AHR Forum
A Virtual Nation: Greater Britain and the Imperial Legacy
of the American Revolution
ELIGA H. GOULD
ANYONE SEEKING TO WRITE BRITISH HISTORY as something more than the combined
histories of England, Scotland, Ireland, and Wales must begin by accepting a
paradox. It is certainly possible to speak of a collective "British" experience, one
that at various points over the last three hundred years has encompassed all of the
British Isles, together with large stretches of Africa, Asia, Australia, New Zealand,
and the Americas. But to paraphrase the Scottish nationalist Tom Nairn, Britain's
modern history has been a history of fragmentation.' Not only has the empire on
which the sun never set largely vanished, but, for the better part of the last century,
the United Kingdom itself has been beset by the centrifugal impulses of Celtic
separatism. While none of this has prevented the "new British history" from
attracting growing numbers of practitioners, Britain's "limits and divisions" remain
no less conspicuous today than they were a quarter-century ago, when J. G. A.
Pocock first noted their extraordinary persistence in his influential series of
articles."
For an essay on Britain and the American Revolution, this might sound like a
rather self-evident point with which- to begin. Despite the loss of the thirteen
colonies, however, British historians have generally chosen to depict the eighteenth
Earlier versions of this essay were presented at meetings of the Northeast Conference on British
Studies, the New England American Studies Association, and the Omohundro Institute of Early
American History and Culture. I wish to thank the participants for their helpful suggestions and
comments, as well as to acknowledge the generous assistance of David Armitage, Trevor Burnard, J. H.
Burns, Edward Countryman, Thomas Cogswell, John R. Gillis, Jack P. Greene, Nicoletta F. Gullace,
Frank D. McCann, Elizabeth Mancke, P. J. Marshall, Peter Onuf, J. G. A. Pocock, John Sainsbury,
Alan Tully, and the anonymous reviewers for the AHR.
1 Tom Nairn, The Break-up of Britain: Crisis and Neo-Nationalism (London, 1977). Nairn's
conclusions about the weakness of a common British national consciousness find strong support in
Benedict Anderson's now classic formulation, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and
Spread of Nationalism, rev. edn. (New York, 1991), esp. 2.
2 J. G. A. Pocock, "British History: A Plea for a New Subject," Journal of Modern History 47 (1975):
601-28; Pocock, "The Limits and Divisions of British History: In Search of the Unknown Subject,"
AHR 87 (April 1982): 311-36. See also David Cannadine, "British History: Past, Present-and
Future?" Past and Present 141 (1987). For an indication of how the interest in British history has
continued to grow, see Margot Finn, "Editor's Introduction," Journal of British Studies 36 (1997): 1-3.
No doubt one reason for this interest is the more general interest in transnational history: see John R.
Gillis, "The Future of European History," Perspectives 34 (April 1996), as well as J. C. D. Clark's
suggestive essay, "The Strange Death of British History? Reflections on Anglo-American Scholarship,"
Historical Journal 40 (1997): 787-809.
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century as a time of growing unity. Whether we take as our benchmark Linda
Colley's magisterial study of the rising sense of British nationhood in England,
Scotland, and Wales,' or the growing interest stimulated by Leigh Schmidt, Michael
Crawford, and others in the varieties of British religious experience," or the work
of Bernard Bailyn, Ian Steele, and David Hancock on the commercial integration of
the British Atlantic "community,"> the ties that bound men and women across vast
distances currently loom far larger in the scholarly literature than the sorts of
schismatic tendencies that resulted in the Declaration of Independence. This even
holds for much of the research dealing with Britain's response to the American
Revolution. Although generations of British and Irish radicals drew inspiration
from its democratic example, scholars as apparently different as Pocock, Ian
Christie, and Stephen Conway have tended to present the revolution as a rather
exceptional event with limited relevance for British history, whose most lasting
consequence was to rid the empire of the one group who could not be assimilated
by the otherwise irresistible forces of Anglicization and imperial rule."
As far as England, Scotland, and Wales are concerned, there are some persuasive
reasons to treat the .revolution as a momentary setback from which the British soon
recovered. Despite a brief period of soul-searching and malaise, the defeat did
practically nothing to alter Britain's standing as Europe's preeminent maritime
power, nor did it thwart the subsequent development of a new British hegemony
based on the world's most advanced industrial economy." If we direct our attention
to the empire that lay "beyond the sea," however, a significantly different picture
emerges. Although the British themselves remained committed imperialists, the
American Revolution ultimately served as a forceful reminder of the vast distances
that separated those men and women who lived within the United Kingdom from
Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707-1837 (New Haven, Conn., 1992).
Leigh Eric Schmidt, Holy Fairs: Scottish Communions and American Revivals in the Early Modern
Period (Princeton, N.J., 1989); Michael J. Crawford, Seasons of Grace: Colonial New England's Revival
Tradition in its British Context (Oxford, 1991). See also W. R. Ward, The Protestant Evangelical Revival
(Cambridge, 1992); Mark A. Noll, et al., eds., Evangelicalism: Comparative Studies in Popular
Protestantism in North America, the British Isles, and Beyond, 1700-1900 (Oxford, 1994), especially the
essays by Susan O'Brien, "Eighteenth-Century Publishing Networks in the First Years of Transatlantic
Evangelicalism," Harry S. Stout, "George Whitefield in Three Countries," and Leigh E. Schmidt,
"Time, Celebration, and the Christian Year in Eighteenth-Century Evangelicalism."
5 Bernard Bailyn, Voyagers to the West: A Passage in the Peopling of America on the Eve of the
Revolution (New York, 1986); Ian K. Steele, The English Atlantic, 1675-1740: An Exploration of
Communication and Community (New York, 1986); David Hancock, Citizens of the World: London
Merchants and the Integration of the British Atlantic Community, 1735-1785 (Cambridge, 1995). For a
perceptive account of how this commercial integration affected the movement of information, see also
Charles E. Clark, The Public Prints: The Newspaper in Anglo-American Culture, 1665-1740 (Oxford,
1994).
6 J. G. A. Pocock, "1776: The Revolution against Parliament," in Pocock, Virtue, Commerce, and
History: Essays on Political Thought and History, Chiefly in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge, 1985),
74-75, 85-88; Ian R. Christie, Stress and Stability in Late Eighteenth-Century Britain: Reflections on the
British Avoidance of Revolution (Oxford, 1984); Stephen Conway, The War of American Independence,
1775-1783 (London, 1995), esp. 235-38. The revolution performs a similar service for Colley in Britons
(see esp. 144-45); see also T. H. Breen's suggestive essay, "Ideology and Nationalism on the Eve of the
American Revolution: Revisions Once More in Need of Revising," Journal of American History 84
(1997): 13-39, in which he reverses this relationship by tying the revolution's origins to the colonists'
own disillusionment over being excluded from Britain's increasingly unified sense of nationhood.
7 See esp. Linda Colley, "The Politics of Eighteenth-Century British History," Journal of British
Studies 25 (1986): 359.
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4
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those who did not. Furthermore, even as the conflict left some people convinced of
the need for a firmer hand in matters of imperial administration, it simultaneously
demonstrated the high cost of using force to bind any of Britain's outlying provinces
into a closer national union. Indeed, far from being an exceptional event with
causes unique to North America, the disintegration of the "First British Empire"
highlighted the limits of metropolitan authority in provinces as scattered as Nova
Scotia, Jamaica, Bengal, and Ireland." For these reasons, we might well say that the
longest colonial war in modern British history holds one key to understanding why
Britain's internal boundaries have proved so resilient and why the nation superimposed over those divisions remains, in some ways, more virtual than real.
IN RECENT YEARS, the formation of a British national identity has proved to be an
especially fruitful area for research. Thanks in large measure to the pioneering
work of Linda Colley, we have a much clearer sense of the extent to which
eighteenth-century Britons of "all classes" and "both sexes" came to think of
themselves as belonging to a single nation." Driven by the escalating cycle of war
with France, this "revolution in sensibility" manifested itself in a variety of social
and political activities, including military service, royal and aristocratic patronage of
the arts and sciences, and middle-class voluntarism. Perhaps the most striking
aspect of Britain's self-invention, though, was the way it dovetailed with an
apparently insatiable market for patriotic paraphernalia of every shape and size. As
an indication of the extent of this demand, Colley's own work abounds with an
impressive array of patriotic images and ideographic material, including the lavish
portraits and historic tableaux of masters like Benjamin West and David Wilkie, as
well as scores of prints and cartoons by lesser known and anonymous figures.
Elsewhere, studies of Georgian political culture have documented Britain's growing
national unity through sources ranging from George Frederick Handel's oratorios
and the novels of Sir Walter Scott to mass-produced commodities like canes
8 See Eliga H. Gould, "American Independence and Britain's Counter-Revolution," Past and
Present 154 (February 1997): 107-41; Gould, The Persistence of Empire: British Political Culture in the
Age of the American Revolution (Chapel Hill, N.C., forthcoming). For general work on the British
Empire before, during, and after the revolution, see also Jack P. Greene, Peripheries and Center:
Constitutional Development in the Extended Polities of the British Empire and the United States,
1607-1788 (Athens, Ga., 1986), esp. chaps. 1-4 and 9; Greene, "Negotiated Authorities: The Problem
of Governance in the Extended Polities of the Early Modern Atlantic World," in Greene, Negotiated
Authorities: Essays in Colonial Political and Constitutional History (Charlottesville, Va., 1994), 12-17;
C. A. Bayly, Imperial Meridian: The British Empire and the World, 1780-1830 (London, 1989); P. J.
Marshall, ed., The Oxford History of the British Empire, Vol. 2: The Eighteenth Century (Oxford, 1998);
Neil Longley York, Neither Kingdom nor Nation: The Irish Quest for Constitutional Rights, 1698-1800
(Washington, D.C., 1994), esp. chap. 3; Andrew J. O'Shaughnessy, "The Stamp Act Crisis in the British
Caribbean," William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser., 51 (1994): 203-26; Elizabeth Mancke, "Another
British America: A Canadian Model for the Early Modern British Empire," Journal of Imperial and
Commonwealth History 25 (1997): 1-36.
9 Colley, Britons, 5. Though Colley's formulation is by far the best known, it is certainly not the only
one, nor was it the first. See also Michael Hechter, Internal Colonialism: The Celtic Fringe in British
National Development, 1536-1966 (Berkeley, Calif., 1975); Angus Calder, Revolutionary Empire: The
Rise of the English-Speaking Empires from the Fifteenth Century to the 1780s (London, 1981); Richard S.
Tompson, The Atlantic Archipelago: A Political History of the British Isles (Lewiston, N.Y., 1986).
Despite the English focus of its title, John Brewer's Sinews of Power: War, Money and the English State,
1689-1783 (New York, 1989) also has a good deal to say about the growth of Britain.
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embossed with the image of William Pitt, snuff boxes celebrating the naval victories
of Edward Vernon ("Old Grog"), Edward Hawke, and Horatio Nelson, tokens and
medallions, bunting and ribbons of every sort, plates, teacups, songbooks, poetry,
almanacs-the list goes on and on.'? Indeed, the casual observer might be forgiven
for wondering whether ordinary men and women cared about anything else. Britain
may have been something more than the nation of shopkeepers parodied by Samuel
Adams and Napoleon Bonaparte. But it certainly was a nation in which the
purveyors of patriotism had ample opportunities to peddle their wares.
While much of the work on popular patriotism has focused on England, there is
no question that this "empire of goods"-to borrow T. H. Breen's apt phraseproved equally alluring elsewhere in the British world.'! Charting a course first
mapped out by Bernard Bailyn and John Clive, students of eighteenth-century
Scotland have long recognized the desire to imitate things English as a central force
both in making Edinburgh, Glasgow, and Aberdeen leading centers of the
Enlightenment and, indirectly, in transforming North Britain into a commercial and
industrial dynamo capable of dominating key sectors of the Atlantic economy.F
Based on Scotland's unusually high rates of overseas migration, Ned C. Landsman
and David Armitage have even argued that these integrative pressures effectively
transformed the empire from an "English" into a "British" polity during the later
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.!' To judge from the work of Philip Jenkins
and S. J. Connolly, England's cultural and commercial exports held a similar appeal
for local elites in Wales and on the far shores of St. George's Channel. Although
Ireland's Protestant Ascendancy refused to concede quite as much to the forces of
Anglicization as their counterparts on the British mainland, the dynamics of
cultural replication were sufficiently powerful to make both "Irishness" and
"Welshness" look like so many varieties of "Britishness," while the interest in
metropolitan institutions and practices was no less conspicuous in Dublin or Cardiff
10 See, for example, John Brewer, "Commercialization and Politics," in Neil McKendrick, John
Brewer, and J. H. Plumb, The Birth of a Consumer Society: The Commercialization of Eighteenth-Century
England (Indianapolis, 1982),231-62; John Brewer and Roy Porter, eds., Consumption and the World
of Goods (London, 1993); Christine Gerrard, The Patriot Opposition to Walpole: Politics, Poetry, and
National Myth, 1725-1742 (Oxford, 1994); Kathleen Wilson, The Sense of the People: Politics, Culture
and Imperialism in England, 1715-1785 (Cambridge, 1995); Ruth Smith, Handel's Oratorios and
Eighteenth-Century Thought (Cambridge, 1995); J. R. Oldfield, Popular Politics and British Anti-Slavery:
The Mobilisation of Public Opinion against the Slave Trade, 1787-1807 (Manchester, 1995).
11 T. H. Breen, "An Empire of Goods: The Anglicization of Colonial America, 1690-1776," Journal
of British Studies 25 (1986): 467-499. See also T. H. Breen, "'Baubles of Britain': The American and
Consumer Revolutions of the Eighteenth Century," Past and Present 119 (1988): 73-104.
12 John Clive and Bernard Bailyn, "England's Cultural Provinces: Scotland and America," William
and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser., 11 (1954): 200-15. See also T. C. Smout, A History of the Scottish People,
1560-1830 (London, 1969), chaps. 10, 12, 15, 19; and Smout, "Where Had the Scottish Economy Got
to by the Third Quarter of the Eighteenth Century?" in Istvan Hont and Michael Ignatieff, eds., Wealth
and Virtue: The Shaping of Political Economy in the Scottish Enlightenment (Cambridge, 1983), 45-72;
Nicholas T. Phillipson, "Culture and Society in the Eighteenth-Century Province: The Case of
Edinburgh and the Scottish Enlightenment," in Lawrence Stone, ed., The University in Society, 2 vols.
(Princeton, N.J., 1974), 2: 407-48.
13 Ned C. Landsman, Scotland and Its First American Colony, 1683-1765 (Princeton, N.J., 1985);
David Armitage, "Making the Empire British: Scotland in the Atlantic World, 1542-1707," Past and
Present 155 (May 1997): 34-63. For the continuation of this pattern into the eighteenth century, see
Bailyn, Voyagers to the West, as well as Ned Landsmen's contribution to this Forum, "Nation, Migration,
and the Province in the First British Empire: Scotland and the Americas, 1600-1800," 463-75.
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than it was to the north and east.':' In short, this largely voluntary process of
assimilation helps explain why Britain's eighteenth-century rulers, despite their
apparent deficiency in formal coercive powers, were able to extend their authority
so effectively over what had historically been a rebellious and unruly hinterland.
Of the Whig regime's various outlying provinces, though, none appear to have
been more susceptible to these metrocentric tendencies than the English-speaking
colonies on the North American seaboard. For anyone familiar with actual
conditions in the colonies, of course, the sheer diversity of the populationincluding Native Americans, Protestant immigrants from across northern and
western Europe, and large numbers of Africans, free as well as slave-clearly
distinguished British North America from either England or its Celtic periphery.t>
At the same time, though, early Americanists generally concede that on the
revolution's eve Anglomania was a far more conspicuous feature of colonial society
than the separatist sentiments that appeared so suddenly during the controversy
over parliamentary taxation.l'' In matters of religion, commerce, education, law,
and politics, the models that carried the greatest weight were those of the
metropolis, and contemporaries often noted-and historians such as Jack P.
Greene have subsequently confirmed-that until the third quarter of the eighteenth
century, this mimetic patriotism helped British authorities gain a far broader
voluntary obedience than they possibly could have hoped to secure through more
authoritarian forms of government. 17 Even after the political relationship had been
dissolved, Americans remained eager consumers of British goods of all sorts."
Indeed, there were more than a few observers on both sides of the Atlantic who
expected that this cultural and economic hegemony would enable Britain to
continue to maintain some sort of informal empire over its erstwhile provinces. As
14 Philip Jenkins, The Making of a Ruling Class: The Glamorgan Gentry, 1640-1790 (Cambridge,
1983); S. J. Connolly, Religion, Law and Power: The Making of Protestant Ireland, 1660-1760 (Oxford,
1992); Connolly, "Varieties of Britishness: Ireland, Scotland and Wales in the Hanoverian State," in
Alexander Grant and Keith J. Stringer, eds., Uniting the Kingdom? The Making of British History
(London, 1995), 193-208. For the relationship between Anglicization and elite formation, see also
David Cannadine, "The Making of the British Upper Classes," in Cannadine, Aspects of Aristocracy:
Grandeur and Decline in Modern Britain (New Haven, Conn., 1994).
15 The literature dealing with the colonies' multi-cultural character is discussed in greater detail
below.
16 For the Anglicization of colonial America generally, see Breen, "Empire of Goods," 467-99; and
"'Baubles of Britain,'" 73-104; John M. Murrin, "The Legal Transformation: The Bench and Bar of
Eighteenth-Century Massachusetts," in Stanley N. Katz, ed., Colonial America: Essays in Politics and
Social Development (Boston, 1971), 415-49; Richard L. Bushman, "American High Style and
Vernacular Cultures," in Jack P. Greene and J. R. Pole, eds., Colonial British America: Essays in the
New History of the Early Modern Era (Baltimore, Md., 1984),345-83; Greene, Pursuits ofHappiness: The
Social Development of Early Modern British Colonies and the Formation of American Culture (Chapel
Hill, N.C., 1988), esp. chap. 8.
17 See esp. Jack P. Greene, "An Uneasy Connection: An Analysis of the Preconditions of the
American Revolution," in Stephen G. Kurtz and James H. Hutson, eds., Essays on the American
Revolution (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1973); Greene, "The Seven Years' War and the American Revolution:
The Causal Relationship Reconsidered," Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 8 (1980):
85-105. For an indication of the extent of this loyalty, note the high rates of colonial participation in
Britain's wars with France in Fred Anderson, A People's Army: Massachusetts Soldiers and Society in the
Seven Years' War (Chapel Hill, 1984).
18 This is one implication of Richard L. Bushman's Refinement of America: Persons, Houses, Cities
(New York, 1992), esp. pt. 2. See also Hancock, Citizens of the World, 386-88; Laurel Thatcher Ulrich,
"Wheels, Looms, and the Gender Division of Labor in Eighteenth-Century New England," William and
Mary Quarterly, 3d ser., 55 (1998): 3-38.
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the Scottish diplomat Caleb Whitefoord is alleged to have remarked to his French
counterpart at the Paris peace conference in 1783, it was possible that someday "the
thirteen United States wou'd form the greatest Empire in the World." But
Whitefoord was confident that, "from a similarity of Language, Manners and
Religion, that Great Empire wou'd be English."!"
By the time Whitefoord uttered these words, the English-speaking Atlantic had
undergone an extraordinary transformation. Nonetheless, the literature on the
coming of the American Revolution has largely confirmed the Anglicization thesis.
For metropolitan politicians who supported George Grenville's ill-fated Stamp Act
(1765), the proposition that Britain and America together comprised "one nation"-a nation whose members were "virtually represented" by the House of
Commons-played an important role in perpetuating the mistaken theory that
Parliament might tax the colonists in the same manner as it did the inhabitants of
England, Scotland, and Wales.>' While not all Britons accepted this logic, even
so-called "friends of America" such as the English radical John Wilkes based much
of their opposition to the government's actions on the premise that there should be
"no difference between an inhabitant of Boston in Lincolnshire, and of Boston in
New England.">' But, most important of all, the colonists themselves justified their
resistance in terms that were predominantly English, and as late as the Constitutional Convention of 1787, Americans were still working within the paradigms of
Whig political theory.F In a sense, George III lost the greater part of his North
American empire not because his colonial subjects rejected metropolitan norms
and practices but because they had become so thoroughly "British" that they
refused to sacrifice any of the rights of self-government enjoyed by their cousins on
the European side of the Atlantic.
WHILE ALL THIS CONFIRMS THE BENEFITS of emphasizing the trend toward integration,
however, there are sound reasons to question how much these tendencies did to
alter Britain's underlying character as a composite, multi-polar polity.P Although
English theorists generally assumed that Parliament's legal authority over the
19 "Anecdotes of the Negotiations," in The Whitefoord Papers: Being the Correspondence and Other
Manuscripts of Colonel Charles Whitefoord and Caleb Whitefoord from 1739 to 1810, W. A. S. Hewins,
ed. (Oxford, 1898), 187.
20 [Thomas Whately], The Regulations Lately Made concerning the Colonies, and the Taxes Imposed
upon Them, considered (London, 1765), 109. See also Gould, Persistence of Empire, esp. chap. 4.
21 John Wilkes to Junius, November 6, 1771, British Library, Add. MSS. 30,881, 27. The literature on
the British "friends of America" is too voluminous to mention in full here, but see esp. Wilson, Sense
of the People, 237-83; Colin Bonwick, English Radicals and the American Revolution (Chapel Hill, N.C.,
1977); John Sainsbury, Disaffected Patriots: London Supporters of Revolutionary America, 1769-1782
(Kingston, Ontario, 1987); Peter N. Miller, Defining the Common Good: Empire, Religion and
Philosophy in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Cambridge, 1994), chap. 4.
22 See J. R. Pole, Political Representation in England and the Origins of the American Republic (New
York, 1966); Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, Mass.,
1967); Gordon S. Wood, The Creation of the American Republic, 1776-1787 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1969);
Pauline Maier, From Resistance to Revolution: Colonial Radicals and the Development of American
Opposition to Britain, 1765-1776 (New York, 1972); J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment:
Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton, N.J., 1975); Forrest
McDonald, Novus Ordo Seclorum: The Intellectual Origins of the Constitution (Lawrence, Kan., 1985).
23 See esp. Gould, "American Independence and Britain's Counter-Revolution," 107-41; P. J.
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empire was uniformly absolute, the British state actually consisted of a consortium
of realms and provinces, many of which maintained a substantial measure of local
autonomy. To take the case of Scotland, the Treaty of Union (1707) that created a
unitary British legislature at Westminster also guaranteed the independence of the
established Presbyterian Church and the Scottish courts of law. As a result,
Parliament's sovereignty north of the River Tweed remained somewhat less
absolute than it was in England.>' Elsewhere, Westminster did not have to contend
with formal limitations of the sort that the Edinburgh parliament had managed to
exact, yet this autonomy was hardly unique. Even within the subordinate polities of
Ireland and the British colonies in North America and the Caribbean, Parliament's
theoretical supremacy remained hedged about by the competing claims of provincial assemblies and a variety of customary local rights and privilcges.> And this is
to say nothing of the complications arising from the East India Company's
momentous decision in 1765 to assume administrative responsibility for the Mughal
emperor's northeastern provinces of Orissa, Bihar, and Bengal.>
Not surprisingly, some of the most innovative work on Britain's composite
character has focused on the extraordinary racial and ethnic diversity that these
legal arrangements' fostcred.?? To take the much-studied example of Olaudah
Equiano, the West African native and former slave whose autobiography became an
international best-seller following its publication in 1789, neither "Briton" nor
"African" does justice to the complex identity that emerges from the pages of his
Interesting Narrative. In a sense, Equiano was both British and African." Likewise,
North America's "middle ground"-Richard White's suggestive term for the space
Marshall, "A Nation Defined by Empire, 1755-1776," in Grant and Stringer, Uniting the Kingdom,
208-22.
24 Sir William Blackstone accorded the Treaty of Union the status of fundamental law, observing that
any violation of the articles pertaining to the Scottish Church would "greatly endanger" its duration:
Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England (1765-1769), Stanley Katz, et al., eds., 4 vols.
(Chicago, 1979), 1: 97-98. See also Brian P. Levack, The Formation of the British State: England,
Scotland and the Union, ]603-1707 (Oxford, 1987); John Robertson, "Union, State and Empire: The
European Context of British Union in 1707," in Lawrence Stone, ed., An Imperial State at War: Britain
from 1689 to 1815 (London, 1994).
25 See Greene, Peripheries and Center, esp. chaps. 2-7; H. G. Koenigsberger, "Composite States,
Representative Institutions and the American Revolution," Historical Research 62 (1989).
26 For the relationship between the administration of Bengal and British politics, see esp. H. V.
Bowen, Revenue and Reform: The Indian Problem in British Politics, 1757-1773 (Cambridge, 1991). See
also Lucy S. Sutherland, The East India Company in Eighteenth-Century Politics (Oxford, 1952); P. J.
Marshall, Bengal-The British Bridgehead: Eastern India, 1740-1828 (Cambridge, 1987); Philip Lawson,
The East India Company: A History (London, 1993), esp. chap. 6; Nancy F. Koehn, The Power of
Commerce: Economy and Governance in the First British Empire (Ithaca, N.Y., 1994), esp. 132-38,
200-17.
27 For the relationship between Britain's structure as a composite monarchy and the empire's
multi-ethnic character, see the editors' introduction in Bernard Bailyn and Philip D. Morgan, eds.,
Strangers within the Realm: Cultural Margins of the First British Empire (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1991), 1-31;
Edward Countryman, "Indians, the Colonial Order, and the Social Significance of the American
Revolution," William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser., 53 (1996): 342-62.
28 Robert J. Allison, ed., The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, Written by Himself
(1789; Boston, 1995). For the typicality of Equiano's experience, see Philip D. Morgan, "British
Encounters with Africans and African-Americans," in Bailyn and Morgan, Strangers within the Realm,
157-219. For Africans and African-Americans in the English-speaking Atlantic generally, see Mechal
Sobel, The World They Made Together: Black and White Values in Eighteenth-Century Virginia (Princeton,
N.J., 1987); Sylvia R. Frey, Water from the Rock: Black Resistance in a Revolutionary Age (Princeton,
1991); Ira Berlin, "From Creole to African: Atlantic Creoles and the Origins of African-American
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that Indians and Europeans jointly occupied in the vicinity of the Great Lakesproduced all sorts of opportunities for syncretism, ranging from the four Iroquois
"kings" who mesmerized London with their carefully staged visit in 1710 to the
more authentic patriotism of indigenous leaders Mary Brant and her brother
Joseph, who served the crown with distinction during the Revolutionary War. 29 For
such individuals, participating in the rites of British patriotism may have been a
transformative experience, but it clearly did not mean abandoning alternative, even
apparently opposed, identities. Significantly, in George Romney's famous portrait
of 1776, Joseph Brant posed as both English gentleman and Mohawk sachem (see
cover illustration).
When it came to individuals from Africa's Gold Coast or the trans-Appalachian
West, eighteenth-century Britons were often prepared to accommodate a level of
diverse cultural practices far beyond what was acceptable among people of
European descent.'? Nonetheless, the autonomy fashioned by Equiano and Brant
was emblematic of a more general pattern that held for Britain's white inhabitants
as well. The most significant manifestation of this diversity involved matters of
religion. Although the great transatlantic awakenings of the mid-eighteenth century
were beginning to erode Britain's confessional differences, the British still inhabited a religiously contested polity in which members of the dominant Church of
England had to contend with a Presbyterian establishment in Scotland, dissenting
majorities in most of British North America, and large and potentially restive
Catholic populations in Ireland and Quebec." Similarly, the same provincial
manners that Anglicizing elites in Edinburgh, Dublin, and Philadelphia usually
found so embarrassing could occasionally transmogrify into proud emblems of
regional distinctiveness." The Scots may have distinguished themselves as loyal
Britons during the American Revolution, but the quasi-nationalist sentiments that
surfaced in response to revelations that their legendary hero of the third century,
Ossian, and his epic tale had been fabricated are a useful reminder that they were
willing to go only so far in subverting their own history.'?
Society in Mainland North America," William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser., 53 (1996): 251-88; W. Jeffrey
Bolster, Black Jacks: African American Seamen in the Age of Sail (Cambridge, Mass., 1997).
29 Richard White, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires and Republics in the Great Lakes Region,
1650- 1815 (Cambridge, 1991); Eric Hinderaker, "The 'Four Indian Kings' and the Imaginative
Construction of the First British Empire," William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser., 53 (1996): 487-526;
Colin G. Calloway, Crown and Calumet: British-Indian Relations, 1783-1815 (Norman, Okla., 1987).
30 It is worth noting that this diminishing tolerance for difference also held for native peoples living
in areas of European settlement. See James H. Merrell, "'The Customes of Our Countrey': Indians and
Colonists in Early America," in Bailyn and Morgan, Strangers within the Realm, 117-56.
31 The primacy of Britain's religious divisions is the subject of J. C. D. Clark, The Language of Liberty,
1660-1832: Political Discourse and Social Dynamics in the Anglo-American World (Cambridge, 1994). As
Jon Butler points out, evangelicals were often less opposed to the perpetuation of clerical and
denominational authority than historians have sometimes supposed: see Butler, Awash in a Sea of Faith:
Christianizing the American People (Cambridge, Mass., 1990), 164-93. But for the awakenings'
tendencies toward comprehension, see Susan O'Brien, "A Transatlantic Community of Saints: The
Great Awakening and the First Evangelical Network, 1735-1755," AHR 91 (October 1986): 811-32;
Ward, Protestant Evangelical Revival; Timothy D. Hall, Contested Boundaries: Itinerancy and the
Reshaping of the Colonial American Religious World (Durham, N.C., 1994).
32 Clive and Bailyn, "England's Cultural Provinces," 210-13.
33 The Anglicization of Scottish historiography is the subject of Colin Kidd's Subverting Scotland's
Past: Scottish Whig Historians and the Creation of an Anglo-British Identity 1689-c.1830 (Cambridge,
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When viewed from the standpoint of these underlying divisions, the disintegration of Britain's first empire is hardly surprising. Supposing themselves to be equal
members of a greater British nation, colonial polemicists initially responded to the
Stamp Act by demanding that they be accorded the same rights of taxation and
representation they assumed belonged to the British people in general, no matter
where within the king's extended dominions they resided. Because Britain was a
juridically composite state, though, the Americans had comparatively little difficulty
in rejecting Parliament's subsequent requisitions, first by re-imagining the empire
as a confederation of sovereign states bound to each other only by virtue of their
allegiance to the same crown, and eventually by declaring full independence.>' At
each point along this path, the colonists were forced to depart from the conventions
of English political thought, but these departures did not make the radicalism of the
American Revolution unintelligible to men and women elsewhere in the British
world. Significantly, by the time the emissaries of George III came to terms with the
United States in 1782, the Irish Volunteers had already forced the government to
recognize-briefly, as it turned out-the constitutional autonomy of the Dublin
parliament;" and echoes of the Americans' disaffection could be heard as far away
as British Benga1.36
Of equal importance, the revolution demonstrated the limits of imperial sentiment in England, as the self-styled patriots who flocked to join Christopher Wyvill's
County Associations during the spring of 1780 demonstrated just how unwilling
they were to make enormous sacrifices forcing the Americans to remain part of
Britain." In mounting their call for an end to the war in America, Wyvill and his
supporters were following the radical example of "friends of America" such as
1993). For the Ossian myth as a response to these homogenizing tendencies, see Richard B. Sher,
Church and University in the Scottish Enlightenment: The Moderate Literati ofEdinburgh (Princeton, N.J.,
1985), chap. 6; John Robertson, The Scottish Enlightenment and the Militia Issue (Edinburgh, 1985), 104,
238. Similar romantic revivals occurred elsewhere in Britain during the later eighteenth century: see P.
Morgan, "From a Death to a View: The Hunt for the Welsh Past in the Romantic Period," in E. J.
Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, eds., The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge, 1983); N. Vance, "Celts,
Carthaginians and Constitutions: Anglo-Irish Literary Relations, 1780-1820," Irish Historical Studies 22
(1981).
34 Greene, Peripheries and Center, chaps. 6-7. See also J. G. A. Pocock, "States, Republics and
Empires: The American Founding in Early Modern Perspective," in Terence Ball and Pocock, eds.,
Conceptual Change and the Constitution (Lawrence, Kan., 1988), 55-77; Pocock, "Empire, State and
Confederation: The War of American Independence as a Crisis in Multiple Monarchy," in John
Robertson, ed., A Union for Empire: Political Thought and the British Union of 1707 (Cambridge, 1995),
333-45.
35 J. C. Beckett, The Making of Modern Ireland, 1603-1923 (London, 1966), 215-26; York, Neither
Kingdom nor Nation, chaps. 3-4; Thomas Bartlett, "'A People Made Rather for Copies Than
Originals': The Anglo-Irish, 1760-1800," International History Review 12 (1990): 11-25; James Kelly,
Prelude to Union: Anglo-Irish Politics in the 1780s (Cork, 1992).
36 P. J. Marshall, "The Whites of British India, 1780-1830: A Failed Colonial Society?" International
History Review 12 (1990): 30-31.
37 For the domestic crises of 1780-1784 generally, see Herbert Butterfield, George III, Lord North and
the People, 1779-80 (London, 1949); Ian Christie, Wilkes, Wyvill and Reform: The Parliamentary Reform
Movement, 1760-1785 (London, 1962); Philip Harling, The Waning of "Old Corruption": The Politics of
Economical Reform in Britain, 1779-1846 (Oxford, 1996). Despite the merits of each of these works,
there is a pressing need for a study that takes into account the British and imperial dimensions of these
events. For an indication of the possibilities of such an approach, see Wilson, Sense of the People;
Gould, Persistence of Empire, chap. 5; David Armitage, "A Patriot for Whom? The Afterlives of
Bolingbroke's Patriot King," Journal of British Studies 36 (1997): 397-418.
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Wilkes, Catherine Macaulay, and John Cartwright; however, the groundswell of
opposition that finally forced the government to concede the inevitability of defeat
was not limited to groups on the margins of metropolitan politics. Surveying the
wreckage of Britain's North American empire in 1781, the conservative dean of
Gloucester, Josiah Tucker, spoke for many loyal men and women as well, when he
lamented that the British people would have avoided their present difficulties "had
it not been for such Connections" on the far shores of the Atlantic;" The British
may have regarded the American Revolution as a "civil war" between members of
the same nation, but their sense of the boundaries between realm and province
remained sufficiently clear for them to refuse to sacrifice their own peace and
prosperity indefinitely to the greater cause of imperial unity.
IN THE EVENT, of course, Britain's history as an empire did not end with the
recognition of American independence. Where the war was once thought to have
dulled the appetite for colonial rule, scholars now recognize that it coincided with
what C. A. Bayly has called "an imperial revolution in government."39 Convinced
that Britain had erred not in allowing the North American colonists too little liberty
but in granting them too much, imperial officials after 1783 pursued a policy of
aggressive conservatism both in the remaining colonies of settlement and in India,
the cornerstone of the empire's new wealth and power in Asia. Of equal
importance, British merchants continued to expand their empire of goods even
farther, penetrating remote markets in China, Latin America, and the islands of the
South Pacific."? On the eve of Victoria's accession (1837), nearly a quarter of the
world's population was subject to Parliament's theoretically unlimited sovereignty,
and millions more were caught in the spreading web of British trade and industry.
But just what sort of polity was the British Empire? Was it an extended nation,
a vast Anglicized consortium? Or was it something else? Given the Victorian
empire's striking ethnic and political complexity, historians have rightly tended to
avoid sweeping generalizations. For a sense of what contemporary Britons thought
about such questions, however, we might consider the work of J. R. Seeley, the
Regius Professor of Modern History at Cambridge whose lectures on The Expansion of England (1883) were once required reading for anyone seeking to under38 Josiah Tucker, A Treatise Concerning Civil Government, in Three Parts (London, 1781), 250.
Tucker's early endorsement of American independence made him somewhat unusual, but a growing
number of British thinkers were inclined to agree. For the reassessment of imperialism during the final
quarter of the eighteenth century, see Miller, Defining the Common Good, chap. 6 and conclusion;
Anthony Pagden, Lords of All the World: Ideologies of Empire in Spain, Britain and France, c. 1500-c.
1800 (New Haven, Conn., 1995); Bernard Semmel, The Liberal Ideal and the Demons of Empire:
Theories of Imperialism from Adam Smith to Lenin (Baltimore, Md., 1993), chaps. 2-4.
39 Bayly, Imperial Meridian, 116-121. See also P. J. Marshall, "Empire and Authority in the Later
Eighteenth Century," Journal ofimperial and Commonwealin History 15 (1987): 105-22; David Milobar,
"Conservative Ideology, Metropolitan Government and the Reform of Quebec, 1782-1791," International History Review 12 (1990): 45-64; P. J. Cain and A. G. Hopkins, British Imperialism, Vol. 1:
Innovation and Expansion, 1688-1914 (London, 1993), 96-98.
40 P. J. Cain and A. G. Hopkins, "The Political Economy of British Expansion Overseas, 1750-1914,"
Economic History Review, 2d ser., 33 (1980); Michael Greenberg, British Trade and the Opening of
China, 1800-1842 (Cambridge, 1951); D. C. M. Platt, Latin America and British Trade, 1806-1914
(London, 1972).
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stand Britain's imperial past." According to Seeley, the single factor that distinguished "Greater Britain" from the empires of its European competitors was the
existence of a common "English" nationality, which gave its overseas territories an
"ethnological unity." Although Seeley regarded India as an important exception, he
attached considerable importance to the fact that the other four regions-Canada,
the West Indies, South Africa, and Australasia-were all controlled by white
settlers who, if they were not of English descent themselves, nonetheless took their
cultural, political, and religious cues from the norms of metropolitan society." In
a word, Britain's second empire was much like its first. But there was also an
important difference, one that even Seeley's politely racist nationalism could not
obscure. For all its apparent vitality, Seeley's was an empire haunted by the
"secession" of the American colonies, and he was quite sure that the revolution had
created "in the English mind a doubt, a misgiving," which made it difficult for the
metropolitan public to see in their "second Empire" anything but an unstable
consortium whose subjects would eventually follow the same path to independence
as their predecessors had a century before."
With its ethnic bombast and smug belief in the desirability of Britain's imperial
project, Seeley's Expansion of England is too much a work of its day to be regarded
as anything other than a primary text. It is, however, a deeply revealing one, for it
suggests that, in responding to the American Revolution, the British ensured that
their overseas empire would remain, at best, a virtual nation-one still held
together by a combination of force, maritime trade, and the affective bonds of a
shared culture and history, but nonetheless lacking in the sort of uniform political
institutions that Parliament had so disastrously attempted to establish during the
1760s and 1770s. Significantly, Parliament never again attempted to tax the crown's
ultramarine subjects in the direct manner it had used for the North American
colonists between 1763 and 1775. Rather, subsequent generations of colonial
administrators chose to abide by the terms of the Declaratory Act of 1778, whereby
the British government, as part of the attempt by Lord North's ministry to persuade
the Americans to return to the imperial fold, denied its own power to tax colonists
"for the Purpose of raising a Revenue." Indeed, in the discussions that preceded
passage of the Canada Act in 1791, it became clear that whatever other policies
officials might use to check the "political liberty" of the crown's remaining subjects
in British North America, they were no longer free to impose parliamentary taxes.v'
As the great constitutional historian F. W. Maitland reminded his Cambridge
41 For a perceptive account of Seeley's work and general influence, see the introduction to Bailyn and
Morgan, Strangers within the Realm, 1-2. As the editors note, the lectures remained continuously in
print until 1956, the year of the Suez Crisis. See also Peter Burroughs, "John Robert Seeley and British
Imperial History," Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 1 (1973): 191-211; Deborah
Wormell, Sir John Seeley and the Uses of History (Cambridge, 1980); and David Armitage's contribution
to this Forum.
42 J. R. Seeley, The Expansion of England: Two Courses of Lectures (1883; rpt. edn., Boston, 1900),
11-17, 54-60. Significantly, Seeley was convinced that India would eventually achieve independence.
43 Seeley, Expansion of England, 17.
44 Because of. the theoretical breadth of its powers, Parliament could not actually "destroy" its
sovereignty on this score; still, the British tended to act as though it had. For the significance of the
Declaratory Act of 1778, see Gould, Persistence of Empire, chap. 6; Frederick Madden with David
Fieldhouse, eds., Select Documents on the Constitutional History of the British Empire and Commonwealth, 4 vols. (Westport, Conn., 1985- ),2: 592, 611.
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students at the end of the nineteenth century, Parliament enjoyed a legally
boundless sovereignty over "millions and millions" of people "who are not
English"; however, the memory of the American Revolution meant that its
members "habitually" refrained "from making laws of a certain class and must
suspect that if [they] made such laws they would not be obeyed."45
This is not to deny the considerable breadth of Britain's imperial powers. As the
controversy surrounding the abolition of slavery and the slave trade demonstrated,
the British state remained capable of vigorous, unilateral action, far more so, in
some ways, than the democratic republic that took its place on the North American
mainland;" Likewise, the British government repeatedly betrayed a disturbing
capacity for autocracy in India, with alternating bouts of repression and reform."
To a greater degree than is sometimes realized, though, metropolitan interventions
in colonial affairs represented the exception rather than the rule. As P. J. Cain and
A. G. Hopkins have argued in their influential reworking of the RobinsonGallagher thesis, the nineteenth-century empire derived its cohesiveness less from
a unified administrative vision than from the informal forces of "gentlemanly
capitalism" and global trade.:" Even in India, British power depended heavily on
indigenous political structures and what P. J. Marshall has called the "co-operation
or acquiescence" of natives who thought they could "manipulate the new regime for
their own purposes."49 Furthermore, insofar as Seeley and his fellow imperialists
thought about the problem of common political institutions for Britain's world-wide
consortium, they tended to pin their hopes not on an all-powerful parliament or
imperial state but on the sorts of federal theories that they believed had solved the
conflict between center and periphery in the United States and that the Loyal
American refugees who settled Upper Canada during the 1780s helped import into
the mainstream of British political thought."?
45 The Constitutional History of England: A Course of Lectures Delivered by F. W Maitland, H. A. L.
Fisher, ed. (1908; rpt. edn., London, 1963), 339-41. Among the laws that Maitland specifically
mentioned were revenue measures like the ones that had caused the American Revolution.
46 For the divergent responses to abolitionism in Britain and the United States, see esp. David Brion
Davis, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 1770-1823 (Ithaca, N.Y., 1975). For British
antislavery, see also Colley, Britons, 350-60; Oldfield, Popular Politics and British Anti-Slavery.
47 British reform in India was often as high-minded as imperial repression: see Eric T. Stokes, The
English Utilitarians and India (Oxford, 1959); Antoinette Burton, Burdens of History: British Feminists,
Indian Women, and Imperial Culture, 1865-1915 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1994). For similarities in the
tendencies of British reform in Africa, see Susan Pedersen, "National Bodies, Unspeakable Acts: The
Sexual Politics of Colonial Policy-Making," Journal of Modern History 63 (1991).
48 The classic formulation is J. Gallagher and R. E. Robinson, "The Imperialism of Free Trade,"
Economic History Review, 2d ser., 6 (1953). For Hopkins and Cain's partial revision and revival, see P. J.
Cain and A. G. Hopkins, "Gentlemanly Capitalism and British Expansion Overseas, I: The Old
Colonial System, 1688-1850," Economic History Review, 2d ser., 39 (1986); Cain and Hopkins, British
Imperialism, 1: 7-17.
49 P. J. Marshall, "Britain and the World in the Eighteenth Century: I, Reshaping the Empire,"
Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 6th ser., 8 (1998): 16. See also A. J. Stockwell, "Power,
Authority, and Freedom," in P. J. Marshall, ed., The Cambridge Illustrated History of the British Empire
(Cambridge, 1996), 161-63; Tapan Raychaudhuri, "British Rule in India: An Assessment," in Marshall,
Cambridge Illustrated History of the British Empire, 361.
50 Seeley, for one, believed that Britain's best chance for preserving its empire was "to do what the
United States does so easily, that is hold together in a federal union countries very remote from each
other" (Expansion of England, 18-19). For Canada's role in the creation of this "imperial federalist"
paradigm, see esp. John Kendle, Federal Britain: A History (London, 1997), chap. 2. See also Chester
Martin, Empire and Commonwealth: Studies in Governance and Self-Government in Canada (Oxford,
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All this is to say that the British Empire remained at base a composite,
multi-centered polity. Like Seeley, the Victorians who grappled with matters of
imperial governance hoped that a common nationality and sense of patriotism
would supply the glue necessary to hold its distant territories and possessions
together. More often than not, however, things worked out rather differently. In
Ireland, the part of the nineteenth-century empire where the attempt at British
integration was probably most conspicuous, the Union of 1801 remained subject to
recurring bouts of contestation, negotiation, and compromise, much of it in
response to a nationalist movement heavily indebted to the example of the
American Revolution.>! Elsewhere, the effects of Anglicization proved even less
predictable, as the British presence in both India and Africa increasingly produced
new, syncretic indigenous cultures that, more often than not, ended by undermining
the authority of the very officials they were meant to assist.'? At times, even the
English commitment to the empire could seem to flag. Despite the popularity of
imperial and Unionist causes during the later nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries, those who sought to hold Greater Britain together worried almost as
much about "Little Englanders" at home as they did budding movements for
independence in India, Africa, and Ireland.v'
And what about the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Irelandthat composite entity which, according to Benedict Anderson, is "as much the
legatee of the prenational dynastic states of the nineteenth century as the precursor
of a twenty-first century international order'Y>' In searching for the roots of the
current pressure for devolution in Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland, historians have tended to look not to the American Revolution but to the so-called
"British problem" of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.v' Nonetheless, it
might be worth considering whether Britain's admission of defeat in 1783 created
1929); W. H. Nelson, "The Last Hopes of the American Loyalists," Canadian Historical Review 32
(1951): 22-42.
51 The literature on Ireland under the Union is enormous, but see Tom Corfe, The Phoenix Park
Murders: Conflict, Compromise and Tragedy in Ireland, 1879-1882 (London, 1968); M. J. Winstanley,
Ireland and the Land Question, 1800-1922 (London, 1984); V. G. Kiernan, "The Emergence of a
Nation," in C. H. E. Philpin, ed., Nationalism and Popular Protest in Ireland (Cambridge, 1987), 16-49.
52 The literature on subaltern and postcolonial theory is far too extensive to do more than mention
in brief here, but for the unintended, often self-subverting effects of British cultural imperialism, see
Terence Ranger, "The Invention of Tradition in Colonial Africa," in Hobsbawm and Ranger, Invention
of Tradition, 211-62; Homi K. Bhabha, "Signs Taken for Wonders: Questions of Ambivalence and
Authority under a Tree outside Delhi, May 1817," Critical Inquiry 12 (1985): 144-65; Paul S. Landau,
The Realm of the Word: Language, Gender and Christianity in a Southern African Kingdom (Portsmouth,
N.H., 1995).
53 Samuel Hynes, The Edwardian Turn of Mind (Princeton, N.J., 1968), esp. chap. 2; John Turner,
"Letting Go: The Conservative Party and the End of the Union with Ireland," in Grant and Stringer,
Uniting the Kingdom, 255-74. See also Angela Woollacott, "'All This Is the Empire, I Told Myself':
Australian Women's Voyages 'Home' and the Articulation of Colonial Whiteness," AHR 102 (October
1997): 1003-29.
54 Anderson, Imagined Communities, 2.
55 See, for example, John Morrill's suggestive remarks about the continuing "ambiguity" and
"incompleteness" of British history in his introduction to the volume that he co-edited with Brendan
Bradshaw, The British Problem, c. 1534-1707: State Formation in the Atlantic Archipelago (London,
1996),38. See also J. H. Burns, "Ex Uno Plura? The British Experience," in J. C. Boogman and G. N.
van der Plaat, eds., Federalism: History and Current Significance of a Form of Government (The Hague,
1980), 189-216; Alexander Grant and Keith Stringer, "Introduction: The Enigma of British History,"
in Grant and Stringer, Uniting the Kingdom, 3-11.
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a precedent that effectively limited how far the British people would be willing to
press the cause of national unity in subsequent controversies, even when, as has
been the case for the last quarter-century, those controversies involved the
structure of the United Kingdom. There is no British equivalent to the popular
support that the Republican Party was able to mobilize on behalf of the Union
during the American Civil War. 56 Instead, the reemergence of the "Irish problem"
during the 1870s and the first calls for devolution in Scotland not only gave rise to
an unyielding Unionism but also produced the Gladstonian hope that implementing
Home Rule would save the British state from a contest it was not likely to survive.
The reasons for this ambivalence go beyond the response to the American
Revolution. But by treating Britain's only military defeat of the eighteenth century
as an exceptional event, British historians have perhaps overlooked one of the main
reasons why the United Kingdom has remained a composite empire, in which the
sentimental ties of Britishness appeared to bind its inhabitants into a closer political
union but where the appearance of nationhood has been in some ways more virtual
than real.
56 The interpretive possibilities of broadening the study of Anglo-American history to include the
Civil War are evident in Kevin Phillips, The Cousins' Wars: Religion, Politics, and the Triumph of
Anglo-America (New York, 1999).
Eliga H. Gould is an assistant professor of British and American history at the
University of New Hampshire. He is the author of The Persistence of Empire:
British Political Culture in the Age of the American Revolution (Chapel Hill,
forthcoming), which won the Jamestown Prize from the Omohundro Institute
of Early American History and Culture; and co-editor (with Peter Onuf) of
Empire and Nation: The American Revolution in an Atlantic World (in progress).
Recent articles include "American Independence and Britain's CounterRevolution," Past and Present 154 (February 1997); and "'What Is the
Country'? Patriotism and the Language of Popularity during the English Militia
Reform of 1757," in Gerald MacLean, et aI., eds., The Country and the City
Revisited: England and the Politics of Culture, 1550-1850 (1999). His current
project is a book-length study of the imagined relationship between civility and
frontiers in the early modern British Atlantic.
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