“The events of 1763-1775 can have no meaning unless we understand that the character of English imperial policy never changed: that Pitt and his successors at [Whitehall] were following exactly the same line that Cromwell had laid down more than a century before. The purpose of their general program was to protect the English capitalist interests which now were being jeopardized as a result of the intensification of colonial capitalist competition, and English statesmen yielded quickly when no fundamental principle was at stake, but became insistent only when one was being threatened … The struggle was not over high-sounding political and constitutional concepts: over the power of taxation or even, in the final analysis, over natural rights. It was over … the survival or collapse of English mercantile capitalism within the imperial-colonial framework of the mercantilist system.”
Andrew Hacker, historian, The Triumph of American Capitalism, 1940
The argument in Andrew Hacker’s excerpt suggests that the primary cause of the American Revolution was the
Colonial reaction to British taxation policies, rooted in Enlightenment principles
Use of suppressed violence against colonial resistance, such as the Boston Massacre
Economic rivalry between English mercantilism and colonial capitalism
Direct impact of British military repression following the Seven Years’ War
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