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Europe: Early Modern and Modern
The purpose of Eliga H. Gould's welcome and scholarly study is to address "the public support that helped
make the Revolutionary war the Longest colonial conflict in modern British history" and to answer the
question of why so many people (in Britain) accepted
the government's ill-fated policies during the American War of Independence (p. xvi). Indeed, this attempt
to investigate British support for ministerial policy in
the 1760s and 1770s is both timely and intelligently
undertaken. Gould's decision to locate the origin of
these tendencies in the era of the Wars of the Austrian
Succession and the Seven Years War is undoubtedly
correct. If anything, he understates the extent to which
Britons resented involvement in European affairs and
the extent to which the Seven Years War whetted their
appetite for empire.
Yet, well-crafted and well executed as the book is, it
would be unwise to claim too much for it. It does not
amount to a comprehensive analysis of British political
culture, and I doubt that Gould would claim as much.
His research, moreover, is directed only toward one of
his stated objectives: namely, to examine "the public
rationale that, despite its eventual repudiation, made
the North American policies of George III and his
ministers appear both necessary and justifiable" (p.
xvii). As he says, "this is primarily a study of political
consciousness," the product of Gould's reading of
"nearly a thousand political pamphlets, most of which
were published somewhere in Britain between the
early 1740s and the end of the Revolution" (p. xix).
The book provides a narratively structured analysis of
the pamphlet and periodical literature of over four
decades and an innovative and insightful commentary
on events unfolding on either side of the Seven Years
War. Gould writes well, the volume is helpfully referenced, and it contains considerable quantities of original material.
Such an inquiry, inevitably, has its limitations. First,
Gould offers only a one-page discussion of the methodology adopted in this book. An analysis of "political
consciousness" requires more extensive discussion of
the likely circulation, audience, reception, and method
of reading of the pamphlets on which his study is
based. It is not, I think, enough, to assert that Britain
was an "imagined community" and then to proceed to
assume that the pamphlet literature was part of an
"imaginative reconstruction" of both citizenship and
national identity. For one thing, Britain was a plurality
of communities. For another, language may generate
its own reality and thus to an extent its own autonomy,
but it is not a sufficient answer to a complex historical
problem to leave it there and to ignore the political
and social context within which this occurs.
Second, some of the author's judgments and assertions are less than self-evident. On the very first page
of the introduction, we are told that "Britain's eighteenth century rulers were notorious for regarding the
common people with disdain" (p. xv). Students of the
period will likewise be interested to be told that the
rationale that made the government policies appear
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW
both necessary and justifiable was chiefly the result of
"a burgeoning desire for imperial self-sufficiency" (p.
xvii). This was the case to some extent, of course, but
surely there was far more to it than that. Later we are
informed that, during the Jacobite rebellion of 17451746, "the general public demonstrated a pronounced
willingness to leave responsibility for its suppression
in the hands of the regular army and the legally
commissioned officers of the crown," thus neglecting
the Loyalist response of those years (pp. 24-25). There
are, in addition, some curious omissions. For example,
Lord Bute only receives four mentions in the entire
book. The first of these (p. 102) is an error. He did not
replace William Pitt as prime minister at the end of
1761 but, if he may be said to have done so at all, in
May 1762. Two of the others are little more than
passing references (pp. 103, 141). Moreover, nothing
at all is said about Frederick the Great's curious role in
British polities and society in the late 1750s as an
extremely popular, iconic, patriot figure.
Consequently, although this valuable analysis of
some of the public literature of the time advances our
understanding of British perceptions of the American
Revolution, it does not amount to a sustained and
complete answer to the questions proposed either at
the outset or throughout the book on such topics as
continuing support for the war and the argued effect of
the war in sustaining and strengthening the regime in
the long term. In this context, it is timely to mention
Stephen Conway's excellent The British Isles and the
War of American Independence (2000), which investigates the mobilization of the armed forces, discusses
the economie effects of the war, analyzes the religious
underpinnings of public opinion, and surveys the impact of the American issue in the localities. In some
ways, indeed, Conway's book provides significant answers to many of the questions that Gould raises.
FRANK O'GORMAN
University of Manchester
RICHARD DRAYTON. Nature's Government: Science, Imperial Britain, and the Improvement' of the World. New
Haven: Yale University Press. 2000. Pp. xxi, 346.
$40.00.
In this sweeping, imaginative, skillfully crafted, well
written, and beautifully illustrated book, Richard
Drayton connects the histories of botany, gardens,
Great Britain, and the British Empire. He traces the
idea of "improvement" in its many guises, from the
Garden of Eden to the development creed that is with
us still. In the beginning, as John Locke put it in the
Second Treatise on Government, God gave the world to
mankind in common as a sacred trust, not to be left as
wasteland but to be mixed with labor, turning nature
into "property," which it was the sacred duty of
government to protect. Nothing, Drayton argues, is
more central to the Western, Christian, capitalist,
British, and imperial traditions than this ideology of
improvement.
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2001
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Reviews of Books
In this, of course, Drayton echoes such classic
works as Max Weber's Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of
Capitalism (1904), R. H. Tawney's Religion and the
Rise of Capitalism (1926), C. B. Macpherson's Political
Theory of Possessive Individualism (1962), and, more
recently, David Hancock's Citizens of the World: London Merchants and the Integration of the British Atlantic
Community, 1735-1785 (1995). What makes his book
distinctive and original is its grounding in the richly
symbolic and metaphorical soil of gardens. For early
modern Europeans, which emphatically inciuded the
English, gardening became a favorite sport of nobility
and royalty, a means of displaying their wealth and
clout. It was in the eighteenth century, however, that
such figures as Charles "Turnip" Townshend, Thomas
William Coke of Norfolk, and Arthur Young elevated
the new scientific agriculture to the level of gospel. For
them, the empire was the British nation's "useful
garden," to be tilled, planted, manured, and above all
improved.
The ideology of improvement found its greatest
promoter and patron in Sir Joseph Banks, many of
whose papers have recently been made available in
their original holograph form on the World Wide Web
(http://www.sinsw.gov.au.Banks/). And it is with Banks
that Drayton's hitherto sweeping survey settles down
to more detailed analysis. Banks's role in promoting
imperial gardening—the transformation of the Kew
Gardens from Royal to national treasure and responsibility; the patronage of the well-known exploration
voyages of Captains Cook and Bligh; the development
of a network of imperial gardens where valuable
botanie discoveries could be cultivated, grafted, and
transplanted—was truly prodigious. Although less
spectacular than the founder, his successors followed
up and institutionalized his example. Not only Bligh's
infamous breadfruit but quinine, rubber, cocoa, and
many other crops were brought to Kew and then
transmitted to Calcutta, Sydney, Kingston, Singapore,
Accra, and elsewhere through the far-flung network of
imperial botanical laboratories.
The economic value of all these botanical products
has of course been incalculable. Yet Drayton argues
persuasively that for Banks and his fellow imperial
botanists, the economic argument of empire was a
means of justifying what for them was mainly a professional objective. The British were gardeners not so
much because it was profitable as because they were
British. Like cricket or fly-fishing, it was their hobby.
Nor, since many of the products were food crops,
without which it is hard to see how the world's
expanding population could have been fed, was this
phase of expansion all that reprehensible.
Although this is preeminently an eighteenth and
nineteenth-century book, Drayton continues it on into
the twentieth, when Joseph Chamberlain's doctrine of
"undeveloped estates," the several versions of "backwardness" and "underdevelopment," the World Bank,
and UNESCO were all manifestations of the idea of
improvement. Drayton's book is one of the most
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successful so-called New Empire histories I have encountered. It is a pleasure to read. He has succeeded in
breaking down the Chinese walls that have separated
British domestic and imperial history, the history of
science, and the history of gardening. All who are
interested in any of these fields will need to read this
book. Moreover, since I for one would like to use it in
the classroom, I hope that Yale University Press will
soon bring out a paperback edition.
JOHN W. CELL
Duke University
PAULA BARTLEY. Prostitution: Prevention and Reform in
England, 1860-1914. (Women's and Gender History.)
New York: Routledge. 2000. Pp. xi, 229. Cloth $85.00,
paper $25.99.
Paula Bartley carves out new territory in a muchexamined field in her study of Victorian and Edwardian prostitution. She does not attempt to offer fresh
insights into the causes of prostitution or the campaigns for regulation or deregulation, areas analyzed
so perceptively by such historians as Judith Walkowitz
in her now-classic Prostitution and Victorian Society
(1980). Instead, Bartley focuses on the efforts of
reformers to eradicate prostitution by eliminating
prostitutes, at first through rehabilitation institutions,
then through preventive measures, and finally through
suppression.
Bartley argues that the first attempts to eliminate
prostitution were led by optimistic religious reformers
who believed that with successful intervention, prostitutes could be rehabilitated and reintegrated into
society as moral beings. Groups sponsored by the
Church of England and other religious denominations
established penitentiary institutions where prostitutes
were confined and inculcated in middle-class morality,
even as they were trained in practical domestic skills
that would allow them to find employment other than
sex work. When these institutions for rehabilitation
proved unsuccessful, reformers turned to attempts to
prevent women from betoming prostitutes in the first
place. Such organizations as the "Ladies Associations
for the Care of Friendless Girls," with its many
branches throughout England, established training
schools for poor working-class girls. They also founded
homes for unwed mothers, in hopes that presumably
one moral failure would not turn into a life of prostitution.
In the late nineteenth century, according to Bartley,
there was a shift away from environmental to biological explanations for prostitution. With the new concern about racial strength, eugenicists postulated a
connection between feeble-mindedness and sexual
promiscuity and argued that women of defective mental capabilities were most susceptible to prostitution.
These prostitutes were seen as especially dangerous to
the race because of the many defective children they
would presumably have as a result of their sex work.
Institutions were therefore established to provide for
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