Benjamin Franklin and the Theater of Empire

Abstract

Benjamin Franklin and the Theater of Empire Allan Kulikoff (bio) Benjamin Franklin and the Ends of Empire. By Carla J. Mulford. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015. 426 pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. $65.) Recent books on Benjamin Franklin cast a wide net, placing Franklin within the Atlantic republic of letters and community of scientists as well as the political economy of empire and capitalism.1 Carla Mulford's Benjamin Franklin and the Ends of Empire sheds new light on imperial politics, theories of empire, and Enlightenment ideas throughout the Atlantic world. Her focus on empire builds on a resurgence of imperial history, one that devotes equal attention to center and periphery and gives voice not only to policymakers but to women and men, free colonists and servants, slaves and indigenous peoples.2 Influenced by this literature, Mulford incorporates the entire empire—Canada, Ireland, Scotland, and India as well as Britain and her American colonies—into her analysis. Mulford uses Franklin's writings to interpret his evolving views of the British empire, from his adolescence to the 1780s. She examines his well-known pamphlets, including those on paper money (1729), the Pennsylvania militia (1747), American population (1751), Canada in the empire (1760), and immigration to the new nation (1784); as well, however, she incorporates Franklin's letters and the marginalia he wrote in books he read. This essay will focus on the development of Franklin's theory [End Page 77] of empire during his Philadelphia and London years, a period analyzed in the most significant parts of the book. In Mulford's telling, Franklin gradually devised a vision of an egalitarian empire, one in which all its citizens—farmers, artisans, and laborers as well as merchants and gentlemen—shared rights to self-government. Civil liberty, free trade, freedom from coercion, and representative governance—hallmarks of what Mulford (following Annabel Patterson) calls "early modern liberalism"—undergirded Franklin's conception of empire.3 He argued that the ends of empire "ought to be the creation, material support, and protection of the best possible living circumstances for the greatest number of people living within the borders of territories held as one national community" (14). Franklin built his ideas on empire from his reading of seventeenth-and early eighteenth-century British liberal theorists John Milton, John Locke, Algernon Sidney, James Harrington, John Trenchard, Thomas Gordon, Bernard Mandeville, and Daniel Defoe. He drew examples from the English Reformation, seventeenth-century revolutions, and contemporary politics. His Indian negotiations, conflicts with Pennsylvania's proprietors, parliamentary lobbying, imperial politics in India, and travels in Britain and Europe informed his theories of empire. Franklin began to examine the empire in the late 1720s. He framed his 1729 tract A Modest Enquiry into the Nature and Necessity of a Paper-Currency around writings of English political economists, especially William Petty, and colonial supporters of paper money. Since British authorities could veto colonial legislation, it was necessary for Franklin to deal with the nature of the empire in his discussion of the controversy. He conceived of the empire, Mulford reports, as an interconnected whole, in which British prosperity depended on the prosperity of its colonies—Pennsylvania, with its busy port of Philadelphia, foremost among them. In his view, a new paper money emission would make exchange easier and thereby improve Pennsylvania's trade; trade, in turn, would attract immigrants to settle frontier lands and make goods Britain needed. Mulford's discussion of Franklin's Modest Inquiry is the best I have read, but it misses how Franklin tweaked the class implications of earlier writings. English and colonial exponents of paper currency emphasized commerce and those who conducted it; Franklin stressed farmers and handicraft workers. In his 1664 England's Treasure by Forraign Trade, Thomas [End Page 78] Mun wrote that paper money would give opportunities "to the younger & poorer Merchants to rise in the world, and to enlarge their holdings" (90–91). In contrast, Franklin praised "Labouring and Handicrafts Men (which are the chief Strength and Support of a People)." Paper money emissions benefitted "Brickmakers, Bricklayers, Masons, Carpenters, Joiners, Glaziers, and several other Trades immediately employ'd by Building, but likewise to Farmers, Brewers, Bakers, Taylors, Shoemakers...