The American Revolutionary War, also called the American War of Independence, began in 1775 as a war between the Kingdom of Great Britain and thirteen British colonies in North America and expanded into a global war involving several European great powers, including conflicts in India and West Africa between Great Britain and France. It grew out of the political American Revolution, as colonists rallied against the Stamp Act of 1765, which Parliament imposed and the colonists considered unconstitutional, arguing that taxation without representation was illegal for British subjects. The colonies formed the Continental Congress and shadow governments in each colony while still professing loyalty to the monarch and a place in the British Empire. Tensions escalated after the Boston Tea Party in 1773, and London responded by ending self-government in Massachusetts and placing it under the British army with General Thomas Gage as governor. In April 1775, after learning that weapons were being gathered in Concord, Gage sent British troops to seize and destroy them, and local militia confronted them and exchanged fire. After repeated appeals to the British monarchy failed and Congress was declared traitors by royal decree, the colonies declared the independence of the United States of America on July 4, 1776. American Loyalists rejected the Declaration, and attempts to expand the rebellion into Quebec and the Florida were unsuccessful. Fighting continued through 1782 as peace negotiations began, and in 1783 the Treaty of Paris ended the war, recognized United States sovereignty, and fixed its territory roughly from present-day Canada to Florida and west to the Mississippi River, while a wider international peace also exchanged several territories.