Parliament passes the Currency Act in 1764…

The Russians spend about two and a half million rubles supporting Poniatowski's election, his supporters and opponents engage in some military posturing and even minor clashes, and in the end, the Russian army is deployed only a few miles from the election sejm, which meets at Wola near Warsaw.

In the end, there are no other serious contenders, and during the convocation sejm on September 7, 1764, the thirty-two-year-old Poniatowski is elected king, with 5,584 votes.

He swears the pacta conventa on November 13, and the formal coronation takes place in Warsaw on November 25.

The new King's uncles in the Familia would have preferred another nephew on the throne, Prince Adam Kazimierz Czartoryski, characterized by one of his contemporaries as débauché, sinon dévoyé (debauched if not depraved), but Czartoryski had declined to seek the office.

Cesare Beccaria publishes a brief but celebrated treatise On Crimes and Punishments in 1764, with the encouragement of Pietro Verri.

Some background information had been provided by Pietro, who is in the process of authoring a text on the history of torture, and Alessandro Verri is an official at a Milan prison who has firsthand experience of the prison's appalling conditions.

In this essay, Beccaria reflects the convictions of his friends in the Il Caffè (Coffee House) group, who seek to cause reform through Enlightenment discourse.

Beccaria's treatise marks the high point of the Milan Enlightenment.

In it, Beccaria puts forth some of the first modern arguments against the death penalty.

His treatise is also the first full work of penology, advocating reform of the criminal law system.

The book is the first full-scale work to tackle criminal reform and to suggest that criminal justice should conform to rational principles.

It is a less theoretical work than the writings of Hugo Grotius, Samuel von Pufendorf and other comparable thinkers, and as much a work of advocacy as of theory.

The brief work relentlessly protests against torture to obtain confessions, secret accusations, the arbitrary discretionary power of judges, the inconsistency and inequality of sentencing, using personal connections to get a lighter sentence, and the use of capital punishment for serious and even minor offenses.

Beccaria was born in Milan on March 15, 1738, to the Marchese Gian Beccaria Bonesana, an aristocrat of moderate well-being from the Austrian Habsburg Empire.

Beccaria had received his early education in the Jesuit college at Parma.

Subsequently, he graduated in law from the University of Pavia in 1758.

At first he showed a great aptitude for mathematics, but studying Montesquieu (1689–1755) had redirected his attention towards economics.

In 1762 his first publication, a tract on the disorder of the currency in the Milanese states, included a proposal for its remedy.

In his mid-twenties, Beccaria has become close friends with Pietro and Alessandro Verri, two brothers who with a number of other young men from the Milan aristocracy, form a literary society named "L'Accademia dei pugni" (the Academy of Fists), a playful name that makes fun of the stuffy academies that proliferate in Italy and also hints that relaxed conversations that took place in there sometimes end in affrays.

Much of its discussion focuses on reforming the criminal justice system.

Through this group Beccaria has become acquainted with French and British political philosophers, such as Hobbes, Diderot, Helvétius, Montesquieu, and Hume.

He is particularly influenced by Helvétius.

The Jesuit colleges had been closed on April 1, 1763, and by a further arrêt of March 9, 1764, the Jesuits are required to renounce their vows under pain of banishment.

At the end of November 1764, the king signs an edict dissolving the Society throughout his dominions, for they are still protected by some provincial parlements, as in Franche-Comté, Alsace, and Artois.

In the draft of the edict, he cancels numerous clauses that imply that the Society is guilty, and writing to Choiseul he concludes: "If I adopt the advice of others for the peace of my realm, you must make the changes I propose, or I will do nothing. I say no more, lest I should say too much."

Voltaire's "Philosophical Dictionary" is published in 1764; he begins a prodigious attack on the dogmas of church and state.

Parliament had announced in April 1764 when the Sugar Act was passed that they will also consider a stamp tax in the colonies.

Opposition from the colonies is soon forthcoming to this possible tax, but neither members of Parliament nor American agents in Great Britain (such as Benjamin Franklin) anticipate  the intensity of the protest that the tax will generate.

Stamp acts had been a very successful method of taxation within Great Britain; they have generated over £100,000 in tax revenue with very little in collection expenses.

By requiring an official stamp on most legal documents, the system is almost self-regulating; a document would be null and void under British law without the required stamp.

Imposition of such a tax on the colonies had been considered twice before the Seven Years' War and once again in 1761.

Grenville had actually been presented with drafts of colonial stamp acts in September and October 1763, but the proposals lacked the specific knowledge of colonial affairs to adequately describe the documents subject to the stamp.

At the time of the passage of the Sugar Act in April 1764, Grenville had made it clear that the right to tax the colonies was not in question, and that additional taxes might follow, including a stamp tax.

The Glorious Revolution had established the principle of parliamentary supremacy.

Control of colonial trade and manufactures had extended this principle across the ocean.

This belief has never been tested on the issue of colonial taxation, but the British assume that the interests of the thirteen colonies are so disparate that a joint colonial action is unlikely to occur against such a tax—an assumption that haa its genesis in the failure of the Albany Conference in 1754.

By the end of December 1764, the first warnings of serious colonial opposition are provided by pamphlets and petitions from the colonies protesting both the Sugar Act and the proposed stamp tax

Grenville faces the problem of not only paying for these troops but servicing the national debt.

The debt had grown from £75,000,000 before the Seven Years' War to £122,600,000 in January 1763, and almost £130,000,000 by the beginning of 1764.

George Grenville does not expect the colonies to contribute to the interest or the retirement of the debt, but he does expect the Americans to pay a portion of the expenses for colonial defense.

Estimating the expenses of maintaining an army in the Continental colonies and the West Indies to be approximately £200,000 annually, Grenville has devised a revenue-raising program that will raise an estimated £79,000 per year.

The first tax in his program to raise a revenue in America, a modification of the Molasses Act of 1733, is the Sugar Act, also known as the American Revenue Act or the American Duties Act, passed by the Parliament of Great Britain on April 5, 1764.

The preamble to the act states: "it is expedient that new provisions and regulations should be established for improving the revenue of this Kingdom ... and ... it is just and necessary that a revenue should be raised ... for defraying the expenses of defending, protecting, and securing the same."

The earlier Molasses Act of 1733, which had imposed a tax of six pence per gallon (equal to £3.74 today) of molasses, had never been effectively collected due to colonial evasion.

The Molasses Act of 1733 had been passed by Parliament largely at the insistence of large plantation owners in the British West Indies.

Molasses from French, Dutch, and Spanish West Indian possessions is inexpensive.

Sugar (from the British West Indies) is priced much higher than its competitors and they also have no need for the large quantities of lumber, fish, and other items offered by the colonies in exchange.

In the first part of the eighteenth Century, the British West Indies had been Great Britain's most important trading partner, so Parliament was attentive to their requests.

However, rather than acceding to the demands to prohibit the colonies from trading with the non-British islands, Parliament had passed the prohibitively high tax on the colonies on molasses imported from those islands.

If actually collected, the tax would have effectively closed that source to New England and destroyed much of the rum industry.

The purpose of the Molasses Act was not actually to raise revenue, but instead to make foreign molasses so expensive that it effectively gave a monopoly to molasses imported from the British West Indies.

It did not work; colonial merchants avoided the tax by smuggling or, more often, bribing customs officials.

The Sugar Act reduces the tax to 3 pence per gallon (equal to £1.60 today) in the hope that the lower rate will increase compliance and thus increase the amount of tax collected

The Act also taxes additional imports and includes measures to make the customs service more effective.

These incidents increase the colonists' concerns about the intent of the British Parliament and help the growing movement that will become the American Revolution.

New York had reported in November 1753 that New Hampshire governor Benning Wentworth had continued to grant land in the disputed area between the Connecticut River and Lake Champlain.

Grants had ceased briefly in 1754, because of the French and Indian War, but in 1755 and 1757, Wentworth had had a survey made sixty miles (ninety-seven kilometers) up the Connecticut River, and one hundred and eight grants have been made, extending to the line twenty miles (thirty-two kilometers) east of the Hudson, and north to the eastern shore of Lake Champlain.

While Wentworth's land sales are underway in the disputed territory, New York also issues land patents in the same area.

However, in contrast to the New Hampshire grants, the New York patents are generally irregularly shaped and issued to wealthy landowners.

The New Hampshire grants are "town-sized," and generally settled by middle-class farmers.

Most of the New York boundaries will be ignored in favor of the New Hampshire boundaries and designations once Vermont achieves statehood, and some of these New York patents are now referred to as paper towns because they existed only on paper.

New York had caught New Hampshire surveyors working on the east side of Champlain in September 1762,  provoking the colonial government to reiterate its claim to the area, citing both its own patent and the New Hampshire letters patent of 1741.

Wentworth had released a statement in March 1764, to the effect that the resolution of jurisdictional dispute required a royal verdict, which he was certain would be made in his favor. Meanwhile, he has encouraged his grantees to settle in the land and to cultivate and develop it.

New York had appealed to the Board of Trade, requesting a confirmation of their original grant, which finally resolved the border dispute between New York and New Hampshire in favor of New York.

The royal order of July 26, 1764, affirms that "the Western bank of the Connecticut, from where it enters the province of Massachusetts Bay as far north as the 45th degree of northern latitude, to be the boundary line between the said two provinces of New Hampshire and New York."

Wentworth issued his final two grants on October 17 of this year: Walker and Waltham.

The Sugar Act, passed by Parliament on April 5, 1764, arrives in the colonies at a time of economic depression.

It is an indirect tax, although the colonists are well informed of its presence.

A good part of the reason is that a significant portion of the colonial economy during the Seven Years' War is involved with supplying food and supplies to the British Army.

Colonials, however, especially those affected directly as merchants and shippers, assume that the highly visible new tax program is the major culprit.

As protests against the Sugar Act develop, it is the economic impact rather than the constitutional issue of taxation without representation that is the main focus for the colonists.

New England ports especially suffer economic losses from the Sugar Act as the stricter enforcement makes smuggling molasses more dangerous and risky.

Also they argue that the profit margin on rum is too small to support any tax on molasses.

Forced to increase their prices, many colonists fear being priced out of the market.

The British West Indies, on the other hand, now have undivided access to colonial exports.

With supply of molasses well exceeding demand, the islands prosper with their reduced expenses while New England ports see revenue from their rum exports decrease.

Also, the West Indies have been the primary colonial source for hard currency, or specie, and as the reserves of specie are depleted the soundness of colonial currency is threatened.

Two prime movers behind the protests against the Sugar Act are Samuel Adams and James Otis, both of Massachusetts.

In May, Samuel Adams draftss a report on the Sugar Act for the Massachusetts assembly, in which he denounces the act as an infringement of the rights of the colonists as British subjects:

    For if our Trade may be taxed why not our Lands? Why not the Produce of our Lands & every thing we possess or make use of? This we apprehend annihilates our Charter Right to govern & tax ourselves – It strikes our British Privileges, which as we have never forfeited them, we hold in common with our Fellow Subjects who are Natives of Britain: If Taxes are laid upon us in any shape without our having a legal Representation where they are laid, are we not reduced from the Character of free Subjects to the miserable State of tributary Slaves?

In August, fifty Boston merchants agree to stop purchasing British luxury imports, and in both Boston and New York City there are movements to increase colonial manufacturing.

There are sporadic outbreaks of violence, most notably in Rhode Island.

Overall, however, there is not an immediate high level of protest over the Sugar Act in either New England or the rest of the colonies.

That will begin in the later part of the next year when the Stamp Act is passed.

To understand New Hampshire's controversy with New York Province, a contest for the same land area in what will become the state of Vermont, it is necessary to remember that Governor Wentworth's charters provide for ownership in fee simple.

New York still operates on a quasi-feudal system (perhaps borrowing from the Dutch patroon system), awarding enormous tracts of land to political favorites, who see no need to provide for schools or allow self-government by settlers.

As a result, your yeoman farmer, who assumes his New Hampshire deed is valid, becomes a tenant farmer overnight.

New York, waiting until one hundred and twenty-eight towns in the New Hampshire Grants have come under cultivation, moves in and claims them all on the strength of an ill-defined hundred-year-old grant to the Duke of York (the future James II) by his brother Charles II, imposing entire new grants on top of the Wentworth grants, and requiring landowners to repurchase their deeds at exorbitant fees from New York Province.

A furor results, and even when the Crown imposes a moratorium in 1764 of all chartering and Governor Wentworth stops, New York continues with the practice, to the disgust and outrage of Ethan Allen, among others.

American colonists initially object to the Sugar Act for economic reasons, but before long they recognize that there are constitutional issues involved.

The British Constitution guarantees that British subjects cannot be taxed without their consent, which comes in the form of representation in Parliament.

The colonists elect no members of Parliament, and so it is seen as a violation of the British Constitution for Parliament to tax them.

There is little time to raise this issue in response to the Sugar Act, but it will come to be a major objection to the Stamp Act the following year.