[ilbegone]

After reading a number of books concerning colonial America and period English history (including the contemporary and difficult to read - for me - Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith) I become increasingly convinced that the Revolutionary war was as much about money as it was about English notions of personal liberty being asserted in the colonies (the American Bill of Rights seems to be a partial restatement of the 1689 English bill of rights http://www.constitution.org/bor/eng_bor.htm)

King George III had a professional army built up from the French wars he wanted to keep, yet it was not his right to keep a standing army in England in time of peace. So, much of it wound up originally in the western parts of the colonies. George needed to pay his soldiers (Stamp Act of 1765) as well as recoup the expense of the American part of the Franco / British 7 years war (known in America as the French and Indian war). Thus the various successive and progressively harsh tax schemes and increasingly punitive collection measures which so enraged the American colonists.

George Washington was a tobacco farmer and land speculator. The British mercantile monopoly on colonial trade squeezed tobacco farmers to sell low then saddled them with high interest rate loans. The Crown desired that colonization move towards Canada and Florida rather than west, which was the direction preferred by the rowdy, late arriving border peoples (Sots-Irish) from northern Ireland, southern Scotland and northern England. So, the British soldiers were originally stationed west of the Appalachian ridge in a futile attempt to stem the western tide. The Scots - Irish tended to squat wherever they pleased in the west (and return after being burned out by British soldiers or Indians) and British policy frustrated seaboard based land speculation.

The various import taxes (such as the molasses and sugar acts) combined with British trade monopoly led to smuggling. John Hancock, the man who signed his name so large on the Declaration of Independence so that King George wouldn't have to wear glasses to read the signature, was a smuggler who had at least one warrant out for his arrest. One British response to colonial smuggling was the infamous use of Writs of Assistance, which were perpetual, blanket search warrants which allowed British investigators to rifle and sift through whole neighborhoods and towns in order to find either contraband or evidence of smuggling via written records. Hence the 4th amendment concerning unreasonable search and seizure.

And, since no American court would convict a smuggler, the British began packing up suspects to be tried in England, therefore the American right trial in front of a jury of one's peers.

The list goes on and on.

The Mexican War of Independence was set off by the inept revolutionary priest Miguel Hidalgo, who read books banned by the Inquisition and was incensed by the Spanish authority which uprooted his olive trees, grape vines, and mulberry trees (leaves to feed silk worms). Spanish monopoly insisted that the Spanish colonies buy high priced olive oil, wine, and silk from the Royal monopoly on trade.

I'm not sure, but I think the French Revolution originally had to do with peasants being excessively taxed to refill a treasury depleted by a number of wars with England. The unrest was usurped by and turned into The Terror of the French Revolution by Robespierre and his henchmen, who eventually succumbed to the guillotine themselves. The Revolution eventually became the immensely destructive Napoleonic wars.

What sort of unrest did Lenin exploit in Czarist Russia? Did it originally have to do with economic grievances rather than Marxist dogma? I'll eventually check it out...