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Article: Stamp Act
- Article from:
- Dictionary of American History
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STAMP ACT
STAMP ACT.
The formal title of the Stamp Act is seventy words long. Prime Minister George Grenville indicated his intention to impose it in 1763, but it was not enacted until 22 March 1765, to take effect on 1 November. The act's mode of raising taxes was familiar to Britons of the time and was still in limited use at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Colonials understood stamp duties too. For a given document to be legal, a stamp of appropriate value had to be purchased from an official distributor and affixed to the document.
The mode may have been familiar, but the act's avowed purpose of raising revenue directly from colonials by act of Parliament was not. The ...