colonial ventures, Americans grasped the significance of govern-
ment participation in their economic life. So long as the role of
government was one of aiding and abetting the business life of the
colonists, Americans were loyal subjects. If, on the one hand, the
government demanded that essentially all goods bound for England
or the colonies must travel in the ships of the mother country or
the colonies, the Americans shared in the prosperous monopoly in
shipping. If, on the other hand, the government ordered a tariff on
French molasses bound for America, making that product more
expensive than the otherwise more costly British product, the
American colonists simply smuggled in the cheaper French good.
Until 1763 American colonists enjoyed the benefits of British gov-
ernment participation in the American economy, and avoided gov-
ernment intervention that increased costs.

Prior to 1763 the British government was generally too involved
with French competition in the New World to enforce mercantilistic
legislation. Minimal enforcement of the laws provided a fillip to
American prosperity. Americans observed those laws they found
profitable. American shippers took advantage of the monopoly on
shipping, and indigo planters collected the bounty paid by the Crown
for that crop. Those laws costly to the colonials were evaded when
possible. By 1763 evasion of such legislation was institutionalized
in the colonies.

In the 1660s the British-Americans overwhelmed the Dutch in
America. The commercial sector of the British-American colonies
especially prospered from absorbing Dutch holdings. A century
later the 1760s brought an end to French holdings in North Amer-
ica. Again British-American business interests expected to benefit
financially from the change. Before the 1860s and the triumph of
American business again, this time over the agrarian culture of the
Southern United States, a revolution severed the political ties be-
tween Americans of the thirteen colonies and the British Crown.

So long as mercantilistic policies worked to the benefit of Amer-
ican business enterprise and government intervention was ineffec-
tive, the British subjects in America remained loyal. After 1763,
the more effective implementation of mercantilistic policies en-
couraged Americans to regard the cutting of ties with England as
a necessity for continued American prosperity. The colonies had
matured beyond mercantilism. They had developed into an eco-

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