What Did The Colonies Pay In Taxes?

[Dill]

(07-04-2019, 07:44 PM)BFritz21 Wrote: I was thinking about this and everyone knows the reason for the war: taxation without representation, but what were the colonies being taxed in?

Did they have silver coins as money that they had to send back?  Were the coins over here the same as they were in England?  When did we get our own coins?

Were they taxed in livestock or crops?  Was it even sent back or was it just collected and kept over here?

Was it not even coins but just silver and gold?

Anybody know?

BPat has a good response to this in post #4, but I want to add something.

During the 17-1800s, the British economy was organized according to the precepts of MERCANTILISM, which treated the national economy on very simplistic terms, rather like a household economy. The goal was to increase the amount of wealth (gold) flowing into Great Britain and decrease the amount flowing out.

So taxes were not the only problem for the colonists. Owing to a series of Navigation Acts passed between 1651 and 1673, if a colonist wanted to sell lumber to the French, he had to ship it first to London on a British ship, where a duty would be paid on it by any French who bought it.  It would have been cheaper and easier for the French to simply sail into Charleston or Boston in their own ships and buy the timber directly, at market prices. This meant the colonists could not directly sell timber, or tobacco, or cotton or furs to any other nation.  They could not buy textile and paper products other than from Britain, and tea from any other source than the British East India Company. 

Thus Great Britain could insure a monopoly over raw materials from the colonies, and in return had a "captive" market for goods produced in GB. There was trade between Britain and other countries, so colonial products did not all remain in Britain, but the Crown got a piece of that action, since all that trade went through British ports.

1776, the date of the US Declaration, was also the year of publication for Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations, which argued against mercantilism in favor of free markets in which individual investment was unrestricted.  The US colonists thought they could do very much better if so much of the value they produced were not being extracted by Britain, not only by taxes but by control of trade and markets.

Virtually all European colonies since have recognized this problem and fought for independence, most winning it.