The Sugar Act made the earlier molasses rules permanent in 1764, eleven years before the American Revolutionary War. Stamp duties and other measures followed as the confrontation developed. One interpretation places the Sugar Act within an accumulation of disputes rather than treating it as a single sufficient cause of the war. On this reading, the thirteen colonies had been growing apart from Britain for roughly a century.
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The Sugar Act in a longer colonial break
The 1764 Sugar Act mattered within a century of growing colonial autonomy and trade evasion.