SUGAR ACTS

SUGAR ACTS were parliamentary measures designed to increase Great Britain's profits from the lucrative West Indian and North American sugar trade. Throughout the American colonial period the British Empire depended on the West Indies for sugar. Wealthy sugar planters who resided in England used their political influence to bring about enactment of the MOLASSES ACT (1733), which secured their monopoly by subjecting foreign molasses imported into any British colony to a duty of six pence per gallon. This law proved ineffective, however, in the absence of systematic measures to enforce it.

In 1764 George Grenville, chancellor of the Exchequer, enacted a new sugar act, which he intended to end the smuggling trade in foreign molasses and at the same time secure revenue. The act lowered the duty on foreign molasses from six to three pence a gallon, raised the duties on foreign refined sugar, and increased the export bounty on British refined sugar bound for the colonies. These measures gave the British sugar planters an effective monopoly of the American sugar market. Smuggling of foreign sugar became unprofitable, as did the old illicit trade in foreign molasses. These changes sparked violent protests at first. Two years later, Parliament lowered the duty to one penny a gallon, applied alike to foreign and British imports, and the protests on the molasses duty ended. At this lower rate, molasses yielded an average of £12,194 annually from 1767 to 1775.

Other phases of the Sugar Act of 1764 were far more irritating to the colonists than was the lowered duty on molasses. One was a new duty on wine imported from Madeira, which had previously come in duty free and was the main source of profit for the fish and food ships returning from the Mediterranean. This part of the Sugar Act led to few direct protests, but it did produce some spectacular attempts at evasion, such as the wine-running episode in Boston involving a ship belonging to Capt. Daniel Malcolm, in February 1768. Even more provocative were measures imposing new bonding regulations that compelled ship masters to give bond, even when they loaded their vessels with nonenumerated goods. The most controversial of these features was a provision that shipmasters had to give bond before they put any article, enumerated or nonenumerated, on board. The universal American practice, however, was to load first and then clear and give bond, which made it difficult for shipmasters to give a new bond at a customhouse before he brought every new consignment on board. Under the Sugar Act, any ship caught with any article on board before a bond covering that article had been given was subject to seizure and confiscation. The customs commissioners profited greatly from this provision. The most notorious seizures for technical violations of the bonding provision included John Hancock's sloop Liberty (10 June 1768) and the Ann belonging to Henry Laurens of South Carolina.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Andrews, K. R., et al. The Westward Enterprise: English Activities in Ireland, the Atlantic, and America, 1480–1650. Detroit, Mich.: Wayne State University Press, 1979.

McCusker, John J., and Russell R. Menard. The Economy of British America, 1607–1789. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985.