American Revolution (1775-1783), conflict between 13 British colonies in North America and their parent country, Great Britain. It was made up of two related events: the American War of Independence (1775-1783) and the formation of the American government as laid out by the Constitution of the United States in 1787. First, the war achieved independence from Great Britain by the colonies. Second, the newly created United States of America established a republican form of government, in which power resided with the people.

The revolution had many causes. Long-term social, economic, and political changes in the colonies before 1750 provided the basis for an independent nation with representative political institutions. More immediately, the French and Indian War (1754-1763) changed the relationship between the colonies and their mother country. Finally, a decade of conflicts between the British government and the colonists, beginning with the Stamp Act crisis in 1765, led to the outbreak of war in 1775 and the Declaration of Independence in 1776.

Once independent, the new state governments implemented republican constitutions, and a Continental Congress directed the American war effort. Then in 1781 the rebellious states created a loose union under the Articles of Confederation. At the end of the war in 1783, Britain recognized its former colonies as an independent nation. In 1789 the people of the several states ratified the Constitution that created a stronger central government.

Britain’s 13 North American colonies experienced an extraordinary rate of population growth. In 1700 the population was about 250,000; seven decades later there were about 2,500,000 inhabitants, a tenfold increase. This phenomenal growth was a prerequisite for a successful independence movement. In 1700 there were 20 people in Britain for every American colonist; by 1775 this ratio had fallen to 3 to 1.

The American population also changed in composition. The proportion of the colonists who were of English culture and ancestry steadily declined during the 1700s as the result of the arrival, by forced or voluntary migration, of new racial and ethnic groups. Among the 80 percent of Americans who were of European descent, there were important cultural divisions. Migrants from Germany, Scotland, and Ireland made up at least 30 percent of the white population. Members of these groups often settled in their own communities, especially in the mid-Atlantic colonies of Delaware, New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania. Others migrated into the backcountry regions of the Southern colonies (Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia), thus adding ethnic diversity to a region already divided along racial lines. Only the New England colonies of Connecticut, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, and New Hampshire remained predominantly English in composition and culture.

In 1775 about one-fifth of the people of the mainland colonies were of African ancestry. Unlike Latin America and the West Indies, North American slaves had a high rate of natural increase. About 250,000 Africans were brought to the mainland colonies before 1775, but the total black population numbered 567,000 on the eve of independence. Most lived as slaves working on tobacco and rice plantations in the Southern colonies. Slaves and some free blacks also lived in the Northern colonies, working on small farms or in cities.

This growth in population and diversity made the American colonies more difficult for Britain to rule. It was therefore an important precondition for the rise of an independence movement and the subsequent emergence of a unique American nationality.

In 1750 there was little political basis for a national consciousness in the colonies of British North America. Each of the 13 colonies was a separate entity, with its own governor and legislative assembly. The inhabitants’ first political allegiance was to their own colony. The lower house of each legislature was elected by the adult white men who were property owners. However, the upper houses, or councils, and the governors were chosen in different ways depending on the type of colony.

There were three kinds of colonies: corporate, proprietary, and royal. Rhode Island and Connecticut were corporate colonies, so called because they had been founded under charters granted by the king of England that bestowed corporate rights. In these two colonies, the corporation of property owners elected the council and governor as well as the assembly. Maryland, Pennsylvania, and Delaware were proprietary colonies, ruled by descendants of their founders. Their governors and councils were chosen by their British proprietors, or owners. Georgia, North and South Carolina, Virginia, New Jersey, New York, Massachusetts, and New Hampshire were royal provinces. Their governors were appointed by the king on the advice of the Board of Trade, the British administrative agency that supervised colonial affairs. Their councils, except in Massachusetts, were nominated by the governor and approved by the Board of Trade.

In 1750 there were no governmental bodies or political parties that could formulate policy for the colonists as a whole. Such intercolony ties were created only in response to political events that affected all the colonies—first the French and Indian War and then the struggle for independence.

Nevertheless, the colonies shared one important political institution. Each colony had a representative assembly with authority to make laws covering most aspects of local life. The assemblies had the right to tax; to appropriate money for public works and public officials; and to regulate internal trade, religion, and social behavior. Although the British government was responsible for external matters, such as foreign affairs and trade, the American colonists had a great deal of self-government during the colonial period. The capable leaders of the assemblies took the lead in the independence struggle. These well-functioning representative institutions would form the basis for the new state governments.

In addition to the rapid growth and diversity of the population and the experience in representative government, the emergence of a prosperous agricultural and commercial economy in the colonies during the 18th century helped pave the way for the independence movement. This economic system was based on the production of wheat, cattle, corn, tobacco, and rice in America for export to the West Indies, Britain, and Europe.

Southern agriculture was founded on the cultivation of tobacco, wheat, and corn in Virginia, Maryland, and North Carolina, and of rice and indigo (a blue dye) in South Carolina and Georgia. There was a large demand for these crops in Europe. These crops were cultivated with the help of black slaves imported from Africa. The white planter class in the South was the most powerful, both politically and economically.

Wheat was the main cash crop of the mid-Atlantic colonies of Pennsylvania, New York, and New Jersey. These colonies, along with those in New England, exported wheat—along with corn, cattle, horses, fish, and wood—primarily to the West Indies. The British and French planters of the Caribbean, exploiting a mainly African labor force, specialized in the production of sugar for export to Europe and imported many of their foodstuffs. The Northern mainland prospered from this vast transatlantic division of labor. In payment for supplies shipped to the West Indies, their merchants received bills of exchange (essentially credit slips) from merchant houses in Great Britain. These credits were then used to purchase British manufactured goods.

The colonists’ participation in transatlantic trade accounted for the rise of the American port cities of Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Newport, and Charleston. These shipping centers gradually came to provide the commercial services, such as insurance and wholesale trade, and the small-scale industries, such as rope and sail manufacture and shipbuilding, that were necessary to sustain a merchant fleet. The independence movement began in these cities.

The contrast between the rich and the poor was stark in the colonial cities. In 1774 about 29 percent of the adult men in Boston possessed no taxable property at all. These men were wage earners, working for others. They lived in the back of shops, taverns, or rented rooms. Since they had little or no property, they could not vote, and thus lacked direct political power.

Next in social rank were the artisans and small shopkeepers. Constituting almost half of a town’s population, they owned about one-third of the total wealth. Shopkeepers had once dominated town life, but their political and social influence had waned with the rise of wealthy merchants. Artisans feared a similar decline in their position; the influx of British manufactures might destroy their small businesses, reducing them to the status of propertyless wage laborers. As threatened social groups, artisans and shopkeepers were vital to the revolutionary upheaval. They took the strongest stand against the new British measures of taxation and control. They also challenged the political domination of the merchants and lawyers.

Urban merchants also played key leadership roles in American resistance. By 1770 these men, about 10 percent of the taxpayers, owned from 50 to 60 percent of the total wealth of these towns. Their wealth also gave them much prestige and enabled them, and their lawyer allies who handled complex commercial transactions, to dominate political life.

The gap between rich and poor was much narrower in the farming regions of the Northern colonies. However, even in rural communities, where most Americans lived, social differences were increasing. Inequality was especially apparent in areas where crops were raised for sale, rather than just for subsistence. For example, in the Southern colonies, great disparity existed between plantation farmers who grew rice and tobacco on a large scale and family farmers who grew food to feed themselves. In both the North and the South these differences divided farming communities.

In 1775 it was not clear whether the many divisions within American society—among racial and ethnic groups, religious denominations, and social classes—and the fragmented character of colonial political institutions would prevent a unified movement for independence. But it was increasingly apparent that the battle with Britain for American home rule would also involve a struggle among Americans over which people would rule in the new country.

The war changed the relationship between Great Britain and the colonies. Prior to the war, Great Britain had practiced a policy of salutary neglect, not insisting on strict enforcement of laws, such as the Molasses Act, which in 1733 imposed a tax on molasses, because trade with the American colonies was making Britain very wealthy and powerful. During this period, the colonists developed a nearly independent political and economic system.

After the war, however, British leaders reevaluated their relationship with the colonies, ending the policy of salutary neglect and proposing reforms and new taxes. This reevaluation was caused by conflicts between Great Britain and the colonies during the war, such as the colonial assemblies’ insistence on controlling the militia units raised to fight the French, the increased colonial independence, and colonial smuggling of French goods into the country during the war. In addition, the war had left Great Britain deeply in debt. British leaders viewed American prosperity as a resource and taxing the colonies as a means to relieve British debt. Conflicts arose as Great Britain attempted to reassert its power over the colonies; they viewed Great Britain’s attempts to tax them as interference into internal matters. The colonies believed that Great Britain had jurisdiction only over external issues.

The English political tradition provided a third ideological basis for the American resistance. Early English Whigs had resisted the arbitrary power exercised by the Stuart kings before 1689 and had sought to limit the authority of the Crown and to increase the power of Parliament. Their ideas had appealed to many members of the colonial assemblies, who faced powerful governors appointed by the king.

Then, in the decades after 1720, many educated Americans followed arguments in England that attacked the power of government financiers, condemned the idea of standing armies, and accused the king and his ministers of manipulating Parliament through patronage and bribes. To these Americans, the Stamp Act was not simply an economic measure to defray the cost of the American garrisons. The colonists believed that Britain was responsible for external matters but the colonial assemblies legislated internal affairs. Therefore, the Stamp Act represented a cunning attempt by Britain to seize control of taxation from the representative colonial assemblies and to tax the colonists without giving them representation in government.

Pressure from the British merchants, who feared the nonimportation movement, persuaded a new British ministry, led by Prime Minister Charles Wentworth, Marquess of Rockingham, to repeal the Stamp Act in 1766. However, Parliament enacted a Declaratory Act that restated its traditional claim to legislate for and to tax the colonists. As Chief Justice William Murray, later 1st Earl of Mansfield, stated: "The British legislature … has the authority to bind every part and every subject without the least distinction, whether such subjects have the right to vote or not."

Mansfield’s argument was directed against the colonial position of no taxation without representation. Colonists who protested the taxes distinguished between taxes designed to raise money, which they opposed, and duties intended primarily to regulate trade, which the colonists had accepted, at least in principle, since the Molasses Act of 1733.

The Americans’ determined resistance to the Townshend Acts resulted, in part, from a profound transition in the colonial economy. Before 1754 the colonists had earned enough from their exports to pay for their imports from Great Britain. Then, British military expenditures in America during the French and Indian War bolstered the incomes of many colonists and unleashed a wave of spending for consumer items: equipment for their farms and all kinds of household goods—including cloth, blankets, china, and cooking utensils. British merchant houses aided this spree of consumption by extending to American traders a full year’s credit, instead of the traditional six months. The mainland colonists soon accounted for 20 percent of all British exports and had gone deeply into debt.

At the end of the war in 1763, the boom came to an abrupt end. The postwar recession brought bankruptcy and disgrace to those Americans who had overextended their commitments and brought hard economic times to nearly everyone else. This financial hardship generated opposition to the Stamp Act in 1765, especially among urban artisans. They had suffered from the competition of low-priced British manufactures and now feared higher taxes. Similar economic pressures fueled resistance to the Townshend Acts in 1767.

Americans also had moralistic reasons for calling a halt to the mass importation of European goods. Extravagant expenditures on luxury items—fancy carpets and carriages, elegant clothes and furniture—produced calls for a return to more frugal living standards. In New England, where Puritan influence was strongest, excessive consumption and debt was seen as a moral failing that inevitably led to a weakening of character.

American women, especially religious women, added their support to the nonimportation movement. Ordinarily women were excluded from prominent roles in political affairs, but the boycotts prompted a more sustained involvement by women in the public world. In Providence, Rhode Island, during the Stamp Act crisis, 18 "Daughters of Liberty" met to spin yarn for cloth, to avoid purchasing any cloth from British manufacturers. To protest the Townshend Acts, a much larger group of religious women in New England organized dozens of spinning matches, bees, and demonstrations at the homes of their ministers. Some gatherings were openly patriotic, such as that at Berwick, Maine, where the spinners "as true Daughters of Liberty" celebrated American goods, "drinking rye coffee and dining on bear venison." But many more women combined support for nonimportation with charitable work by coming together to spin flax and wool, which they donated to their ministers and needy members of the community.

As Patriots warned fellow colonists of the dangers of imperial domination, Lord North lent substance to their predictions. He wanted to assist the East India Company, which had incurred great military expenses in expanding British trade in India. To do so, he secured the Tea Act