Politics & Power Quote by Albert Bushnell Hart

1763 lands like a hinge in Hart's sentence: not a year you merely remember, but a mechanism that changes what comes after. Calling it a "new era" is historian shorthand with a prosecutorial edge. It suggests the colonies didn't slowly drift toward rupture; they were shoved into a different system of expectations, surveillance, and extraction. Hart pairs "government" with "trade" to deny readers the comforting myth that the American Revolution was born purely from lofty ideals. Power and money arrive as a single apparatus.

The context is the post-Seven Years' War settlement, when Britain suddenly owned more territory, more debt, and more reasons to tighten control. In government: the Proclamation Line, expanded imperial administration, standing troops, and a sharper insistence that colonial assemblies were subordinate. In trade: renewed enforcement of the Navigation Acts and the beginnings of revenue policy that treated the colonies less like partners and more like a balance-sheet solution. The point isn't that regulation was new; the intensity and intent were. "Came to the colonies" subtly frames imperial policy as an outside force descending on local life, a narrative of intrusion rather than mutual governance.

Hart's subtext is a tidy causality argument: once Britain stopped neglecting the colonies and started managing them, conflict became structural. The elegance of the line is its compression. One date, two domains, and an implied verdict: empire functions when it can look away; it cracks when it finally pays attention.