Reflections on Economic Interpretation, Slavery, the People Out of Doors, and Top Down versus Bottom Up

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OUR essay invites colleagues to revisit economic interpretation of the colonial protest movement and the decision for American independence. More specifically, we propose that “the American Revolution was a struggle for economic independence from the British Navigation Acts and other economic restrictions.”1 We also maintain that leaders’ public reticence about the economic dimensions of their struggle and about the important issue of slavery represented two sides of the same coin.