1An act regulating stamp duty (a tax on the legal recognition of documents).

1. 1.1 An act of the British Parliament in 1765 that exacted revenue from the American colonies by imposing a stamp duty on newspapers and legal and commercial documents. Colonial opposition led to the act's repeal in 1766 and helped encourage the revolutionary movement against the Crown.
   Example sentencesExamples

   • In the 1760s such attachments led Franklin into taking stands, notably his initial support of the Stamp Act, that he would later see as contrary to American ideals and interests.
   • In response to the Stamp Act of 1765, the merchants of the Atlantic cities signed nonimportation agreements.
   • He had signed the Non-Importation Agreement of 1765, and his patronage of the fledgling enterprise to make porcelain on American soil is further testament to his protest against the Stamp Act.
   • Attempts were made to raise taxes, notably with the ill-starred Stamp Act of 1765, and to bring colonial officials more directly under royal control.
   • The bowls honor William Pitt who supported freedom of the press and individuals, as well as protested against the Stamp Act.
   • The practice changed in the wake of the Stamp Act 1853, which abolished the ad valorem duty on order cheques, introducing in its stead a fixed duty of one penny.
   • He was certainly unhelpfully intransigent over America, continuing to believe long after 1783 that the repeal of the Stamp Act of 1766 had shown dangerous weakness and had thus encouraged the colonists' rebellion.
   • Upon hearing the story, Rab tells Johnny that Merchant Lyte is crooked - that he imported English goods secretly even though all the merchants had agreed not to until the Stamp Act was repealed.
   • The Colonies were being faced with the Stamp Act, the Tea Act, the Sugar Act.
   • In the wake of the hated Stamp Act, and the Townshend Acts that followed, mob violence broke out in Boston.
   • Thus the attempt to enforce the Stamp Act proved utterly ineffectual.
   • And so, in the spring and early summer of 1765, most of the colonial assemblies adopted resolutions condemning the Stamp Act.
   • That the colonists used the boycotting of British imports as a political weapon, from the Stamp Act through the Townsend Duties and Tea Act, is well known.
   • But while the moderate Whigs were alarmed by the specter of social conflict thrown up by the riots, they were reluctant to do anything which might actually assist in the execution of the Stamp Act.
   • As colonists' anger over the Stamp Act built, a tax official was burned in effigy from the limbs of an elm estimated to be 120 years old.
   • If this is interpreted as a sun, the tree becomes a liberty tree, a symbol of resistance to the Stamp Act of 1765 by which the British Parliament imposed the first direct tax on the colonists.
   • Boycotts of British imports were organized to protest the Stamp Act, the Townshend Acts and the so-called Intolerable Acts.
   • William Pitt, Lord Chatham, the great leader in the Seven Years War, had actually argued that the Stamp Act on the American colonies (to pay for their own defence) was unconstitutional, illegal.
   • Britain's imposition on America of measures including the Stamp Act in 1765 provoked violent colonial opposition.
   • In colonial Boston, juries regularly refused to indict citizens accused of violating the Stamp Act and other unpopular policies.