difficult to enforce, however, and for decades, the colonists flourished under a policy that Parliamentarian Edmund Burke would later call "salutary neglect." Even though mercantilist laws were largely winked at, the colonies, especially the sugar colonies of the Caribbean, remained very profitable for British merchants. This arrangement began to change in the mid-eighteenth century, especially after the Seven Years War, known as the French and Indian War in the colonies. A series of laws, beginning with the Sugar Act, sought to impose tighter regulations on colonial trade. The imposition of new taxes like the Stamp Act is best understood as part of this process, which was intended in part to recoup some of the expenses of the war. The colonists claimed that these acts were antithetical to their liberties, touching off an imperial crisis that culminated in the Revolutionary War and American independence.

Mercantilism was the dominant economic theory of the early modern era, one which imagined economics as being a zero sum game. For mercantilists, there was only a finite quantity of wealth and resources, and this left the individual European states competing with one another on economic terms. Thus, one of the staples of economic policy was the pursuit of what was known as a favorable balance of trade: mercantilist economies sought to export in greater quantities than they imported, which would then translate into greater quantities of wealth for themselves.

With this in mind, perhaps it should not be surprising that the age of mercantilism was also the age of colonization. After all, when seen from a mercantilist perspective, colonies represented a powerful avenue for the acquisition of natural resources (or, in some cases, directly mining gold or silver), while also denying those same resources to one's rivals. Thus, these various colonies were expected to serve the economic interests of the mother country, a perspective that, in the case of England, can be seen reflected in the Navigation Acts, which regulated trade in the colonies to ensure it reflected England's own national interest.

In practice, however, despite the existence of these laws, enforcement tended to be lax, on account of the extreme distance separating the colonies from Europe. Smuggling in particular was a very lucrative trade among colonial merchants. However, this situation changed dramatically after the French and Indian War, part of a larger, global conflict which left the British economy under severe strain. Thus, what followed was a change in policy, by which mercantilism became much more stringently implemented. For example, as part of the Sugar Act of 1764, the British government sought to crack down on smuggling by prosecuting accused smugglers not in the colonies but, rather, in the vice admiralty courts. We can see this same far more interventionalist policy in the various taxation acts imposed on the colonies by the British government. This had the effect of sparking outcry among the colonists themselves, leading to the American Revolution.