Greetings (again) This is in response to John's comments to my "essay" of last week (I think) - and subsequent postings. Apologies for leaving the reply for so long... When the American colonies declared their independence they were setting a very dangerous precedent. They opted to declare independence in order to get financial and military support from France, which wouldn't cough up while the colonies were still British - and the French were desperate for revenge after their defeat in the Seven Years' War (French and Indian War). Every European maritime nation had colonies and if the British lost her colonies in north America, then every other colony had a model to follow, whichever nation it belonged to. Letting them go wasn't an option. I'm not sure about your argument over the choice of words, John. "Rebel" is negative; "loyalist" is a bit suspect (watch the TV where the "loyalists" in Ulster are throwing petrol bombs at the police - a predominantly protestant force), Tory is VERY suspect - it was a term of abuse both here and in the colonies (nothing changed there, then!!). I'm of the very firm opinion that had subsequent governments followed the line taken by "my Marquis" (Rockingham), we may well have ended up giving the thirteen colonies something like "Dominion Status" in 1775 and have started the Commonwealth a couple of centuries earlier than it began. Canada - apart from the French bit - seems happy to be part of the Pax Britannica. I had to read Bernard Bailyn's "Ideological Origins of the American Revolution" at one stage and came to the conclusion that he was desperately seeking a good reason for the colonial revolt; it does seem to have boiled down to cash in the end. The colonists didn't want to pay and Britain was desperate for the money. That meant conflict. Ironically, it led to the one thing about shopping in the US that floors us Brits. The price we see isn't the price we pay: we get to the till and someone slaps on an extra 10%. Not nice... but Americans can see the tax they're paying! <<The colonials were extremely well-informed on European political currents. The reverse was not true.>> True - and even when the government had got men on the spot (like Gage) telling them that there was a problem, parliament just ignored the warnings. There was a lot going on in England at the time, though. Ann said <<The colonies came into existence because people wanted to leave their homelands and come to America>>. Oohh!!! That's not really true of the Brits. In the early days of colonisation, people went to America to make their fortunes from trading with the natives, intending to return, very rich, to England where they could buy land and become important political/social personages. The Non-Conformists would have preferred to stay in Britain but were told either to worship according to the Church of England or leave: they left. The "Pilgrim Fathers" ended up at Cape Cod in error - they were heading much further south and got lost. Others ended up in the colonies because they were sent there by our legal system: transportation. That was hardly a voluntary act! The Navigation laws were passed in the 17th century, tying colonial trade to Britain: some of them do seem daft - but at least they enabled British manufacturing to develop and provided ready markets for colonial goods: tobacco, sugar, coffee, tea (from India), cotton. That made the plantation owners rich. Again (as I recall, but without checking), Virginia and Massachusetts merchants were heavily indebted to British merchants and therefore had an excellent reason for supporting colonial independence - not paying their debts... I'm almost sure I read that Samuel Adams was appointed as a tax-collector by the British government and owed something like £50,000 in unpaid revenues. Presumably he'd either not collected it, or had pocketed it instead of paying? Do you think that the colonists would have accepted "Dominion status" in 1775, had the events at Lexington and Concord not intervened? Marjie.