William Paterson and the Apotheosis of the Scoto-British View of the British Atlantic Empire, 1747–1762

How the Old World Ended: The Anglo-Dutch-American Revolution, 1500-1800. By Jonathan Scott. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019. Pp. 392. $35.00 hardcover, $16.99 Kindle).To Begin the World Over Again: How the American Revolution Devastated the Globe. By Matthew Lockwood. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019. Pp. 506. $30.00 hardcover, $15.71 Kindle).WHEN future historians write the history of our own time, a major theme, it seems safe to say, will be the awareness that we live in a moment of disruption on a planetary scale. Exactly what the historians of tomorrow make of that fact is hard to say. As Jonathan Scott and Matthew Lockwood argue in the books under review here, two things seems clear. The disruptions of the twenty-first century did not begin yesterday, and the North American colonies that became the United States are an important part of the story.As the long title of How the Old World Ended suggests, Scott's focus is the early modern Netherlands and England, with North America playing an increasingly important role as the eighteenth century progressed. It was here, Scott maintains, in what he calls the “water world” of the North Sea and its Atlantic periphery, that Europeans first liberated themselves from the “production and demographic limits of pre-industrial agriculture” (3, 37). Key to this transformation was a shared Anglo-Dutch culture of commercial, agricultural, and industrial innovation, which allowed the two western European powers to feed populations far in excess of what their own farmers had been able to produce during the Middle Ages. Access to water mattered too, giving Dutch and English merchants, producers, and consumers the ability to buy and sell goods in markets elsewhere in Europe and, eventually, across the Atlantic and around the world. By the sixteenth century, the Dutch had already escaped the “Malthusian trap of finite resources,” and the English were not far behind (37).In the second of the book's three parts, Scott turns to the Calvinist-dominated Protestantism that England, Scotland, and the Netherlands all had in common. From the late sixteenth century, that shared culture opened the way for innovators in each country to exchange ideas in politics, theology, science, agriculture, manufacturing, banking, and commerce, sometimes doing so competitively but often acting in concert. During the second half of the seventeenth century, entanglements between the two powers triggered the Anglo-Dutch wars of 1652–1654, 1665–1667, and 1672–1674. As Scott correctly notes, all three were in important respects civil wars. Of even greater moment, in what Scott labels the Anglo-Dutch Revolution of 1649–1702, the same ties produced two political unions: the federated Anglo-Dutch Republic of 1649 to 1653 and the personal union that accompanied the accession of the Dutch Stadtholder William of Orange and his wife Mary Stuart to the thrones of England, Scotland, and Ireland in 1689.This Anglo-Dutch moment led to the consolidation of what, in the book's third and final section, Scott terms Britain's “maritime monarchy” (215). As its place in his tripartite structure suggests, Scott sees the eighteenth-century British Empire as an Anglo-Dutch creation, like its French and Spanish rivals a maritime dominion but with a cultural, economic, and political dynamism that the Bourbon powers lacked. Feeding that dynamism were Britain's North American and West Indian colonies, whose growing wealth and population played an enormously important role—thanks in no small part to the Navigation Laws first enacted during the Anglo-Dutch wars of the previous century—in the industrialization of England and Scotland. By the time of the American Revolution, the British Empire had become an “English-speaking empire of customers” (283). Although doomsayers predicted that the loss of the thirteen American colonies would be the empire's undoing, the commercial relations forged by more than a century of “supply and demand [were] sufficiently robust to survive independence” (275). Rather than destroying the British factory system and the global commercial dominance that was the result, the American Revolution ensured its success.As he makes his way through this narrative, Scott frequently notes the “eye-watering human cost of early modern European empires,” directing readers to Africa and the Americas in particular (161). Scott is also cognizant of industrialization's ecological and environmental toll (28). Ultimately, however, the story that he tells is one of individual liberation and empowerment. In the conclusion, he has this to say of the Industrial Revolution: Without it we would still be peasant farmers living in a village rather than inhabitants of a city. Our lives would still be governed by the seasonal agricultural calendar, and the constantly evolving daily cycle of light and darkness, rather than the never-ending flow of hourly work time, glow of electricity, and electronic devices which [sic] never sleep, accompanied by aircraft which fly us from one season to another (300).Scott does not ask his readers, even rhetorically, which world they would rather inhabit, the old or the new. But there seems to be little doubt how he thinks most would answer.If Scott makes the case for modernity, one way to read Matthew Lockwood's To Begin the World Over Again is as an extended brief against it, especially modernity as enshrined in the democratic principles of the American Revolution. Although Britain does not appear in the title, Lockwood's chief concern is the British reaction after the entry of France and Spain turned the Revolutionary War into a global struggle for imperial dominance and, many Britons feared, survival. The result, according to the book's title, “devastated the globe.” In thirteen chapters, Lockwood surveys the effects of this devastation, from the Gordon Riots that literally devastated London during the spring of 1780 to Ireland, Honduras, Peru, the Crimean Peninsula, Sierra Leone, India, Australia, and China. For readers versed in British and imperial history, some parts of this story will be familiar, others not so much. Regardless of the details, the outcome was the same. Wherever the effects of the American Revolution were felt, writes Lockwood, the ensuing turmoil inaugurated “an authoritarian counter-revolution that expanded Britain's empire while fatally weakening France and Spain” (7).Having written about Britain's counter-revolution myself, I am sympathetic with what Lockwood wants to do.1 There are, however, problems with attributing most of the agency for that reaction to the American Revolution. Although debunking the American founding has a long and distinguished pedigree, most such accounts focus on the costs that the revolution imposed in North America and its immediate vicinity. By expanding the revolution's costs to include actions that Britain took in India, Australia, and Asia, Lockwood asks his readers to accept a much more capacious litany of woe—one where a “revolution in favor of liberty in one corner of the map initiated a reactionary revolution in the wider world, inflicting new suffering and new restraints on people for whom freedom and independence were not available” (7). Because the American Revolution in the quoted passage is the subject, the thing that activates the British reaction in the predicate, the revolution is also what produces the suffering on the part of people who were neither free nor independent in the participle that follows. Britain, of course, was the power that inflicted most of the suffering—and much of the suffering that it inflicted occurred on the opposite side of the world—but the sentence's structure casts the British as supporting actors, who played the roles that they did because the revolution's American and pro-American dramatis personae gave them no choice. Is that really “how” the American Revolution devastated the globe?Similar questions of agency and causation arise from Lockwood's discussion of the Tupac Amaru revolt in Spanish Peru and the Russian annexation of Crimea. There is no question that both crises were devastating. The Tupac Amaru revolt claimed an estimated 100,000 Indigenous and 40,000 Creole lives (177). In neither case, however, were Britain and America directly involved, nor did the two crises have anything to do with the principles of the American Revolution—or for that matter with each other. Tupac Amaru's main grievance involved fiscal burdens imposed by the Spanish Bourbon reforms of the 1760s and 1770s, while the Crimean conquest of 1783 was one episode in the centuries-long rivalry between the Russian and Ottoman empires for control of the Black Sea. While Lockwood is aware of both sets of facts, what matters is that the two crises occurred during the War of American Independence. “Once more,” he writes of Crimea, “the American Revolution had played an important role” (232).What Lockwood hopes to achieve with this sprawling analysis is not entirely clear. In the introduction, he says that one of his goals is to move past the “idea of American exceptionalism, of the United States as a uniquely moral and chosen nation,” yet the American Revolution is at the center of his book's argument and title (4). The result is not so much a repudiation of the idea as a reworking, one that replaces exceptional triumph with exceptional catastrophe while keeping Americans in the leading roles and with most of the agency. In the book's final chapter, “The Dawn of the Century of Humiliation,” Lockwood retells the familiar story of Britain's forced opening of China during the 1780s and 1790s. Although Americans were sometimes present, notably during the 1784 Lady Hughes affair, when merchants from the East India Company and Imperial officials at Canton nearly came to blows after a Company ship accidentally killed a Chinese sailor during an artillery salute, the British were the ones who took the initiative and played the dominant role in shaping the outcome. Undaunted, Lockwood sees the Chinese humiliation that followed the Lady Hughes affair as yet another indication of how “the effects of the American Revolution … rippled out from the Atlantic, aiding the expansion of the British Empire, and undermining its imperial rivals” (480).When a book so obviously misses the mark, it is tempting to look for ways to improve it. One suggestion would be to replace the “devastation” in the title with something along the lines of “fragmentation” or “fracture.” During the half century after the revolution, the period covered by Lockwood's book, the United States lacked the capacity to project its power much beyond its own borders. Its democratic example extended farther, but there too the political challenge to Britain and Europe's other anciens régimes paled in comparison to the threat posed a decade later by the revolution in France. To say that the American Revolution caused devastation in either area on a global scale strains credibility. What the revolution did do was to fragment the world's leading maritime power, with the independent United States claiming perhaps a third of Britain's prewar merchant marine. The response of Britain and Europe's other colonial powers to that fragmentation most certainly did have global consequences, some of which, though by no means all—for example, the rise of antislavery in Britain and the United States—were devastating. Although not the book that Lockwood's title suggests, the apparent near death and subsequent recovery of the British Empire is closer to the storyline in the book that he has written.Ironically, despite his positive take on modernity, Jonathan Scott has the stronger case for the American Revolution as a globally devastating event. Whereas it would take nearly a century for the United States to rival and eventually surpass Britain as a world power, Scott's American empire of consumers played a role in the industrialization of Britain that was both immediate and direct. The origins of that pairing of supply and demand lay in the decades before the revolution, but the transatlantic relationship reached its zenith during the global Anglo-American “settler revolution” that began, according to James Belich, with the end of the Revolutionary War in 1783 and lasted until the Second World War.2 It does not require much imagination to see a straightforward connection between the Industrial Revolution; the intensification of African slavery and the slave trade, both in the United States and elsewhere in the Americas; the dispossession of Indigenous peoples on a global scale; and the climate crisis of our own time.If there is one point on which Scott and Lockwood concur, it is that the world that the American Revolution created was indeed new. That new world is also, they would surely agree, the world that we inhabit today. What will future historians make of that fact? Will they emphasize the cultures of invention that loom so large in the final section of Scott's book, and will they say that industrial capitalism's restless spirit of innovation, which was what brought humanity to the brink of disaster, was also what pulled us back? Or will the costs, environmental as well as human, seem like the only things worth talking about? The answer, unfortunately, is terrifyingly difficult to predict. Only time will tell.

“And now the new system of government came into being. For the first time since the accession of the House of Hanover, the Tory party was in the ascendant.” So wrote Lord Macaulay concerning the early years of George III's reign. In Macaulay's essay on the earl of Chatham one can find all the elements of the Whig myth of the reign of George III. Most of these ideas have been safely laid to rest by Sir Lewis Namier and modern research; we now know that there was neither a new system of government at the accession of the king nor anything resembling a Tory party. George III was not the tyrant depicted in the Declaration of Independence, there was no plot in the imagined cabinet of “king's friends” to overthrow the constitution, and when, with respect to the colonies, the king declared that he would abide by the decision of his Parliament, he was taking a stand on the side of Whig principles and the Revolution Settlement.One element in the putative resurgence of Toryism that Macaulay and other Whig historians emphasized was High-Anglican political theology. G. H. Guttridge, for example, in hisEnglish Whiggism and the American Revolution(1942) well understood the differences between the Toryism of the period of the American Revolution and that of the earlier century. Tories had come to accept the Revolution Settlement, the Hanoverian succession, and even “a modicum of religious toleration.” But if they had lost the bloom of monarchical sentiment, they retained the concept of a state unified above sectional and party interests. Guttridge's formulas were admittedly too simplistic and they justly invited criticism, but one of the overlooked merits of his work was that he located the continuity of conservative thought in its religious aspect. He observed that, “Standing for the two great Tory principles, national unity and a religious sanction for the established order, the Church of England was the central institution of Toryism—the state in its religious aspect, and the divine principle in monarchical government.” The demolition of the Whig interpretation, however, has resulted in a thorough-going neglect of political discourse, and several notable examples of this deconstruction bear directly upon Anglican political thought. In his introduction to theHistory of ParliamentJohn Brooke wrote that during the American Revolution the Anglican clergy in England had no specific attitude toward the war or any other aspect of government policy. When the reprint of G. H. Guttridge's essay appeared in 1963, Ian Christie wrote a vigorous rebuttal to the idea of a revival of Toryism in the early part of George III's reign without a single reference to the Anglican Church.

Reviewed by: Fit for War: Sustenance and Order in the Mid-Eighteenth-Century Catawba Nation by Mary Elizabeth Fitts Bryan C. Rindfleisch Fit for War: Sustenance and Order in the Mid-Eighteenth-Century Catawba Nation. By Mary Elizabeth Fitts. Florida Museum of Natural History: Ripley P. Bullen Series. (Gainesville and other cities: University Press of Florida, 2017. Pp. xvi, 256. $79.95, ISBN 978-1-68340-005-9.) Mary Elizabeth Fitts, a research associate with the Research Laboratories of Archaeology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, combines historical documentation and archaeological evidence to provide a narrative account of how the modern Catawba Nation coalesced in the mid-eighteenth century. In particular, she demonstrates how a multitude of indigenous groups from around the South—the Charraw, Saponi, Wateree, Sugaree, Yssa, Catapa, and Congaree, among others—merged with the Native peoples of the Piedmont region to create the Catawba Nation in a process that started near the turn of the eighteenth century and concluded with the Seven Years' War. As Fitts argues, this polyglot indigenous community experienced both centralization and ethnogenesis—the creation of a distinctly Catawba polity and identity—as a consequence of its relationship with the colony of South Carolina. Specifically, the main catalyst for such processes stemmed from the "militarization" of Catawba communities during the mid-eighteenth century, given that Catawba peoples acted as the auxiliaries for Carolina in its various conflicts with the French and Spanish, which triggered what Fitts calls "settlement aggregation" and the genesis of a Catawba nation (p. 2). Fitts asserts that coalescence and ethnogenesis also produced unforeseen changes within the Catawba economy and foodways, which, when combined with droughts, settler encroachments, and Iroquois and Shawnee raids during the Seven Years' War, exacerbated a "food security crisis between 1755 and 1759" that nearly crippled the Catawba (p. 2). Altogether, Fitts provides an authoritative account of how the Catawba Nation came to be in the mid-eighteenth century, which scholars have not previously fully understood or realized. The strongest contributions that Fitts offers to our understandings of Native American and southern history relate to the evidence gathered at the archaeological excavations of two Catawba communities, Nassaw-Weyapee and Charraw Town. For example, Fitts utilizes faunal remains, pottery sherds, macrobotanical refuse, pipe stems, post holes, glass beads, metal jewelry, and other objects to supplement what historians know about the Catawba from the documentary record. Using both source bases, Fitts identifies the migrant peoples who composed the modern Catawba Nation and traces where they came from. She also illustrates the shift in Catawba pottery production from a "household craft" to a "collaborative craft," a testament to the centralization and coalescence of Catawba peoples during the mid-eighteenth century (pp. 56, 202). Further, Fitts deploys plant and animal remains to recreate Catawba foodways and to articulate "the effects of Catawba militarism on subsistence activities," which led to the food scarcity crisis of 1755–1759 that "had dire consequences for the Nation" (pp. 245, 307). Such insights alone make this book a worthy addition to scholarship on Native American and southern history. With that said, this book is very narrow in scope and time, which can be problematic for some readers. Whereas other scholars such as James H. Merrell [End Page 709] have charted the trajectory of Catawba history over the course of centuries, Fitts is primarily concerned with a few decades, particularly between the 1720s and the 1760s. While she makes a convincing case for why this short period is important to our understandings of the modern Catawba Nation, she ignores subsequent decades and events—such as the expulsion of the French and Spanish from the South in 1763, Catawba involvement in the American Revolution, the continued relationship between the Catawba Nation and South Carolina after 1783, and a host of other examples during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries—that forced the Catawba peoples to evolve even more as a distinct polity. This book, then, is more about the origins of the Catawba Nation than a history of the modern Catawba people. Bryan C. Rindfleisch Marquette University Copyright © 2018 The Southern Historical Association

Whilst not easily categorised as an ‘evangelical’ herself (she was in fact Episcopalian), Hamilton conveys overtones of Christianity that align Translation of the Letters of a Hindoo Rajah chronologically, if not denominationally, with the Evangelical Revival that emerged in Britain in the mid to late eighteenth century.1 This movement harked back to the ‘great awakening’ experienced by Methodists and other dissenting groups in the mid eighteenth century, but swiftly spread to the established Church of England, where evangelical clergy rose to prominence around the country. The Evangelical Revival has long been acknowledged as a force in early nineteenth-century culture and society, but has more recently been given its due as a prevailing influence on the culture of empire in Britain.2 Its impact, traced over the texts covered in this chapter, centred on the growth of the missionary movement and its drive to convert Britain’s Indian subjects to Christianity, a change from the religious tolerance practised under the governorship of Hastings and promulgated by Jones. Indian religion, particularly Hinduism, became less an object of scholarly curiosity and increasingly one of moral alarm and revulsion in the eyes of the assurgent evangelical lobby. Hindu beliefs, ceremonies and rites were construed in new ways that may be characterised as gothic.

How did events and ideas from elsewhere in the British empire influence development in the thirteen American colonies? What was the effect of the American Revolution on the wider Atlantic world? In Empire and Nation, leading historians reconsider the American Revolution as a transnational event, with many sources and momentous implications for Ireland, Africa, the West Indies, Canada, and Britain itself. The opening section situates the origins of the American Revolution in the commercial, ethnic, and political ferment that characterized Britain's Atlantic empire at the close of the Seven Years' War (1756-1763). The empire then experienced extraordinary changes, ranging from the first stirrings of nationalism in Ireland to the dramatic expansion of British rule in Canada, Africa, and India. The second part focuses on the rebellion of the thirteen colonies-touching on slavery and ethnicity, the changing nature of religious faith, and ideas about civil society and political organization. Finally, contributors examine the changes wrought by the American Revolution both within Britain's remaining imperial possessions and among the other states in the emerging concert of Europe. The essays in Empire and Nation challenge facile assumptions about the exceptional character of the republic's founding moment, even as they invite readers to think anew about the complex ways in which the Revolution reshaped both American society and the Atlantic world.

This chapter surveys the history of the Church of England between the Hanoverian succession and the American Revolution. The religio-political questions that bedevilled the English nation during the 1530s remained live ones during the eighteenth century. What sort of Church should the Church of England be? What should the relation of Church to state be? What should constitute the Church’s doctrinal orthodoxy? Whom should the Church comprehend? What were the bounds of toleration? These questions had not been solved at the Glorious Revolution, so that the story of the eighteenth-century Church of England is the concluding chapter in the story of England’s long Reformation. What ultimately brought that particular story to a close was not Enlightenment secularism but the changes catalysed by war and the fear of relapse into seventeenth-century-like religious violence.

Several recent locality-focused studies suggest that the American Revolution was not particularly 'revolutionary'. These studies note continuity of pre and post-independence institutions and local leadership. But the American Revolution was experienced differently in different communities, and the American Revolution was likely more 'revolutionary' along the military frontiers—the subset of localities that experienced prolonged civil warfare—than in more peaceful locales. This study examines one wartorn locality, Monmouth County, New Jersey, to substantiate this hypothesis. The American Revolution split the pre-war leadership in Monmouth County into Whig and Loyalist blocs, and about half of the county's pre-war leaders dropped out of leadership as the war began. The gaps created by Loyalists dropping out of leadership plus the approximate doubling of local offices created a permeable and democratic, new leadership. Men of modest means came into leadership positions; men disaffected from the cause of independence continued being elected into local offices. Local leaders split into antagonistic factions that faced off at the polls, in the courts, and through a series of rival associations. Local political institutions, such as courts and elections, were scandal-plagued and dysfunctional for long stretches. The State legislature was compelled to censure county leaders for provocative and illegal conduct; twice, it voided the results of the county elections. The crucible of civil warfare created extraordinary stresses in Monmouth County, and by war's end, its leadership and governing institutions were substantially transformed. The pre-war elite were marginalized, new families achieved parity with established families in the leadership ranks, local institutions were re-made, and, despite the tribulations, competent local governance eventually emerged.

Teaching & Learning Guide for: Nabobs Revisited: A Cultural History of British Imperialism and the Indian Question in Late‐Eighteenth‐Century Britain

Two assumptions can be made about the American Revolution: it shaped the Atlantic world and was shaped by the Atlantic world. These Atlantic perspectives challenged accounts of it as a specifically American sequence of events, of defining relevance only to the history of United States. Conjuring states out of colonies was the single most radical act of the American Revolution: indeed, it was precisely what turned that sequence of events from a civil war into a revolution as it began the transformation of the Atlantic world into an arena hospitable, first, to independent states on its western shores, then to republicanism (in the sense of non-monarchical government), and finally to the creation of federal republics — the United States, Venezuela, and Mexico, for instance — on a scale undreamed of by classical and early modern thinkers. This article retraces the course of the Revolution from its beginnings in the aftermath of the Seven Years War and places its events into the context of Britain's Atlantic empire and the shifting fortunes of the other European empires of the Atlantic world.

In Britain's wars of the 1740s Royal Navy press-gangs circulated throughout the Atlantic world attempting to force, or impress, British seamen into naval service. Sailors responded, often with the backing of Atlantic seaport communities, by mounting the most spectacular series of impressment riots in the eighteenth century. These disturbances showed that even while impressment helped to forge a common English-speaking Atlantic world, the institution also operated according to separate laws, customs, and traditions in individual regions of the Atlantic. Moreover, the seizing of men produced different consequences depending on the labor markets of particular seaports. Yet, if impressment riots in the British Isles, the West Indies, and North America did not always look the same, they often did share one common element: the presence of Admiral Charles Knowles. In the 1740s Knowles instigated the largest impressment riots in the history of Britain's Caribbean and American colonies. Indeed, the Boston Knowles Riot of 1747 was the most serious disturbance against British imperial authority in the mainland American colonies in the generation before the Stamp Act crisis. Together the Knowles riots and other acts of resistance against press-gangs demonstrated how dangerous forced naval service had become for Britain's Atlantic empire by the mid-eighteenth century.

Reviewed by: The Storied Landscape of Iroquoia: History, Conquest, and Memory in the Native Northeast by Chad L. Anderson David L. Preston The Storied Landscape of Iroquoia: History, Conquest, and Memory in the Native Northeast. By Chad L. Anderson. Borderlands and Transcultural Studies. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2020. 288 pages. Cloth, ebook, pdf. John Mitchell's 1755 Map of the British and French Dominions in North America was so comprehensive and expansive that it remained influential in imperial boundary making for decades to come.1 As a summary view of the British imperial imagination, it drew upon previous cartographic work and expressed Britain's territorial claims to North America from the Mississippi to Newfoundland. Along the crest of the Appalachian Mountains, Mitchell engraved the word Iroquois in letters that stretched from Virginia's frontier northeast toward Montreal and the Saint Lawrence Valley. The Haudenosaunee, as the Six Nations or Iroquois are more accurately known, figured prominently in British imperial ambitions in North America, as they maintained a powerful and independent Indigenous confederation in the eighteenth-century Northeast. Mitchell's rendering captured the eighteenth-century British fiction that their Six Nations allies controlled those designated lands, based upon an equally fictional Haudenosaunee claim of having won them by right of conquest. As Chad L. Anderson makes clear, Iroquoia was a "storied landscape" that remained central in British and American imaginations, even after triumphant revolutionaries had expanded into that region and destroyed much of the Indigenous landscape in the years following the American Revolution. Anderson's The Storied Landscape of Iroquoia traces how early Americans both erased and appropriated the Native past as they imagined the new republic. Ignoring clear evidence of Haudenosaunee towns and agriculture, Americans increasingly portrayed Natives as forest fixtures rather than as skilled and settled farmers. They justified Native dispossession by arguing that American improvements and "progress" would lead to the "inevitable" decline of Native peoples. Echoing familiar themes of classic works by Anthony F. C. Wallace, Laurence M. Hauptman, and Alan Taylor, [End Page 389] the book's greatest value is in how well it captures contested European and American perceptions of the Haudenosaunee past and their meanings for the early republic.2 But in contrast to those authors, who deeply explored Haudenosaunee experiences and perspectives, Anderson focuses almost exclusively on European or American views of the Iroquoian landscape and past.3 Making a compelling case that a close examination of colonizers' ideologies is warranted, Anderson's central contribution is to trace the evolution of Americans' attitudes about the Haudenosaunee lands and landscape, past and present, as they "struggled over the meaning of conquest" (15). Unfolding like a series of focused journal essays, the book first explores the Haudenosaunee world and landscape in the mid-eighteenth century and argues that the "American Revolution marked the turning point in their ability to define the nature of settlement" (11). Anderson underscores that the Haudenosaunee were settlers with ineffable connections to their homelands. Haudenosaunee territories framed by the Saint Lawrence, Champlain, Mohawk, Susquehanna, and Ohio Valleys constituted a built and natural landscape brimming with historical, mythic, and spiritual meanings for the Haudenosaunee. On the eve of the American Revolution, the Haudenosaunee population of around nine thousand prospered in distinct towns and settlements with abundant agriculture. Anderson describes Haudenosaunee lands prior to the revolution as "relatively unknown to outsiders" (8), but his use of "relatively" misses a long and complicated interaction between Haudenosaunee and Euro-American settlers who had competed for land and resources since the early years of the eighteenth century. He claims, for example, that "Europeans did not permanently settle in the lands of the Haudenosaunee prior to the American Revolution" (19) but does not take into account scholarly literature examining how Palatine, Scottish, Dutch, and other European families had been permanently settled—in many cases cheek by jowl—alongside Oneida and Mohawk communities beginning in the 1720s.4 [End Page 390] Indeed, in the early years of the Mohawk Valley's settlement, Europeans initially requested permission of the Haudenosaunee owners to establish their farms. Similarly, French Canadian habitants lived intermixed with Haudenosaunee communities in the Saint Lawrence Valley (an area of Iroquoia that the book...

W hen eighteenth-century Britons contemplated their possessions in W the West Indies what struck them most was the wealth of these small tropical islands. They were particularly impressed by the wealth of the largest British colony in the Caribbean, Jamaica. Despite Jamaica's well-deserved reputation as a white person's graveyard, Europeans flocked to the island in order to acquire great fortunes. Both for individuals and for the British government the wealth of Jamaica was its greatest attraction. As Charles Leslie wrote in the mid-eighteenth century, 'Jamaica is a Constant Mine, whence Britain draws prodigious riches.' Its wealth and strategic importance in the Caribbean made it, as Marshall notes, the most valuable colony in the eighteenth-century empire, and the colony whose loss the British could have least afforded.' This article reports new estimates about how much wealth Europeans possessed in Jamaica on the eve of the American Revolution. Historians have been interested in this question before, but mainly in order to assess the contribution of the West Indies to British economic development. In an article published in this journal in 1965, Sheridan presented data on the wealth of Jamaica supporting Williams's thesis that the economic contribution of the British West Indian slave colonies to British prosperity in the late eighteenth century was considerable. Sheridan's contentions elicited a fierce response from Thomas who used a counterfactual model derived from Sheridan's own data to deny that Jamaica had made a positive contribution to British economic development. The theoretical arguments as to whether or not Williams was correct will not be addressed in this article. I agree with the recent findings of Eltis and Engerman that sugar cultivation and the slave trade did not form an especially large part of the British economy, although, as Solow has shown, profits from the slave trade comprised nearly 8 per cent of total British investment in 1770 and a remarkable 39 per cent of commercial and industrial investment, assuming that all profits went into these channels. What this article concentrates on is the economic importance of Jamaica within the British American empire before the American Revolution. It revises Sheridan's set of statistical measures about the wealth of Jamaica before the American Revolution, empirical data that have hitherto been accepted

The Industrial Revolution is an easily misunderstood event. In many people’s minds the phrase suggests mass production, assembly lines, and the heavy industry of the late nineteenth century, but these things all came much later. When Arnold Toynbee coined the term Industrial Revolution, he applied it to the technology-driven change of British life as it occurred from 1760 to 1840, opening a very large umbrella. Yet even that umbrella still did not cover the first mass production and assembly lines, nor did it encompass our images of modern heavy industry. Toynbee’s dating of the Industrial Revolution starts when its causes were just taking form, and ends when England had become a mature industrial power. He took in the whole saga of the revolution, but within that saga we can identify the Revolution as a much more specific moment in British history. It is the point at which technology suddenly joined hands with radical social and economic changes. In the 1780s Watt’s advanced steam engines, Hargreaves’ spinning jenny, Cort’s improvement of wrought-iron production, and Wilkinson’s cylinder-boring mill all came into being. At the same time, economic theoreticians David Hume and Adam Smith were setting forth a new economic and social system. This convergence of inventions was part and parcel of the other great revolutions of the late eighteenth century—the American Revolution, the French Revolution, and a spate of lesser European revolutions. We have to understand it in the context of those political and social upheavals. In England, social revolution grew out of eighteenth-century Protestant reform. The Wesleyan movement and the various dissident Protestant groups counted the makers of the Industrial Revolution among their members. The mid-eighteenth century was marked by worldwide discontent with authoritarianism and with the tyranny of the mercantile economic system. The French kings loved elaborate clocks and clockwork toys—devices that were completely preprogrammed. By the late seventeenth century, they had joined with the other western European nations in a clockwork economic system as well. The mercantile economic equation specified trade balances, such that raw material flowed in, manufactured goods flowed out, and gold flowed in.

This essay examines the dynamic between local institutions and allegiance during the American Revolution. It focuses on how committees of safety and the British army affected colonists’ behavior in Brookhaven, New York. Between 1775 and 1778, these New Yorkers’ allegiances ostensibly shifted as their wartime circumstances changed. In 1775, as Brookhaven’s committee of safety monitored colonists’ behavior, a significant number of its male inhabitants signed the Continental Association. Yet in 1778, surrounded by an intimidating military and political presence, an equally significant number took the oath of allegiance to King George III, including almost all the members of the township’s committee of safety. By comparing the behavior of Brookhaven’s committee of safety and colonists to those in other parts of New York, alongside those in Delaware, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, and Virginia, this essay concludes that the lived reality of war and local institutions are central to understanding how most people experienced the American Revolution.

Amid the continuing re-evaluations of how the eighteenth-century British empire functioned, the role of land policy remains neglected. Yet it would not be disputed that land was the primary colonial resource. For colonists, its acquisition and exploitation was the most obvious route to wealth, privilege and political power, while in Britain, for those with access to government favour, colonial land was an investment opportunity for making monetary profit from political influence. By the mid eighteenth century, however, opportunities deriving from possession of colonial land varied a good deal. Proprietorial rights in Maryland and Pennsylvania, largely worthless up to the 1730s, rapidly became highly lucrative. In New England, mounting pressure on the supply of land had sharply forced up land values but diminished the average size of landholdings. For both colonists and British investors seeking new opportunities the highest returns on investment in land were likely to be made in the royal colonies of America and the West Indies, where title to land lay in the crown and its acquisition and tenure were subject to regulations which collectively amounted to crown policy. As it had developed over one hundred and fifty years, crown land policy offered terms which were relatively generous and restrictions which were easy to evade. Its study therefore, and particularly examination of attempts by the crown to change the traditional pattern, contribute to a clearer understanding of the imperial nexus in the period before the American Revolution.