The Sugar Act Raises a Revenue in America

In 1764 Parliament passed an act whose preamble says plainly what it is for. It declares it "expedient that new provisions and regulations should be established for improving the revenue of this kingdom" and "just and necessary" that a revenue be raised in the American dominions to defray the cost of defending and securing them. The war just ended had enlarged those dominions, and, as the Office of the Historian of the State Department puts it, left Britain with heavy debts.

The act laid new duties, starting on September 29, 1764, on foreign white or clayed sugar, indigo, coffee, wines, and certain silks and calicoes brought into the colonies, and on coffee and pimento carried out of them. It also took a 1733 act on the sugar colonies' trade, made it perpetual, and replaced its duty on foreign molasses and syrups with a charge of three pence a gallon. The money was to be paid into the Exchequer, kept apart from other revenue, and disposed of by Parliament toward the expenses of defending the colonies. The Office of the Historian describes the policy as reducing some duties on sugar and molasses while enforcing the law much more strictly than before, which in practice raised what colonists paid.

The act is usually remembered for the principle behind it. Earlier trade duties had been framed as regulation of commerce; this one announced itself as a means of raising revenue in America, set aside for imperial purposes. It came within a year of the Proclamation of 1763, and the Stamp Act followed in 1765. Colonists' objections to being taxed by a Parliament in which they had no representatives start here and run through the road to independence and, later, to the question of how the national government should be given the power to tax.