IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/h/spr/sprchp/978-3-031-07484-4_10.html
   My bibliography  Save this book chapter

The Townshend Duties

In: The Rise and Fall of Britain’s North American Empire

Author

Listed:
  • Gerald Pollio

Abstract

The Townshend Duties had two key purposes: (1) to raise revenues in the colonies in ways that avoided the provocation inherent in the prior Stamp Act and (2) to provide financial support to the floundering East India Company (EIC). Four acts were passed within a matter of days in 1767, although only three related directly to taxation; the remaining measure, equally provocative, shut down the New York Assembly until it agreed to pay the expenses involved in quartering British troops there. The Revenue Act imposed duties on a range of goods, including tea, wine, lead, and glass, imported into the colonies. The Indemnity Act reduced duties on tea imported into England by the financially hard-pressed EIC, which were refunded once the tea was exported to the colonies. The final measure, the Commissioners of Customs Act, imposed a series of shipping and trade regulations to ensure the appropriate duties were paid. Conflicts erupted between the colonists and the Customs Board created to enforce the law, which led to British troops being sent to Boston to quell any opposition to the measure. Tensions increased between the townspeople and British soldiers culminating in the Boston massacre (1770).

Suggested Citation

  • Gerald Pollio, 2022. "The Townshend Duties," Springer Books, in: The Rise and Fall of Britain’s North American Empire, chapter 0, pages 149-156, Springer.
  • Handle: RePEc:spr:sprchp:978-3-031-07484-4_10
    DOI: 10.1007/978-3-031-07484-4_10
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    To our knowledge, this item is not available for download. To find whether it is available, there are three options:
    1. Check below whether another version of this item is available online.
    2. Check on the provider's web page whether it is in fact available.
    3. Perform a search for a similarly titled item that would be available.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Revenue; Colonial reactions;

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:spr:sprchp:978-3-031-07484-4_10. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Sonal Shukla or Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.springer.com .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.