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Emigration from the British Isles, higher this year than ever, had become “epidemical amongst the most useful of our people,” an official warned; in just fifteen years, 3 percent of Scotland’s population and almost as many Irish had bolted for the New World in what one Scot called “America madness.”
Then there was debt: the Great War for the Empire had cost £100 million, much of it borrowed, and the country was still strapped for money.
the American population, now 2.5 million, was more than doubling every quarter century, an explosive growth unseen in recorded European history and fourfold England’s rate; that two-thirds of white colonial men owned land, compared to one-fifth in England;
that two-thirds were literate, more than in England; that in most colonies two-thirds could vote, compared to one Englishman in six; that provincial America glowed with Enlightenment aspiration, so that a city like Philadelphia now rivaled Edinburgh for medical education and boasted almost as many booksellers—seventy-seven—as England’s top ten provincial towns combined.
the Americans were heavily armed.
George’s resolve helped his ministers rally around three critical assumptions, each of which proved false: that most colonists remained loyal to the Crown, notwithstanding troublemakers in Massachusetts capable of inciting a rabble; that firmness, including military firepower if necessary, would intimidate the obstreperous and restore harmony; and that failure to reassert London’s authority would eventually unstitch the empire, causing Britain to “revert to her primitive insignificancy in the map of the world,” as a member of the House of Commons warned.
The king and his men believed that British wealth and status derived from the colonies.
Those windrows of wet tea leaves foretold political and economic ruin.
The Coercive Acts and the Quebec Act galvanized American
resistance, empowering the radicals and further converting neutrals and moderates to a cause now touched with fire.
Not only did they endorse resistance to the Coercive Acts, the delegates also agreed to halt trade with the British Empire over the coming months.
Civic virtue would be measured by a colonist’s refusal to consume British goods or trade with the mother country; transgressors were to be publicly shamed, or worse.
