by Sally Morem

Created on: August 23, 2009

There were several important events that triggered the American Revolution: Great Britain's victory over France ending the French and Indian War, for one, soon followed by London's insistence that the colonists help pay for the war through new taxes, for another. But, by far the most important cause of the American move towards independence was the abysmal ignorance of America exhibited by King and Parliament during subsequent years.

While working on his masterpiece, "A History of the American People," historian Paul Johnson dug into the London archives and discovered the juicy story of how London agents, including Ben Franklin, acting on the behalf of several American colonies, deliberately and systematically misled Parliament about how rapidly America was growing as an economic power. They took special pains to make sure London had no idea how widespread American violations of British mercantile policies really were.

18th century European leaders were not known for their mastery of the science of statistics. As a result, Franklin and those other agents found it easy to bamboozle the country gentlemen who dominated Parliament at the time. The British had absolutely no idea what the population of their American colonies was, nor how rapidly the population was growing (they had grown a stunning 500% from 1700 to 1750 through immigration and natural increase).

Worse yet from the British viewpoint, they couldn't even conceive of the shockingly high number and variety of goods Americans were producing (already 2/5 of the number of goods their British cousins were producing in 1775, making them per capita the most productive people on Earth, a lead Americans have never relinquished since), or how wealthy they were becoming, as individuals and in aggregate. The almost pure market capitalist systems Americans were operating under and the complete lack of trade restrictions between Americans offered nothing but incentives for hardworking, inventive people to produce more, more, and yet more.

Historian David McCullough described in his book, "1776," how astonished British officers were when ransacking ordinary American farmsteads during battle in New York when they discovered how wealthy those supposedly lowly colonial farmers really were.

As a direct result of this ignorance, British leaders believed they had the power to bend what they perceived as weak and poor colonial subjects to their own whims with a show of force. In short, the British

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