"Tax Rates in Colonial America - 1700's?" Topic

I would like to know the tax rates on products being imported into Colonial America during the first 20 years of the 1700's.

Any ideas?

Was there a flat tax rate on all products, or did it vary by commodity?

Just curious about the amounts being charged, since apparently a lot of people and merchants were eager to buy from pirates at discounted rates. Reportedly, that was due to their ability to undercut/eliminate the rates being charged for taxes.

I'd like to know roughly how much the pirates were able to discount goods taken on the high seas, and/or from other merchants. Supposedly, the discount was considerable – obviously it is fairly easy to discount heavily on items taken, instead of being paid for, but I'd like a rough idea of what they were charging for products, e.g. 25%, 50%, (more/less), etc. of the standard price, including the taxes to be paid for honest trade.

Thoughts?

It varied. Most taxes were around 1-3%, I think. Fred Anderson goes over a lot of the details of this sort of thing in his Crucible of War. I don't have my copy here in Indy with me.

Taxes were set by category or item. The most famous example is the sugar tax (which really taxed molasses). Not everything was taxed, IIRC, but many necessaries were. The molasses was taxed at about 12-14% (3 p./gallon – seems to my dusty mind that it ran about 25 p./gallon) – other things more, other things less.

The real problem came not from the taxes, though evading duties was something like a national passtime in Britain and her colonies, but from the North Government's insistence that they be paid in specie, and British specie at that. The politicians in London just could never get their heads adjusted to the fact that hard money was uncommon in America, and that most of what was available was Spanish, French, or Dutch. Pitt seems to have been a rare exception.

A good place to find such data, by the way is "The British Empire before the american Revolution" by Gipson.

All of them are Intolerable Acts.

The average colonist paid much less tax than a citizen living in Britain.