The Answer at Large to Mr. Ptt's Speech
- Anonymous Pamphleteer 1766 (author)
- Jack P. Greene (collection editor)
This essay is an anonymous British pamphlet written as a direct rebuttal to William Pitt the Elder’s celebrated speech in the House of Commons in January 1766, in which Pitt famously praised the American colonies for resisting the Stamp Act and argued that Parliament had no constitutional right to impose direct taxes on them without their consent. The anonymous author takes the opposing position, defending Parliament’s sovereign and unlimited legislative authority over all British territories, including the American colonies.
Central to the pamphlet is a challenge to Pitt’s much-debated distinction between “internal” taxation (such as the Stamp Act) and “external” trade regulations — a distinction Pitt used to deny Parliament’s taxing power while affirming its commercial authority. The author dismisses this distinction as constitutionally unfounded, insisting that Parliament’s supremacy admits of no such division. Published during the heated Stamp Act crisis, the pamphlet forms part of the wider transatlantic pamphlet debate about colonial rights, parliamentary sovereignty, and the constitutional bonds of the British Empire.
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The text of these 18th century pamphlets has been converted by machine from scanned PDFs of the original microfilm copies. While the text has been machine-proofed, transcription errors may still remain. For example, the 18th-century long S, ſ , may be rendered as “f,” some words may be incorrectly transcribed, and there may be repeated words or phrases.