Sugar Act

Examples of Sugar Act in the following topics:

• Navigation Acts

  • The deeply unpopular Molasses Act was the first of the Sugar Acts.
  • This act was set to expire in 1763; instead, it was renewed in 1764 as the Sugar Act.
  • Two prime movers behind the protests against the Sugar Act were Samuel Adams and James Otis,, both of Massachusetts.
  • Overall, however, there was not an immediate high level of protest over the Sugar Act in either New England or the rest of the colonies.
  • The Sugar Act was repealed in 1766 and replaced with the Revenue Act of 1766, which reduced the tax to one penny per gallon on molasses imports, British or foreign.

• The Sugar and Stamp Acts

  • The Sugar and Stamp Acts of 1764 and 1765, intended to raise revenue in Great Britain, led to increased resistance from the colonies.
  • The Sugar Act, also known as the American Revenue Act, was a revenue-raising act passed by the British Parliament of Great Britain in April of 1764.
  • When passed by Parliament, the new Sugar Act of 1764 halved the previous tax on molasses.
  • The Sugar Act was passed during a time of economic depression in the colonies.
  • Define the Sugar Act of 1764 and the Stamp Act of 1765

• Enforcing the Navigation Acts

  • In some instances, British colonists and foreign merchants subverted the Act; for example, in the West Indies, the Dutch kept up a flourishing "smuggling" trade due to the preference of English planters for Dutch goods and the better deal the Dutch offered in the sugar trade.
  • Later revisions of the Act added new regulations.
  • Later laws such as the Molasses Act of 1733 (the first of the Sugar Acts) levied heavy duties on the trade of sugar from the French West Indies to the American colonies, forcing the colonists to buy the more expensive sugar from the British West Indies instead and only added fuel to the growing fire.
  • On the whole, the Navigation Acts were more or less obeyed by colonists, despite their dissatisfaction, until the Molasses and Sugar Acts.
  • Irritation with stricter enforcement under the Sugar Act of 1764 became a greater source of resentment by merchants in the American colonies against Great Britain, contributing to the American Revolution.

• The Stamp Act

  • Opposition to the Stamp Act was not limited to the colonies.
  • The Act was repealed on March 18, 1766 as a matter of expedience, but Parliament affirmed its power to legislate for the colonies "in all cases whatsoever" by also passing the Declaratory Act.
  • Parliament announced in April 1764 when the Sugar Act was passed that they would also consider a stamp tax in the colonies.
  • The Sugar Act was to a large extent a continuation of past legislation related primarily to the regulation of trade.
  • Because of its potential wide application to the colonial economy, the Stamp Act was judged by the colonists to be a more dangerous assault on their rights than the Sugar Act was.

• The Habit of Self-Government

  • The Sugar Act established a tax of six pence per gallon of sugar or molasses imported into the colonies, and by 1750, the Parliament had begun to ban, restrict, or tax several more products.

• The Mercantalist System

  • Throughout the 17th and 18th centuries, the Parliament of England passed the Navigation Acts to increase the profit England derived from its colonies.
  • Among the provisions, the Acts required that any colonial imports or exports travel only on ships registered in England.
  • The colonies were forbidden to export tobacco and sugar to any nation other than England.
  • The Navigation Acts expelled foreign merchants from England's domestic trade.
  • Many colonists resented the Navigation Acts because they increased regulation and reduced their opportunities for profit, while England profited from colonial work.

• Nonconsumption and the Daughters of Liberty

  • Two colonial movements, the Daughters of Liberty and the nonconsumption agreements, were created in response to British taxation such as the Stamp Act .
  • Proving their commitment to "the cause of liberty and industry" they openly opposed the Tea Act.
  • They experimented to find substitutes for taxed goods such as tea and sugar.
  • They helped end the Stamp Act in 1766.
  • These import duties were birthed from the Intolerable Acts that Britain passed in the wake of the Boston Tea Party the previous year, which protested high taxes against tea and other products.

• The Plantation Economy and the Planter Class

  • Prominent plantation crops included cotton, rubber, sugar cane, tobacco, figs, rice, kapok, sisal, and indigo.
  • Sugar, tea sisal, and palm oil are most suited to plantations.
  • Over the years, tobacco became important to Virginia's economy, even acting as currency at times.
  • Sugar also has a long history as a plantation crop.
  • The juice from the crushing of the cane was then boiled or clarified until it crystallized into sugar.

• The Tariff and the Politics of Protection

  • The Tariff Act of 1890, commonly called the McKinley Tariff, was an act of the United States Congress framed by Representative William McKinley that became law on October 1, 1890.
  • The tariff raised the average duty on imports to almost fifty percent, an act designed to protect domestic industries from foreign competition.
  • McKinley, the act's framer and defender, was then assassinated.
  • What would become the Wilson-Gorman Tariff Act was introduced by West Virginian Representative William L.
  • The Sugar Trust in particular lobbied for changes that favored change at the expense of the consumer.

• The Townshend Acts

  • The first of the Townshend Acts, sometimes simply known as the Townshend Act, was the Revenue Act of 1767.
  • This act represented a new approach for generating tax revenue in the American colonies after the repeal of the Stamp Act in 1766.
  • The original stated purpose of the Revenue Act and the following Townshend Acts was to raise revenue to pay the cost of maintaining an army in North America.
  • Proving their commitment to "the cause of liberty and industry," they openly opposed many of the British taxes and experimented to find substitutes for taxed goods, such as tea and sugar.
  • They helped end the Stamp Act in 1766.