The Development of the American System

The first charters took it for granted that tariffs were to be established on both sides of the Atlantic and made provisions accordingly. The century and a half of colonial America provides, in fact, one of the most interesting phases of our tariff history, for it was then that Great Britain in line with mercantilistic theory, attempted by tariffs at home and in America to regulate the economic life of the colonies. As long as these regulations did not interfere in an important way with normal economic development or were not enforced, they were taken for granted and little opposition was aroused. When important elements in the trading population realized, however, that Great Britain after 1763 intended to enforce the old system and impose new tariffs detrimental to American interests, strenuous opposition immediately arose, an opposition which culminated in the American Revolution. The unwise system of English tariffs was a primary cause leading to the Revolution. The Revolution as far as the Continental Congress was concerned was financed without the aid of a tariff. The make-shift government had not the power to use it to obtain revenue, and under the existing reaction against the tariff there was little likelihood that such power would be soon granted. With the coming of independence, however, the thirteen independent states were confronted by the problem of finance, and as tariffs afforded an indirect method of obtaining revenue in a way that was likely to arouse the least opposition, they were widely used. In fact it was not long before the states began to use tariffs as a weapon against one another as well as against foreign nations. The desire to curtail internal tariff wars, and at the same time give the federal government strength to retaliate against the tariff discriminations of foreign governments, was one of the important arguments in favor of a new constitution

Development (topology · American Constitutional Law and Politics · Mathematics

• Una sombra colonial

  Open Access•Edward Owen Teggin, Ahmad Ginanjar Purnawibawa•Guerra Colonial•2025

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