CHAPTER: 13 REVOLUTIONS In England, King James alarmed the Protestant majority by ruling arbitrarily and by favoring his fellow Catholics. Several Anglican bishops and aristocrats secretly write to William, the Dutch Prince of Orange, urging that he come to England with an army to intervene on behalf of the Protestant cause. In 1688 the Dutch face a renewed war with powerful France, under the aggressive rule of Louis XIV. In a bold and desperate gamble, William invaded England as a preemptive strike to capture that realm for a Dutch alliance. William's English supporters, known as the Whigs, called the transfer of power a 'Glorious Revolution', which they creatively depicted as a spontaneous uprising by a united English people. In fact, the revolution was fundamentally a coup spearheaded by a foreign army and navy.
CHAPTER: 14 THE ATLANTIC During the 18th century, a swelling volume of British shipping carried information, goods and people more regularly across the Atlantic. The annual transatlantic crossings tripled from about 500 during the 1670s to 1500 by the late 1730s. The increasing shipping (and diminished piracy) reduced insurance costs and freight charges, which encouraged the shipment of greater cargos. The ocean became less of a barrier and more of a bridge between the two shores of the empire. Clustered close to the Atlantic, most colonists felt oriented eastward toward the ocean and across to Europe, rather than westward into the interior. The continental interior of dense forests, Indian peoples and immense but uncertain dimensions was far more mysterious and daunting than an ocean passage. Far from dividing the colonists from the mother country, the ocean and the passage of time both worked to draw them closer together during the first two-thirds of the 18th century. The colonists became significantly better informed about events and ideas in Britain and especially London. William Penn explained that it had become 'the interest of England to improve and thicken her colonys with people not her own'. By recruiting for colonists in Europe, imperial officials hoped to strengthen the colonies without weakening the mother country. In 1740, Parliament passed the Plantation Act, which enabled foreign-born colonists to win British citizenship: a necessary prerequisite for legal ownership of land as welll as for political rights.
CHAPTER: 14 THE ATLANTIC (Cont.) The new recruitment invented America as an asylum from religious persecution and political oppression in Europe, with the important proviso that the immigrants had to be Protestants. Colonial laws and prejudices continued to discourage the emigration of Catholic and Jews to British America, from a fear they would subvert Protestantism and betray the empire to French or Spanish attack. As a land of freedom and opportunity, British America had powerful limits. More than any other 18th century empire, the British relied on foreign emigrants for human capital. The new emigration included far fewer English but many more Scots and Germans. As the colonial population became less English, it assumed a new ethnic and racial complexity, which increased the gap between freedom and slavery, privilege and prejudice, wealth and poverty, white and black. At the same time that high culture and consumer culture became more tied to English models, the colonial population and vernacular cultures became less homogenous. Relatively large farms and fertile soil enabled colonists to raise or to purchase cheaply the grains, vegetables, milk and meat of a plentiful diet. The muster rolls for colonial military regiments recorded heights, revealing that the average colonial man stood two or three inches taller than his English counterpart.
GOVERNMENT IN 1700’s The colonies were independent of each other before 1774 as efforts led by Benjamin Franklin to form a colonial union had not made progress. The thirteen all had well established systems of self government and elections based on the Rights of Englishmen, which they were determined to protect from “imperial interference”. Beginning with the intense protests over the Stamp Act of 1765, the Americans insisted on the principle of "no taxation without representation". They argued that, as the colonies had no representation in the British Parliament, it was a violation of their rights as Englishmen for taxes to be imposed upon them. Parliament rejected the colonial protests and asserted its authority by passing new taxes. Trouble escalated over the tea tax, as Americans in each colony boycotted the tea and in Boston, dumped the tea in the harbor during the Boston Tea Party in 1773. Tensions escalated in 1774 as Parliament passed the laws known as the Intolerable Acts, which, among other things, greatly restricted self-government in the colony of Massachusetts. In response the colonies formed extralegal bodies of elected representatives, generally known as Provincial Congresses, and later that year twelve colonies sent representatives to the First Continental Congress in Philadelphia. During the Second Continental Congress that year, a thirteenth colony, Georgia, sent delegates, and by spring 1775 all royal officials had been expelled from all thirteen colonies. The Continental Congress served as a national government through the war that raised an army to fight the British and named George Washington its commander, made treaties, declared independence, and instructed the colonies to write constitutions and become independent states.