SUGAR ACT

The Sugar Act (1764), also known as the American Revenue Act, was the first overt imperial tax raised by Parliament in British America. It was one of a series of measures introduced by the ministry of George Grenville in an effort to reduce Britain's national debt by defraying the cost of colonial administration and the defense of a muchexpanded empire in the aftermath of the French and Indian War (1756–1763). The Sugar Act yielded the largest revenue of any imperial tax before the Revolutionary War.

The Sugar Act revised the earlier Molasses Act (1733). It decreased the duty on foreign molasses imported into North America from six pence per gallon to three pence, prohibited the importation of rum, and increased the tax on sugar imports from five shillings to one pound seven shillings per hundredweight. It imposed new or higher duties on foreign textiles, coffee, and indigo and on wines directly imported from the Madeira and the Canary Islands. In an effort to close a tax loophole, it doubled the duties on foreign goods reshipped from Britain to America. It added iron, hides, whale fins, raw silk, potash, and pearl ashes to the list of goods permitted to be exported by the colonies to Britain. Of perhaps greater significance, it introduced elaborate enforcement regulations and new trial procedures in the viceadmiralty courts. Furthermore, it was more effectively enforced than the earlier Molasses Act, partly in consequence of more rigorous efforts by the collectors of customs but also because of the intervention of the Royal Navy.

The act did not provoke the same unity of opposition among the thirteen colonies as the Stamp Act did the following year. This was because, although the preamble had clearly stated that it was a revenue measure, it conformed in many ways to the tradition of navigation acts that sought primarily to regulate trade. Furthermore, it did not affect all levels of society or equally impact all the thirteen colonies. The opposition was therefore limited primarily to merchants in the northern and middle colonies, where refineries depended upon the cheap and plentiful supply of molasses from the French Caribbean. The Sugar Act was soon overshadowed by the much more unpopular Stamp Act. Nevertheless, it caused colonies to correspond with one another and some cities to sign nonimportation agreements, thereby setting precedents for opposition to the Stamp Act. The Sugar Act was relatively popular in the British Caribbean, where planters wanted to secure the monopoly of the North American market because they were unable to compete profitably with the rival French. Indeed, the Patriot opposition complained that it was sacrificed to the lobbying power of the British planters in the Caribbean. The act was a major obstacle to a united colonial alliance of the North American and West Indian lobbies in London.

The Rockingham ministry revised the Sugar Act when it repealed the Stamp Act in 1766, reducing the tax on the import of molasses from three pence to one penny per gallon. North Americans nevertheless protested the new Sugar Act with formal petitions from the merchants of New York, followed by Boston and the legislature of Massachusetts. Their attempts to win further concessions to trade openly with the French Caribbean widened the breach with the British Caribbean and diverted the colonial lobbies from uniting against other measures like the Currency Act (1764) and Townshend Act (1767). The legislation played an important role in alienating colonial opinion against the vice-admiralty courts and the Royal Navy.

See alsoBritish Empire and the Atlantic World .

bibliography

Bullion, John L. A Great and Necessary Measure: George Grenville and the Genesis of the Stamp Act, 1763–1765. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1982.

Lawson, Philip. George Grenville: A Political Life. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984.

O'Shaughnessy, Andrew Jackson. An Empire Divided. The American Revolution and the British Caribbean. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000.

Andrew O'Shaughnessy