Explain how debt from the French and Indian War led Britain to impose new taxes on the colonies, and describe colonial objections summarized as "no taxation without representation."
Between 1754 and 1763, Britain and its American colonies fought France and its Native allies for control of North American territory in the French and Indian War, the North American part of a larger global conflict. Britain won, gaining Canada and French land east of the Mississippi River in the Treaty of Paris of 1763, but the war left Britain deeply in debt. That same year, the Proclamation of 1763 forbade colonists from settling west of the Appalachian Mountains, an attempt to reduce costly conflict with Native nations there -- a rule that angered colonists eager for new land.
To help pay off war debt and the cost of stationing British troops in the colonies, Parliament passed new taxes, including the Sugar Act of 1764 and the Stamp Act of 1765, which taxed paper goods and documents and was the first direct tax Parliament had ever placed on the colonies. Colonists argued they had no elected representatives in Parliament, so taxing them without their consent was unjust, a position summarized in the phrase "no taxation without representation." Protest groups like the Sons of Liberty organized boycotts of British goods, and Parliament repealed the Stamp Act in 1766 -- though it passed the Declaratory Act the same year, insisting it still had the right to tax the colonies whenever it chose.
Mastery looks like: They can explain how war debt led to new taxes and state the meaning of "no taxation without representation."
Common stumbles: Thinking colonists objected to all taxes on principle rather than specifically to taxation without representation; confusing the Stamp Act with later events in Boston.