00:00:00.000Welcome to Bitchy History, the irreverent history podcast whose only possible audience, according to the troll comment I recently got on YouTube anyway, is apparently men.
00:00:09.060Because apparently only men care about history. Who knew?0.52
00:00:12.600All the dudes out there listening, let me know if listening to a podcast titled Bitchy History is making you uncomfortable or emasculating you in any way.1.00
00:00:20.440I won't change the name, but I will laugh at you.0.99
00:00:22.640welcome to episode 19 where we switch gears back into american history 101 and learn what new drama
00:00:34.260the end of the french and indian war will bring to the colonies hint it's a lot the french and
00:00:40.500indian war was essentially a stalemate for several years while britain and france continued to fight
00:00:45.020each other in europe during the seven years war by 1757 the war turned in britain's favor in both
00:00:50.700India and French Canada, France could see the writing on the wall, and they began offering
00:00:55.340peace negotiations. Smelling weakness, the British asked for some really absurd concessions by the
00:01:01.200French in both land and commercial trade, and France said, are you nuts? We aren't that bad
00:01:06.020off yet. And the French king, Louis XV, did what anyone does when faced with defeat by a bigger
00:01:11.240kid. He ran off to tell his big brother, or in his case, his cousin, the Spanish king. Charles III
00:01:17.480it agrees to an alliance known as the Family Compact in 1761. The terms say that Spain would
00:01:23.140declare war on Great Britain if the war didn't end before May 1st of 1762. This was meant mostly to
00:01:29.600try to scare the British into giving better terms for that peace agreement. But instead, the British0.91
00:01:34.440just preemptively declared war on Spain in January of 1762. The Spanish didn't actually bring that
00:01:41.240much to the team, to be honest. So it was a bit like France ran to their asthmatic cousin with an1.00
00:01:46.300allergy to gluten, milk, and peanuts and asked for help defeating their bully. The British Navy
00:01:51.020quickly proved themselves against the Spanish. You'd think the Spanish would have learned that1.00
00:01:54.900the British Navy is not something to trifle with already, but 1588 was a while back, so maybe they
00:02:00.420thought they'd do better this time. They didn't. British forces seize French Caribbean islands,
00:02:05.740Spanish Cuba, and the Philippines. Fighting in Europe ended after a failed Spanish invasion of
00:02:10.520their British ally of Portugal. By 1763, French and Spanish diplomats are beginning to seek
00:02:16.240peace seriously. Then comes the signing of the Treaty of Paris in 1763, in which the British
00:02:22.440essentially got everything they demanded from the French during the first set of peace negotiations.
00:02:27.220The size of British holdings in the Americas more than doubled, with Britain gaining significant
00:02:31.600territory in North America, including all of the French territory east of the Mississippi River,
00:02:36.460the area in dispute that had caused this entire conflict, and Spanish Florida. Spain did get Cuba
00:02:42.460back, for now anyway. It's a canon event. We need Spain to have Cuba so we can get the whole0.82
00:02:47.700remember the main to hell with Spain rhyme from newspapers in 1898. So everything's good, right?0.99
00:02:53.880The American colonists got the land they wanted, and Britain got to feel good about kicking France1.00
00:02:58.180and Spain's ass. The North American colonies are ecstatic at first. The French are no longer a0.99
00:03:02.860threat on their northern and western border for the first time in nearly a century. France's stupid1.00
00:03:07.720French influence on the continent will probably take a hike, and without all that conflict with1.00
00:03:12.060the French in the colonies, the British colonies can go back to the business of being an extremely
00:03:16.540profitable colony. Everything's fantastic. And nothing can go wrong. Oh no, it all went wrong.
00:03:25.100Yeah, unfortunately it doesn't work like that. Britain's victory ends up sowing the seeds of a
00:03:29.460huge amount of tension between the American colonies and the British, mostly because of
00:03:33.520several rather foolish policy decisions that the British make in the aftermath of the war.0.96
00:03:38.080Or at least foolish in retrospect.0.97
00:03:40.260They more or less made sense at the time.0.97
00:03:42.740The major factor that leads to all of this is money.
00:03:49.160Take a look at America's military budget sometime for a fun understanding of how easy it would be to cancel all of the student loans in America
00:03:55.900if we weren't spending it all on R&D for new fighter jets that are ultimately scrapped because no one wanted the new fighter jets in the first place.
00:04:03.600I promise you won't scream in frustration.
00:04:06.240But back to the 1700s, the French and Indian War cost the British government about 70 million pounds
00:04:11.600and doubled their national debt to around 140 million pounds.
00:04:15.540And that's in 1760s dollars, not 2000s dollars.
00:04:19.140I would try to correct that for inflation, but I don't think bazillion is actually a real word,
00:04:23.880and I don't want to figure out what the right term would be.
00:04:34.200The British had to pay for it somehow, and while they tried to raise taxes back in merry old England with the 1763 Cider Act, which is fully titled an act for granting to his majesty several additional duties upon wines imported into this kingdom and certain duties upon all cider and perry, that tax did not end up going over well with the population at all.
00:04:55.340If you think the Boston Tea Party was an overreaction, and it kind of was, but we'll get to that in a later episode, then you ain't seen nothing yet.
00:05:03.560The reaction to the Cider Act was absolutely riotous.
00:05:06.760Literally, we call the reaction the Cider Riots for a reason.
00:05:10.440Protesters created anti-excise pamphlets and even a slogan, resurrected from the protest of the 1733 excise tax, of liberty, property, and no excise.
00:05:20.180They even had merch for the protests.1.00
00:05:22.360Speaking of which, bitchy history has merch.1.00
00:05:24.500it's all very cool, and I might actually make a liberty property and no excise mug eventually too,
00:05:30.340just as an homage to the cider riots. Attempts were made to calm the populace by amending the
00:05:35.620law, but it didn't really do much to calm the populace, who was steaming mad about the idea
00:05:40.500that their cider prices were going to be driven up by the excise tax. Cider was an enormously
00:05:45.040popular drink in England, and it was seen as an onerous and overburdensome tax on the poor,
00:05:49.640especially. American colonists were, however, completely untouched by the Cider Act. They were,
00:05:55.740however, keenly watching the news about the protests unfold through the newspapers.
00:06:00.460Newspapers in the colonies often reprinted articles from British newspapers about the
00:06:04.560protests that were happening throughout England. And then came the Stamp Act of 1765, and suddenly
00:06:10.440Americans were hit with the same kind of taxation that had caused so much discord in England.
00:06:15.440But before we get into the details of all of that taxation without representation anger in the colonies,
00:06:20.640we need to take a step back and consider what the relationship between Britain and the colonies had been up until that point.
00:06:26.880And to understand that, we need to talk about a concept known as salutary neglect.
00:06:31.380This was an 18th century policy that governed the relationship between the colonies and the British crown.
00:06:36.540Essentially, it was a hands-off policy where the British government technically had laws making a variety of common practices in the colonies illegal.
00:06:44.100But in practice, they avoided enforcing most of them.
00:06:47.680Laws that governed trade were especially lax in the colonies.
00:06:50.880As long as they remained loyal to Britain and contributed to the economic growth of their parent country,
00:06:55.680England basically let them run things the way they wanted to.
00:06:58.940A modern understanding of this can be seen in the practice of Hedohen,
00:07:02.640roughly translated as tolerated in the Netherlands.
00:07:05.800Hedohen is used for a situation or activity that is technically illegal but actively tolerated by the government,
00:07:11.640since everyone knows that the problem can't actually be abolished by law.
00:07:16.140Officially, if you look at the laws in the Netherlands, pot is illegal.
00:07:19.380In practice, there's a coffee shop on every corner in Amsterdam's red light district,
00:07:23.760and as long as they pay their taxes and follow the general larger laws, like not selling to minors,
00:07:29.280there's not a lot of chance that they'll be stormed by the police and arrested and have their business shut down.
00:07:34.640The term salutary neglect is often thought to come from a speech by Edmund Burke at the House of Commons on March 22nd, 1775,
00:07:41.640in which he said that I know that the colonies in general owe little or nothing to any care of
00:07:47.260ours and that they are not squeezed into this happy form by the constraints of watchful and
00:07:51.840suspicious government but that through a wise and salutary neglect a generous nature has been
00:07:57.580suffered to take her own way to perfection when I reflect upon these effects when I see how
00:08:02.480profitable they have been to us I feel all the pride of power sink and all presumption in the
00:08:07.600wisdom of human contrivances melt and die away within me. By which Burke is essentially saying,
00:08:13.180what purpose does government actually serve? The period of salutary neglect had been long
00:08:18.480running in the American colonies, starting in the mid-1600s. For most of the 17th century,
00:08:23.740the British government had no real official policies in place regarding the colonies.
00:08:28.040The companies, merchants, and independent corporations in the colonies pretty much
00:08:31.640handled their own business and acted as an independent government, despite having loyalty
00:08:36.040and financial obligations to Britain. Then in 1651 that changed. Britain began to take an interest
00:08:42.120and pass the Navigation Act. It was one of the first trade regulations to be passed in the
00:08:46.880American colonies. The law required that all goods shipped to and from the American colonies had to
00:08:52.180be carried on English ships in an attempt to keep the colonists from engaging in trade with other
00:08:56.740countries. Here's a quote from the book Wars of the Age of Louis XIV. The Navigation Act's immediate
00:09:02.620object was mundane, to stop the Dutch from carrying fish and other colonial products to
00:09:06.840England, and to compel Italian merchants to ship their raw silk on English rather than Dutch ships.
00:09:12.400Other products targeted by the act were Turkish weaves, Spanish wool, colonial wines,
00:09:16.780and Neapolitan olive oil. Longer term and more fundamentally, the Navigation Act liberated
00:09:22.460internal trade within a previously closed English system, disallowing old royal monopolies and
00:09:27.980exclusive charter companies and eroding patronage systems in favor of freer, but not free, trade and
00:09:33.860a wide commercial sense of national interest. In a very real sense, this was the 17th century
00:09:39.000version of buy local and the performative made in America marketing that we see today.
00:09:44.280However, in practice, the navigation acts were nearly unenforceable and the British government
00:09:48.600rarely put in any effort to enforce them. Let's face it, the East Coast is long and there's a lot
00:09:54.000of ports or places for ships to put in to bring in smuggled goods using smaller boats, and the
00:09:58.900amount of money it would take to actually enforce the laws would dwarf the amount that the British
00:10:03.140stood to make from any trade regulations. There were a few lonely attempts by the British to
00:10:07.740strengthen control over the colonies throughout the years, namely in the 1680s when they revoked
00:10:12.540the Massachusetts Bay Colony's charter as punishment for disobeying British orders, but this attempt
00:10:17.700was highly unpopular and failed badly. When news of the Glorious Revolution in 1689 reached the
00:10:23.920colony's shores, it prompted the colonists to simply overthrow the officials sent by England.
00:10:28.960So, you know, the whole rebellious colonists standing up to Britain over what they viewed
00:10:33.060as unfair retaliation against the Massachusetts Bay Colony isn't actually unique when it happens
00:10:38.700in the 1770s either. Been there, done that. It's just that in the 1770s, it ends up escalating to
00:10:44.940full-blown revolution instead of just the blip of rebellion that happened in the 1680s.
00:10:49.520While it had been in practice for a while, salutary neglect didn't really become the
00:10:53.700officially unofficial, so to speak, policy of British interaction with the colonies until
00:10:58.400Robert Walpole took over as the Lord of the Treasury in 1721. Walpole's main goal was to
00:11:03.980increase taxable wealth in England to help pay off debts occurred during various wars against
00:11:08.280Spain and France. To accomplish his goals, Walpole discouraged any enforcement of trade laws and
00:11:13.580regulations in the colonies, stating, if no restrictions were placed on the colonies,
00:11:17.700they would flourish. Look, I'm not going to say this is the 18th century version of free market
00:11:22.540capitalism, but I'm not not going to say it either. Make of that what you will. Basically, Walpole and
00:11:28.800other sundry British politicians believe that less regulation would end up netting the British
00:11:32.960government a better financial return in the long run. Or if you believe other historians, Walpole
00:11:37.880and his contemporaries were just incredibly bad at their jobs and salutary neglect was an excuse
00:11:42.680for their administrative inefficiency, financial stringency, and political incompetence rather
00:11:47.680than a planned out deliberate economic policy. Whichever of those versions or combination thereof
00:11:52.800you choose to believe, I certainly won't tell you which one is right, mostly because there's
00:11:56.920no way to know. Incompetence is funnier, but that's just my opinion. I will also say that
00:12:02.340incompetence makes what happens when salutary neglect comes to an end make a lot more sense
00:12:07.480though. To make what happens next make more sense, let me put it in an allegory. Imagine you're a
00:12:13.700full-grown adult. You've left the nest, but you generally have a healthy support structure with
00:12:18.000your parent, and you know that you can go to them if you need something. Every now and then, you
00:12:22.320might find yourself with a bad month where you're short on rent or have an emergency cavity filling
00:12:26.860that needs to be paid for, and you go to your parent for a loan. They help you out, and you
00:12:31.260always pay them back. It's just agreed on. They don't have to demand the money. You always pay
00:12:35.920back the loan. Then one day you decide to buy a house. It just makes sense. Rent prices are absurd,
00:12:42.000a mortgage would be much lower. Only you don't have the money for a down payment, so you go to
00:12:46.700your parent for help. They agree to front you the cash. You buy the house and move in and everything
00:12:51.740is fine, except that was a much bigger loan than the previous ones and your parent had to dig deep
00:12:57.400into their retirement fund for it. So they're a bit more aggressive about you paying them back
00:13:01.860than they used to be. They keep coming around, criticizing your spending habits, telling you how
00:13:06.840to live your life, saying you really shouldn't have a pool built until you pay me back, and playing
00:13:11.500that I paid for it so this is my house and you have to follow my rules card. And you keep reminding
00:13:16.720them that you agreed to pay them back on a certain schedule and you haven't missed a single payment
00:13:21.680yet, so they really need to just leave you to it. Only they won't stop coming over and letting
00:13:27.460themselves in to go through your receipts and ask for money so finally you change the locks send
00:13:32.640them an email saying hey this is bad behavior and until you let up i'll pay you but i'll do it my
00:13:38.620way and you need to chill and you block their number only instead of this escalating to your0.98
00:13:44.120mom writing a nasty post on the am i the asshole subreddit it escalates into an all-out revolution0.96
00:13:49.600that's how the end of the french and indian war be see a lot of people will cheekily joke that0.99
00:13:55.380the cause of the Revolutionary War was a bunch of white men who didn't want to pay their taxes.
00:13:59.800And while there's certainly some truth to those jokes in some ways, it really wasn't ever about
00:14:04.800them not wanting to pay their taxes. It was more about them not wanting the relationship between
00:14:09.720the colonies and Britain to change. They would pay their bills. They just wanted to do it their
00:14:14.120own way without what they saw as excessive micromanaging from the British Parliament
00:14:18.300thousands of miles away. We'll get into the complexities of the actual taxation of the
00:14:23.460Stamp Act and Townshend Acts in a later episode. But it's important to understand that the main
00:14:28.340issue wasn't necessarily taxation in and of itself. It was about representation and the
00:14:33.760micromanagement of the economics of the colony after decades of Britain taking a hands-off
00:14:38.340approach. That's not to say that the colonies didn't have a responsibility to pay for the war
00:14:43.100that they kind of started and then needed their parents' help to finish. But arguably the colonists
00:14:48.580never said that they didn't want to pay their taxes. They just didn't want unilateral control
00:14:53.500by parliament to change the way that they'd been running things for a very long time.
00:14:57.840The colonies had grown used to seeing themselves as a peer to Great Britain at this point,
00:15:01.820and they didn't much like being reminded that they were actually essentially a vassal state.
00:15:07.020They just wanted to keep the status quo, or the status quo the way they understood it anyway,
00:15:11.860just the way it had been. Whether it was reasonable to expect that, given how much
00:15:16.360the French and Indian War had cost Great Britain
00:15:18.380is another question entirely, of course.