Sugar Act

Examples of Sugar Act in the following topics:

• Navigation Acts

  • The deeply unpopular Molasses Act was the first of the Sugar Acts.
  • This act was set to expire in 1763; instead, it was renewed in 1764 as the Sugar Act.
  • Two prime movers behind the protests against the Sugar Act were Samuel Adams and James Otis,, both of Massachusetts.
  • Overall, however, there was not an immediate high level of protest over the Sugar Act in either New England or the rest of the colonies.
  • The Sugar Act was repealed in 1766 and replaced with the Revenue Act of 1766, which reduced the tax to one penny per gallon on molasses imports, British or foreign.

• The Sugar and Stamp Acts

  • The Sugar and Stamp Acts of 1764 and 1765, intended to raise revenue in Great Britain, led to increased resistance from the colonies.
  • The Sugar Act, also known as the American Revenue Act, was a revenue-raising act passed by the British Parliament of Great Britain in April of 1764.
  • When passed by Parliament, the new Sugar Act of 1764 halved the previous tax on molasses.
  • The Sugar Act was passed during a time of economic depression in the colonies.
  • Define the Sugar Act of 1764 and the Stamp Act of 1765

• Enforcing the Navigation Acts

  • In some instances, British colonists and foreign merchants subverted the Act; for example, in the West Indies, the Dutch kept up a flourishing "smuggling" trade due to the preference of English planters for Dutch goods and the better deal the Dutch offered in the sugar trade.
  • Later revisions of the Act added new regulations.
  • Later laws such as the Molasses Act of 1733 (the first of the Sugar Acts) levied heavy duties on the trade of sugar from the French West Indies to the American colonies, forcing the colonists to buy the more expensive sugar from the British West Indies instead and only added fuel to the growing fire.
  • On the whole, the Navigation Acts were more or less obeyed by colonists, despite their dissatisfaction, until the Molasses and Sugar Acts.
  • Irritation with stricter enforcement under the Sugar Act of 1764 became a greater source of resentment by merchants in the American colonies against Great Britain, contributing to the American Revolution.

• British Taxes and Colonial Grievances

  • The Sugar Act of 1764 reduced the taxes imposed by the Molasses Act, but at the same time strengthened the collection of the tax.
  • It also stipulated that British judges—not juries—would try Sugar Act cases.
  • Following the Quartering Act, Parliament passed one of the most infamous pieces of legislation: the Stamp Act.
  • The act faced vehement opposition throughout the colonies.
  • Parliament repealed the Stamp Act but passed the Declaratory Act in its wake.

• The Stamp Act

  • Opposition to the Stamp Act was not limited to the colonies.
  • The Act was repealed on March 18, 1766 as a matter of expedience, but Parliament affirmed its power to legislate for the colonies "in all cases whatsoever" by also passing the Declaratory Act.
  • Parliament announced in April 1764 when the Sugar Act was passed that they would also consider a stamp tax in the colonies.
  • The Sugar Act was to a large extent a continuation of past legislation related primarily to the regulation of trade.
  • Because of its potential wide application to the colonial economy, the Stamp Act was judged by the colonists to be a more dangerous assault on their rights than the Sugar Act was.

• Taxation Without Representation

  • "No Taxation without Representation" was the rallying cry of the colonists who were forced to pay the stamp, sugar, and tea taxes.
  • In short, many of these colonists believed that as they were not directly represented in the British Parliament, any laws it passed taxing the colonists (such as the Sugar Act and the Stamp Act) were illegal under the English Bill of Rights of 1689, and were a denial of their rights as Englishmen.

• Nonconsumption and the Daughters of Liberty

  • Two colonial movements, the Daughters of Liberty and the nonconsumption agreements, were created in response to British taxation such as the Stamp Act .
  • Proving their commitment to "the cause of liberty and industry" they openly opposed the Tea Act.
  • They experimented to find substitutes for taxed goods such as tea and sugar.
  • They helped end the Stamp Act in 1766.
  • These import duties were birthed from the Intolerable Acts that Britain passed in the wake of the Boston Tea Party the previous year, which protested high taxes against tea and other products.

• The Plantation Economy and the Planter Class

  • Prominent plantation crops included cotton, rubber, sugar cane, tobacco, figs, rice, kapok, sisal, and indigo.
  • Sugar, tea sisal, and palm oil are most suited to plantations.
  • Over the years, tobacco became important to Virginia's economy, even acting as currency at times.
  • Sugar also has a long history as a plantation crop.
  • The juice from the crushing of the cane was then boiled or clarified until it crystallized into sugar.

• Catabolite Activator Protein (CAP): An Activator Regulator

  • Just as the trp operon is negatively regulated by tryptophan molecules, there are proteins that bind to the operator sequences that act as a positive regulator to turn genes on and activate them.
  • For example, when glucose is scarce, E. coli bacteria can turn to other sugar sources for fuel.
  • When cAMP binds to CAP, the complex binds to the promoter region of the genes that are needed to use the alternate sugar sources .
  • When glucose levels fall, E. coli may use other sugars for fuel, but must transcribe new genes to do so.
  • This cAMP binds to the CAP protein, a positive regulator that binds to an operator region upstream of the genes required to use other sugar sources.

• Fermented Foods

  • Fermentation in simple terms is the chemical conversion of sugars into ethanol.
  • Historically, when studying the fermentation of sugar to alcohol by yeast, Louis Pasteur concluded that the fermentation was catalyzed by a vital force, called "ferments," within the yeast cells.
  • "Alcoholic fermentation is an act correlated with the life and organization of the yeast cells, not with the death or putrefaction of the cells," he wrote.