Benjamin Franklin and the Ends of Empire

Abstract

One might reasonably ask if anything new can be written about Benjamin Franklin. Carla J. Mulford's Benjamin Franklin and the Ends of Empire answers that question with a resounding “plenty.” Mulford begins this stimulating and engaging “literary biography” with her self-proclaimed “preoccupation” with Franklin's 1768 articulation of civil liberty—which he conceived as personal dignity, economic independence, and political freedom inextricably linked to form a “common right” for all British citizens, including most importantly those living in far flung colonies (pp. x, 2). Mulford takes on earlier historians' understandings of Franklin's political thought; she is never dismissive or critical of them but instead uses her skills as a literary critic to clarify and expand on what she understands as his ideology at key moments. She challenges those who believe that Franklin always articulated an ardent defense of American political rights in opposition to an overly powerful British Parliament as well as those who argue that Franklin became a passionate defender of American liberties only after Alexander Wedderburn's embarrassing denunciation of him before the British Privy Council (known as the “cockpit”) in 1774. Drawing upon Franklin's published and unpublished papers, Mulford adamantly and consistently maintains that Franklin's early modern liberal notion of sovereignty was “not a new line of argument” for him but rather was an evolving, even maturing, ideology dating from Franklin family tales of political oppression throughout the English Civil War, becoming more fully developed in his 1750 letters to William Shirley, and reaching maturity in 1771 when he toured Ireland and finally understood the permanent damage an overweening power could do to the concept of individual rights grounded in the freedom of labor. Mulford turns a fresh analytical lens on Franklin's often-complicated critique of “the inconsistencies in a system that yoked imperialism to the language of liberalism while denying that any inherent rights and liberties belonged to those most valuable to the commonwealth, the laboring people” (p. 17). For Mulford, nowhere was this more evident than the British support of its eastern empire to the detriment of its American empire. That and not the “cockpit” debacle may have been the straw that broke the camel's back.