After Britian's sweeping victory over France in the Sevens Years War (1754-1763), Britain gained control of all of north America from the Atlantic to the Mississippi. In spite of the heady feelings this brought to British subjects on both sides of the Atlantic, it also involved challenges well undertood on the Board of Trade and in Privy Council. In the decades before 1763, Royal governors in the American colonies found themselves unable to enforce the instructions and laws that had come from Privy Council and Parliament. For this reason, in the wake of the Peace of Paris, Royal officials planned a series of reforms and structural improvements designed to assure effective control of the Empire from the administrative center at Whitehall. This required changes in every aspect of administration (military, legal, economice, etc.) and, most crucially, revenue acts that would enable these reforms to be funded by taxes raised in the colonies. More than any other factor, these administrative reforms, about which there was broad consesus in both Whitehall and Parlaiment, helped lay the ground-work for what has been called "the American crisis" (1765-1775): the succession of political struggles between imperial center and periphery that issued in the Revolution.