ABSTRACT
This Protest against the Bill to Repeal the American Stamp Act was written anonymously and published in Paris. But its signatories are all famous political figures, some of them heavily involved in imperial administration. The Protest is similar in form to Charles Jenkinson’s ‘Notes on the Right to Tax the Colonies’ (1765). The writing is more suitable for publication, but it is a brief iteration of arguments for parliamentary sovereignty and taxation. Its lack of analytic elaboration suggests how far arguments over these issues had come in a very short time and how familiar they had become. The first argument is that to repeal the Stamp Act ‘would in effect, surrender Parliament’s antient, unalienable rights of supreme jurisdiction, and give them exclusively to the subordinate Provincial Legislatures established by prerogative. Second, the act ‘was passed in the other House with very little opposition, and in this without one dissentient voice’.
