“American Revolution was an economic revolt against mercantilism.” Substantiate.

Mercantilism treated colonies as suppliers of raw materials and captive markets for the mother country; the American Revolution (1775–83) was in large measure the revolt of a maturing colonial capitalism against this subordination.

The mercantilist stranglehold

• Navigation Acts (1651 onwards): colonial trade confined to British ships, with enumerated goods — tobacco, sugar, indigo — routed through England.
• Colonial manufacturing suppressed to protect British producers: Wool Act (1699), Hat Act (1732), Iron Act (1750).
• Currency Acts restricted colonial paper money, squeezing debtor farmers and merchants.

The post-1763 squeeze

• After the Seven Years' War, Britain taxed the colonies to service imperial debt: Sugar Act (1764), Stamp Act (1765), Townshend duties (1767).
• The Tea Act (1773) handed the East India Company a monopoly that threatened colonial merchants and smugglers alike, provoking the Boston Tea Party and the retaliatory Coercive Acts.
• The Proclamation of 1763 barred settlement beyond the Appalachians, blocking land speculation and settler expansion.
• The slogan of no taxation without representation clothed economic interest in constitutional principle; merchants like Hancock and planters like Washington led the revolt.

Qualification

• Enlightenment ideas — Locke's natural rights, Paine's Common Sense (1776) — and political self-assertion also fed the revolution: economics supplied the grievance, ideology the justification.

Substantially, therefore, the Revolution was colonial capitalism breaking its mercantilist fetters — a reading vindicated when independent America immediately embraced free commerce.