The British wanted to (rightly) recover the high cost of defending the colonies – the recent war had nearly emptied the treasury – and the colonies didn’t want to pay for it. This process escalated to the point of civil (revolutionary) war. This was extremely foolish for both parties, as creating a house of the colonies would have allowed Britain to govern the entire world at lower profit margins, but suppress her ability to maximize current revenues. Our ancestors in the colonies had governed well on their own, and saw europeans as war-mongering greedy troublemakers. But the cost of maintaining the power to expand and manage the empire and drag mankind out of backwardness was expensive, and The Crown needed to feed the machine.
In other words, the americans (my ancestors and maybe yours) were wrong, and the british were just over confident that the peasantry could be that ungrateful.