IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/h/spr/sprchp/978-3-031-07484-4_9.html
   My bibliography  Save this book chapter

The Stamp Act

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

Author

Listed:
  • Gerald Pollio

Abstract

The Stamp Act of 1765 was the first in a series of revenue measures passed by Parliament to increase the amount of revenue raised from Americans. Stamp duties were not unknown in the colonies and were generally considered more equitable than many alternatives. However, the measure was the first internal tax levied directly on Americans and deemed unacceptable because under English law direct taxes could be imposed only with the consent of those being taxed. Following widespread opposition, the Act was repealed by Parliament the following year, but adding insult to injury it was followed by a Declaratory Act that reaffirmed Parliament’s power over the colonies was absolute. The Act imposed a tax on all paper documents produced in the colonies, thus raising the cost of newspapers, land and property registrations, and all forms of litigation thus alienating important segments of colonial society who, in due course, became opponents of the status quo. As things turned out, the costs of the measure far outweighed the income it generated.

Suggested Citation

  • Gerald Pollio, 2022. "The Stamp Act," Springer Books, in: The Rise and Fall of Britain’s North American Empire, chapter 0, pages 127-148, Springer.
    • Handle: RePEc:spr:sprchp:978-3-031-07484-4_9
    DOI: 10.1007/978-3-031-07484-4_9
    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.

    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_9. 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.