There are all sorts of reasons, valid and invalid, true or not true, reasonable or unreasonable, that encourage a people to revolt against their governance. When it comes to America, it has been said, and history has written it as such, that the proximate cause of the American Revolution was taxation, as well as also there being trade restrictions, that precluded or limited the colonists from the interactions that they would prefer, so as to thereby compel the colonists to deal exclusively with, for instance, the British East India Company, and therefore the primary beneficiaries of that trade would be the British East India Company, at the expense of not only the consumers of those goods but also those that desired to compete in that sort of trade.
It might seem somewhat ironic that we currently live in a construct in which, there is plenty of taxation, such as the sales tax, property tax, excise tax, local tax, county tax, estate tax, State tax, and Federal income tax, of which, in theory, the citizens of this nation seem satisfied with this taxation, because though some do moan and groan, there isn’t anything even approaching a revolution to upend our current tax codes or governance, which in fairness, seem to be under the auspices of our representatives and its legislation, of which, that tax code does seem to bend and change with the times. So then, one could reasonably ask, what the difference was between now as compared to then.
The reason that so many colonists were upset about the restrictive trade conditions and the taxation being imposed upon them, actually does have to do with the fact that the colonists did not have any direct representation or representatives within the English Parliament. This thus signified that it could be interpreted that as colonists, their right as “Englishmen” to be taxed through their consent had been violated, and instead, replaced by a construct which for all intents and purposes, thus treated those that were colonists, as nothing much more than a people subservient to the British Empire, in which, that British empire to prove that point, sailed the seas with armaments and soldiers to quell the rising spirit of revolution, which would be indicative that the British empire really did see the colonists as being of no more consideration, than if they were classified as a conquered people.
Indeed, while the British Empire had their reasons why they felt it necessary to impose specific trade restrictions as well as taxation upon the colonists, what they did not take into fair account, was that the type of people that would sail the ocean blue, with all those attendant risks, and thereby leave their homeland, are also the type of people that would not appreciate being essentially voiceless and pushed around by a force that they had no representation in. So too, in an era in which communication was exceedingly slow, from continental America to Great Britain, and with the British Empire not appreciating the nuances of the situation, or the stubbornness of the colonists, led to an armed revolt that really did not need to happen, for sensible minds could have come to a sensible accommodation, but instead, because the colonists held the line, and would not budge, it became revolution.