as we know