Victory in the Seven Year’s War made Britain the master of a vastly enlarged imperial domain in North America, but victory was painfully costly. The London government therefore struggled after 1763 to compel the American colonists to shoulder some of the financial costs of empire. This change in British colonial policy reinforced an emerging sense of American political identity and helped to precipitate the American Revolution. The truth is that Americans were reluctant revolutionaries. Until late in the day, they thought only to claim their rights, not to separate from the country that started it all. In hindsight, America was a revolutionary force from the day of its discovery by Europeans. The New World opened new ideas about the nature of society, citizen, and government. Two ideas had been planted into the minds of the American colonists by the mid-eighteenth century: one was called republicanism. Republicanism is a…show more content… For more than a decade before the outbreak of the American Revolution in 1775, tensions had been building between colonists and the British authorities. Attempts by the British government to raise revenue by taxing the colonies: notably the Stamp Act of 1765, the Townshend Tariffs of 1767 and the Tea Act of 1773, met with heated protest among many colonists, who resented their lack of representation in Parliament and demanded the same rights as other British subjects. Colonial resistance led to violence in 1770, when British soldiers opened fire on a mob of colonists, killing five men in what was known as the Boston Massacre. After December 1773, when a band of Bostonians dressed as Mohawk Indians boarded British ships and dumped 342 chests of tea into Boston Harbor, an outraged Parliament passed a series of measures, known as the Intolerable, or Coercive Acts, designed to reassert imperial authority in