Ideal commonwealths and settler colonies: Oceana in Harrington, Adams and Froude

Abstract

ABSTRACTThe Commonwealth of Oceana (1656), written by the English political thinker James Harrington (1611–1677), is a treatise innovative not only for its complex exposition on the domestic constitution of England, but also for its conscious engagement of the foreign empire upon which such a constitution was premised. While the existing literature on Harrington has made much meaning of his precepts on the commonwealth at home, there is less interest in the imperial commonwealth. An examination of John Adams’s seventh letter of Novanglus (1775) and 29th letter of the Defence of the Constitutions (1787), and James Anthony Froude’s Oceana: Or England and Her Colonies (1886), reveals that both the domestic and foreign commonwealth interested American and English readers. Adams (1735–1826), Second President of the United States, borrowed Oceana to critique the balance of dominion between the British metropole and the American settler colonies. Froude (1818–1894), an English historian and observer of empire and colonial matters, appropriated Oceana to advocate for a commonwealth founded upon closer ties between England and her settler colonies in South Africa, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. The cases of Adams and Froude demonstrate that more can be done to understand Oceana as an imperial text.