Michael Hattem

There's a debate in England about –

The traditional way that they would have and that they had tried to raise revenue, develop revenue streams, was by promoting trade with the colonies.

And this had been the case for decades.

There were no direct taxes.

The revenue was generated by customs duties and things like that, but also the colonies as an outlet for British manufactured goods.

Over the course of the 18th century, the Americans are a huge market for British manufactured goods.

So there's one side in England that says we need to continue to just do policies that promote trade and that will take care of the debt.

But then there is a sort of another position, which is sort of what we might think of as an austerity position, which is we need to minimize our spending and we need to extract revenue from the colonies, right?

As opposed to generating it through trade.

And how do you extract revenue from colonies?

You do it through direct taxes.

And the main crux of the colonists' issue with this approach is that it really had never been done before.

And, you know, there's an importance that is given to precedent and tradition because –

The colonies and England, for that matter, are a sort of – it's a common law culture, right?

So precedent and tradition really matter.

And the fact that there was no precedent for these kinds of direct taxes like the Stamp Act or the Townsend Duties –

that's really the crux of the colonists argument is you've never done this and so you can't do it but of course the people in britain think very differently and in their minds they say look we've just won this unprecedented war our empire is now stretches across the world and we have an unprecedented situation to deal with in terms of administering this new empire

And so if that takes some unprecedented methods, then that's fine with us.

And so there's a real disconnect between the ways that both sides are looking at this.

Yeah, absolutely.