Parliament and the war in the American colonies 1767-83
Following the repeal of the Stamp Act, Parliament tried to tax the colonies in 1767 by raising import duties, which became known as the Townshend duties, on certain goods. The colonists continued to insist that they could not be taxed by the British Parliament without proper representation, even indirectly by customs duties.
Boston Tea Party
The measures also met with opposition from merchants at home, and the government repealed them in 1770 – except for the one on tea, which the Prime Minister Lord North insisted remain as an assertion of Parliament's right to tax the colonists.
On 16 December 1773 a group of protesters in Boston boarded a ship and dumped £10,000 worth of tea in the harbour, an event immortalised in the United States as the Boston Tea Party.
Intolerable Acts
In angry response, Parliament passed in 1774 a series of punitive measures, known in
The Quebec Act greatly extended the territory of the former French colony of Quebec, and recognised the Catholic Church there while giving the royal governor increased powers.
These were all controversial measures, and the Quebec Act in particular was criticised in both
War of Independence
The crisis of 1774 soon tipped over into armed confrontation between British troops and American colonists at Lexington and Concord in Massachusetts on19 April 1775. Eventually it led to war, after representatives of the colonies meeting in the first Continental Congress in Philadelphia formally declared their independence from Britain on 4 July 1776.
Following a protracted war, Britain formally recognised the independence of the thirteen colonies as the United States of America in the treaty of 1783. The only parts of its former North American possessions which remained were the colonies of Nova Scotia, Quebec and Newfoundland – none of which had joined the rebellion and which had received many loyalists fleeing the war-torn colonies.