World History 101: From Ancient Mesopotamia and the Viking Conquests to NATO and WikiLeaks, an Essential Primer on World History

by Tom Head

primary causes of the American Revolution are issues that observers of contemporary US politics will immediately recognize: • High taxes. Britain had spent far more money protecting its North American colonial interests from other European powers than it had planned, and it tried to make up the difference by heavily taxing imported goods to the colonies. • Free trade. The North American colonists tried to save money by importing goods from other European powers instead, but Britain wasn’t having any of that. • Civil liberties. British colonial officials had virtually unlimited search-and-seizure powers, which they used to try to find illegally smuggled goods. • Corruption. These colonial officials often kept the aforementioned illegally smuggled goods, a process we now call civil forfeiture. Sometimes they kept goods that weren’t illegally smuggled. Sometimes they took bribes. It was a messy and poorly supervised system. • Voter disenfranchisement. The British government used flimsy and unconvincing excuses to deprive American colonists of their seats in Parliament, preventing them from being able to vote on issues like, say, tax policy, free trade, civil liberties, and corruption.