World History for Us All Big Era 7 Landscape 2
http://worldhistoryforusall.sdsu.edu/ Page 4
Britain’s Thirteen Colonies
After the Seven Years’ War (1756-1763) ended, Great Britain and France were both motivated to
make their empires self-paying enterprises. Although in both countries there were calls for fiscal
reforms at home, the impetus to revolution in the British colonies of North America can be seen
in the increasing number of taxes, best exemplified by the Stamp Act. The Third Estate in
France, that is, the great majority of the population that did not have the status of aristocrats or
high Roman Catholic clergy, also felt the crunch of increasing taxes and dues. This oppression
propelled them to seek greater representation in government. The free inhabitants of the French
colony of Saint Domingue (later, Haiti) also sought a more equitable balance between taxes and
representation, as did the creoles, that is, people of Spanish heritage born in the Americas, in
Spain’s empire.
By 1770, North American colonists resented the British government’s new financial program as
expressed in the Stamp Act and the Tea Act, so they rebelled using both nonviolent and violent
ways. They were unsuccessful in their attempt to win their own representative institutions. Their
physical attacks on the crown’s officials, whom they tarred and feathered and whose houses they
burned, gained more attention. The organized armed rebellion gained momentum after the
dumping of the British East India Company’s tea in Boston harbor. The Declaration of
Independence in 1776 clarified the grievances of the colonists, who won their eight-year war
partially through their guerilla tactics, French support, and help from some Native Americans. In
1789, the first written constitution was ratified by the individual states, unifying them into a
single federal state and giving a new model of a political structure with a balance of power
among three branches of government. The constitution also included a Bill of Rights based on
British and Enlightenment ideas for protection of citizens’ rights. These ideas spread to other
parts of the Atlantic world. In the new United States of America, however, citizenship was by
definition limited to males of European origin and some other men of property. Women, Native
Americans, people from other parts of the world, and slaves received limited, if any, rights to
participate in government.
France
In France, popular discontent broke out in revolution in 1789, leading to the creation of a
government that gave rights to a minority of the citizens. The violent and nonviolent protests
against King Louis XVI’s tax program mirrored the grievances of the North American colonists.
The majority of the French population, labeled the Third Estate, refused to accept the heavy
burden of increased taxes and insisted on creating a constitution to regulate the government,
including the king. The elite comprising the First and Second Estates—that is, the aristocracy
and the high clergy—strongly resisted the changes and encouraged monarchs of neighboring
countries to help them fight against the new constitutional monarchy. The French Declaration of
the Rights of Man issued in 1791 and the constitution for the new French Republic, established
after the king was executed for treason, were inspired by the documents of the American
revolution. Some of the key figures of the American experiment, including Thomas Jefferson
and Benjamin Franklin, were in France at that time.
Once Napoleon Bonaparte took over France in 1799 as head of the French military, the European
wars that had started during the revolution, expanded more. Napoleon insisted that his new law