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The Navigation Acts (1651, 1660) were acts of Parliament intended to promote the self-sufficiency of the British Empire by restricting colonial trade to England and decreasing dependence on foreign imported goods.
In 1651, the British Parliament, in the first of what became known as the Navigation Acts, declared that only English ships would be allowed to bring goods into England, and that the North American colonies could only export its commodities, such as tobacco and sugar, to England.
In October of 1651, the English Parliament passed its Navigation Acts of 1651. These acts were designed to tighten the government’s control over trade between England, its colonies, and the rest of the world. England’s American colonies could only export their goods in English ships.
Parliament passed the Sugar Act on April 5, 1764. The proper name of the Sugar Act is The American Revenue Act of 1764. The focus of the Sugar Act was to discourage colonial merchants and manufacturers from smuggling non-British goods to avoid taxes imposed by Parliament.
Regulate the trade by effectively closing the legal trade to non-British suppliers. The Act was designed to stop trade between New England and the Middle colonies with French, Dutch, and Spanish in the West Indies. Provide for the seizure of cargoes violating the new rules.
The Sugar Act was designed to regulate commerce and trade especially in the New England region. The Stamp Act was the first direct tax on domestically produced and consumed items. It was unrelated to trade and it affected every single colonist across the Southern colonies, Middle colonies and the New England colonies.
The Stamp Act was despised even more than the Sugar Act that had preceded it, and this caused even more rebellion in the colonies. He mentioned that the taxes that the colonists hated so much were the internal taxes, and that is exactly what the Sugar Act and the Stamp Act were.
The King and Parliament believed they had the right to tax the colonies. Many colonists felt that they should not pay these taxes, because they were passed in England by Parliament, not by their own colonial governments. They protested, saying that these taxes violated their rights as British citizens.
Why did the Sugar Act and the Stamp Act draw fierce opposition from colonists? They argued that they were not being represented in Parliament and therefore could not be taxed. American colonists rejected the theory of virtual representation, arguing that only direct representatives had the right to tax the colonists.