Outraged by the Boston Tea Party, the government in London had meanwhile resolved to make an example of Massachusetts. From its point of view, it could do no less. Ten years of American defiance had upset a trading empire worth thirty million pounds a year in combined imports and exports. Besides, when perhaps only one in thirty Englishmen could vote, and at a time of ballooning internal disorder, American theories of representation struck at the very heart of Britain’s political and social order.
