The war had focused official minds: why then, King George III’s ministers asked, should postwar colonial administration again lose its focus? Shouldn’t the Americans, by some calculations the least taxed of all people, pay more for the security they’d gained? Could the British, however cleverly financed now by the Bank of England, indefinitely accumulate debt? Shouldn’t someone regulate trans-Appalachian settlement, preventing collisions between imported and indigenous Americans? What good was it even to have an empire if you weren’t running it?23
