ABSTRACT
Between 1770, when Lord North became premier minister, and 1774, when the crisis in America began to move towards civil war, Britain appeared to have reattained a Pelhamite order of stability. Lord North could deploy throughout the 1770s, after as well as before his crushing success in the General Election of 1774, on the first occasion his administration faced the electorate, the Opposition's squabbles may seem more like a symptom than a cause of their impotence. The roots of the most profound political change about to occur, the rebirth of 'party' in an enduring, ideological form, lay in the 1760s. The American Revolution catalysed and gave direction to a process that was already underway. When America became a major issue in British politics in the 1760s, and especially after the colonists forced the withdrawal of the Stamp Act by economic boycotts and riots, a basic conflict of interests had developed over the extent of imperial authority and colonial autonomy.
