Korva is a scroll of the internet’s best ideas.
Nobody knew revolution was coming
A secession crisis
History is a story of contingencies, and the question is how people make meaning of them. In the early 1770s, running into 1774, certain people turned what had been an imperial crisis into a secession crisis. That is the moment a switch flips and people begin to see events as inevitable.
Linking the acts
It becomes a revolution later, once people are living with chaos, uncertainty, fear, and violence. Before that, the Stamp Act was passed and then repealed, and the colonists went back to wonderful things. Only as more acts were passed did they link them into a chain of events leading toward the break of the empire in two.
Reading history backwards lets anyone invent cause and effect after the fact.
Why did Parliament repeal the Stamp Act?
Parliament passed the Stamp Act in March 1765 to raise revenue for troops stationed in America. Colonists organized boycotts of British goods, and British merchants who lost sales petitioned Parliament for relief. Parliament repealed the act in March 1766. On the same day, it passed the Declaratory Act, which asserted its right to legislate for the colonies in all cases whatsoever.
How did separate acts feel like a chain?
The Townshend Acts of 1767 taxed glass, lead, paint, paper, and tea imported into the colonies. In 1773 the Tea Act led to the Boston Tea Party, and Parliament answered in 1774 with measures that closed Boston's port and restructured Massachusetts's government. Writers such as John Dickinson, in his Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania, argued that each measure belonged to a single pattern. Dickinson's essays ran in newspapers in 1767 and 1768.
Why does hindsight make events look inevitable?
In a 1975 experiment, psychologist Baruch Fischhoff gave people accounts of historical events and told some of them how the events ended. Those who knew the outcome rated it as having been more likely than people who did not, and they believed they would have predicted it. He called the effect hindsight bias. Fischhoff published the study in 1975 in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance.
More from Joys of Compounding
