Carla J. Mulford. Benjamin Franklin and the Ends of Empire.

Abstract

In Benjamin Franklin and the Ends of Empire, Carla J. Mulford offers an intellectual and literary biography that explains how the man many historians have considered to be a committed imperialist ultimately joined the revolution to end the British Empire in part of North America. Rather than arguing for any one particular moment when Franklin turned his back on Britain’s imperial project, Mulford details how early modern liberalism shaped his evolving response to empire throughout his life. Pulling common threads through Franklin’s voluminous writings over time, Mulford argues that Franklin’s turn against the empire was gradual. Thus, Alexander Wedderburn’s humiliation of Franklin in the Cockpit in 1774 was not the beginning of his disillusionment with empire, but the end. In fact, it was “a turn that had been deliberated for over twenty years” (16). Mulford is concerned with much more than quibbles over chronology. Although focused specifically on Franklin, the book’s important contribution is its explanation of the origins of the American Revolution. If that subject matter seems well-worn, Mulford’s methodology is not. Rather than revive the republican synthesis of Bernard Bailyn and Gordon Wood, Mulford sides more with Joyce Appleby in arguing that “the phrase early modern liberalism helps to cut a clear path through the staggeringly confusing historiography” (5). Even though the phrase did not exist in Franklin’s lifetime, which she acknowledges, it best describes Franklin’s intellectual world with its dual concerns of liberty of person and liberty of conscience. Franklin had long had doubts that Britain would secure these liberties for the American colonists, doubts ultimately confirmed in 1774. This historiographical and conceptual framework serves Mulford’s method well with its blending of “historical documentary biography with aesthetic concerns about the life of the mind” (x). She has synthesized an impressive amount of Franklin’s writing, revealing an intellectual coherence and seriousness that many previous biographers have found elusive because of the many (often satiric) personas Franklin adopted as a writer.