Mercantilist Relationship With America After 1763

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The mid-18th century was a time that saw the birth of new economic systems. One of those systems was mercantilism. In the process of transforming the North American landscape, Britain had developed a beneficial relationship with the American colonists whilst pursuing their mercantile goals. However, the benefits pursuant to this relationship would eventually become null and void. This paper will establish the argument that Britain no longer benefited from a mercantilist relationship with the American colonists after 1763. Before 1763, the colonists accepted Parliament's right to take actions on their behalf and even the primacy of England's economic interests over their own. Prior to the Seven Years' War, almost all parliamentary actions had been designed to regulate trade, and while the colonies at times regarded these acts as unfair or inopportune, they did not regard them as especially oppressive or burdensome. After 1763, however, Parliament's actions began to clash with the colonists' interests. At the end of the Seven Years' War, France surrendered Canada and much of the Ohio and Mississippi valley to British rule. The colonists, upon seeing the vast lands, jumped at the chance of Britain’s vulnerability and started heading west to settle in the area. However, the Proclamation of 1763 reserved lands west of the Appalachian Mountains for Indians and forbade white settlement there. By preventing the colonial population from moving inland, the British ministry hoped to avoid costly Indian wars and keep western land speculation under the control of the crown. This terribly clashed with colonial interests for territorial expansion and would come to mark itself as the first amongst many policy mishaps Britain enacted. Equally disturbing new British politics restricted Indian trade to traders licensed by the British government. For the first time, power over
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