What did "no taxation without representation" mean, and why did the Stamp Act enrage the colonies?

"No taxation without representation" meant that the colonists believed Parliament had no right to tax people who had no voice in it. A majority of them saw the Stamp Act of 1765 as a violation of their rights as Englishmen: to be taxed only with their consent, a consent that only their own colonial legislatures could give.

The tax fell on paper: legal documents, magazines, playing cards and newspapers, all of which had to carry a stamp from London and be paid for in British currency. Britain wanted the money for its troops in America after the French and Indian War. The colonists replied that they had never feared a French invasion and had already paid their share of the war.

British officials had an answer ready, called virtual representation: members of Parliament spoke for everyone, including the many Britons who could not vote. The colonists replied that they were different, since they already had real assemblies of their own.

The argument soon left the pamphlets. In Boston, a crowd hanged the local stamp distributor in effigy from an elm tree that became known as the Liberty Tree. Distributors across the colonies were frightened into resigning, and the tax was never effectively collected. Parliament repealed the act in March 1766, after British merchants, fearing boycotts, had lobbied for it, but it also declared that it could make laws for the colonies in all cases whatsoever. The money was gone, but the question of who had the final say was not.