The American Revolutionary War (1775–1783), the American War of Independence, or simply the Revolutionary War in America, began as a war between the Kingdom of Great Britain and thirteen British colonies in North America, and ended in a global war between several European great powers, such as conflicts in India and West Africa between Great Britain and France.

The war was the result of the political American Revolution. Colonists galvanized around the position that the Stamp Act of 1765, imposed by Parliament of Great Britain, was unconstitutional. The British Parliament insisted it had the right to tax colonists. The colonists claimed that, as they were British subjects, taxation without representation was illegal. The American colonists formed a unifying Continental Congress and a shadow government in each colony, though ostensibly claiming loyalty to the monarch and a place in the British Empire. The American boycott of directly taxed British tea led to the Boston Tea Party in 1773. London responded by ending self-government in Massachusetts and putting it under the control of the British army with General Thomas Gage as governor. In April 1775 Gage learned that weapons were being gathered in Concord, and he sent British troops to seize and destroy them. Local militia confronted the troops and exchanged fire (see Battles of Lexington and Concord). After repeated pleas to the British monarchy for intervention with Parliament, any chance of a compromise ended when the Congress were declared traitors by royal decree, and they responded by declaring the independence of a new sovereign nation external to the British Empire, the United States of America, on July 4, 1776. American Loyalists rejected the Declaration, which received limited international recognition. Attempts to expand the rebellion into Quebec and the Floridas^{[disambiguation needed ]} were unsuccessful.