The Pursuit of Power: Europe 1815–1914 (The Penguin History of Europe Book 7)

by Richard J. Evans

The British governments of the period, anxious not to impose extra tax burdens on the population at a time of economic hardship and potentially rising discontent, cut back sharply on expenditure on the large armed forces kept in the colonies, and stopped subsidising colonial planters and sugar growers at the expense of domestic consumers by an extension of free trade to the colonies. This in turn caused widespread unrest in the colonies, with Jamaican planters refusing to pay taxes and the governor of Canada pelted with eggs, while rebellious Anglo Loyalists burned down the parliament building in Montreal. The British colonial power’s imposition of fresh taxes in Ceylon, again to avoid extra burdens at home, sparked a massive rebellion, in which 20,000 armed Buddhists tried to impose the indigenous Kandian monarchy and were crushed by colonial troops;