Taxation with and without Representation: Malt Tax Riots in Scotland, Stamp Riots in North America, and the Prospects and Problems of Incorporating Union

Abstract: In 1774, as Parliament debated "Intolerable Acts" designed to punish the town of Boston for the Boston Tea Party, an American sympathizer remarked that government had never before imposed collective punishment on a whole community rather than on individual actors, as it was now doing in Britain's colonial dependencies. In fact that was incorrect, government replied, pointing to the aggressive use of force against Glasgow following the Malt Tax Riot in 1725 and Edinburgh after the Porteous Riots the following decade. All of those violent actions were responses by provincial sectors of Britain to seemingly arbitrary quests for revenue by the British Parliament. For all, the foremost problem seemed how to preclude arbitrary taxation by a parliament in which their voices were barely heard. Those efforts derived from the 1707 Anglo-Scottish union, which merged the kingdoms and parliaments of those two nations. While many Scots had preferred a loose confederal union, that did not fit England's plans. Instead, they negotiated an "incorporating union", one that joined the principal governing structures of Crown and Parliament, but safe-guarded such Scottish institutions as Kirk, burghs, universities, and the law through explicit limitations in the Acts of Union. Those included limits on the taxing power of Parliament over Scotland. While Scots complained, rightly, that they paid higher taxes after union than before, the English complained in turn that the rates Scots paid were still significantly lower than those collected south of the border. From the time of the Stamp Act, Americans returned to the question of how to protect themselves from a limitless taxing power. Incorporation constituted an important background to that discussion, broached by such figures as James Otis, Benjamin Franklin, Adam Smith, and others. At independence, Americans also would opt for confederal union, but by 1788, dissatisfied leaders such James Madison and the "Federalists" replace it confederation with what was, in effect, an incorporating union.