The Stamp Act and the Political Origins of American Legal and Economic Institutions
THE STAMP ACT AND THE POLITICAL ORIGINS OF AMERICAN LEGAL AND ECONOMIC INSTITUTIONS JUSTIN DuRIVAGE & CLAIRE PRIEST* The American colonialprotest againstParliament's Stamp Act was a landmark event in the history of the Founding Era, propelling the colonies toward independence. To date, scholars have focused on colonists' constitutional objections to the Stamp Act. Yet, the Stamp Act taxed legal and institutional services and, as this Article describes, the opposition to the Stamp Act also focused on defending low-cost institutions that served local communities. It examines the arguments for and against the Stamp Act as revealing two distinct visions of the role for institutions in economic growth. It suggests that American independence affirmed colonists' commitment to low-cost locally managed institutions within their developing economy. INTRODUCTION The British Parliament's enactment of the Stamp Act of 1765 is widely acknowledged as a starting point for the acceleration of tensions that led to the Declaration of Independence in 1776.1 In the dominant * Acting Assistant Professor, Stanford University, Department of History and Simeon E. Baldwin Professor, Yale Law School. We appreciate the comments of Owen Fiss, Daniel Klerman, Naomi Lamoreaux, James Livesey, Daniel Markovits, Nicholas Parrillo, Steven Pincus, and Carol Rose. We thank the participants in Yale's Center for Historical Enquiry and the Social Sciences; SELA (Seminario en Latinoamdrica de Teoria Constitucional y Politica), in Lima, Peru, and the participants at the Yale University, Mellon Foundation, Dundee University, and Scottish Centre for Global History conference on Finance, Communication and Coordination in Eighteenth-Century Empires. 1. See, e.g., BRENDAN MCCONVILLE, THE KING'S THREE FACES: THE RISE & FALL OF ROYAL AMERICA, 1688-1776, at 249 (2006); EDMUND S.
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