These laws certainly created a certain amount of economic hardship in the colonies, but was it rally enough to cause loyal Englishmen to turn against their king and country? The cause of their discontent was actually more political. They had come to question the very nature of political relationship between Britain and its colonies. But what influenced them to think this way?
Many educated people living in the colonies had studied the ideas of the Enlightenment which was an intellectual movement int he 17th and 18th centuries which challenged many beliefs existing in Europe at that time. Enlightened thinkers believed in questioning everything in existence and then using logic, reason, and rational thought to discover the natural laws which would provide the true answers to all their questions. part of he Enlightenment was a revolution in science where men like Newton and Galileo came up with new theories to explain the physical world and tested them using them the scientific theories.