Boston served as Britain’s regional administrative center, managing tensions between Indigenous nations, frontier outposts, and other colonists as imperial control expanded to Canada and the Appalachians.
In the early days of colonial settlement, New Englanders oriented themselves along the coast towards the rich fisheries of the Gulf of Maine. By the eighteenth century, they gradually pushed inland into the forests and hills stretching from Massachusetts towards the St. Lawrence River and Great Lakes.
British officials in Boston faced numerous conflicts while managing this corner of the empire, notably between the Mi’kmaq peoples, British outposts, and French settlers in Acadia, the region which today stretches from Maine into Nova Scotia and maritime Canada. Soldiers and sailors from New England were heavily involved in these imperial campaigns.
War was a costly enterprise, and the British Parliament soon imposed the Sugar Act (1764) and Stamp Act (1765) on the North American colonies to fund frontier troops and pay off debt. Many Bostonians vehemently opposed these taxes, angry over their lack of political representation in London, and bristling at the government’s increased supervision of the New England economy.
Boston’s geography made it different from other colonial cities. Because Boston was surrounded by water and highly dependent on maritime trade, new tax policies disproportionately impacted Bostonians.
In 1772, the people of Boston and Salem alone paid 34% of all the Sugar Act tax revenue collected from the 13 colonies. Paying ⅓ of the colonial tax load, Bostonians felt unfairly targeted by policies that threatened their livelihoods and everyday lives.