Imperial Crisis Research Articles

Arguing about Empire: Imperial Rhetoric in Britain and France, 1882-1956. By Martin Thomas and Richard Toye.

Not so long ago it seemed enough of a methodological challenge to position a single empire and its metropole within the same analytic frame. But the idea of writing on just one empire is fast becoming outmoded. The preoccupation now is with the ways in which imperialisms intersected: with connected and comparative histories of empire, with trans-imperialism and co-imperialism and sub-imperialism. So Arguing about Empire, a book about the rhetorical and political interdependence of British and French imperialism between the invasion of Egypt and the nemesis of Suez, is decidedly on-trend. It is based on excellent scholarship and makes important points. It is not entirely clear, however, what its principal objectives are. The book deals with the arguments made by British and French writers and politicians about a series of imperial crises, all involving both countries, all generating a significant volume of public discussion. Each of the book’s seven chapters deals with a specific crisis, namely, the 1882 invasion of Egypt; the Fashoda incident of 1898; the Moroccan crises of 1905 and 1911; the Chanak crisis of 1922; World War II (two chapters); and Suez. The focus, then, is on arguments about North Africa and the Middle East, which is justified on the basis that these were the regions in which British and French imperial interests came most closely into contact. The authors contend that looking comparatively at how British and French actors wrote and spoke about imperial crises helps us to grasp the specificities of the two nations’ imperial rhetorics, and the ways in which those rhetorics came to intertwine and to condition one another. The book further suggests that such an analysis can illuminate the gaps between the reality of ‘co-imperialism’ and the oppositional public language with which it was cloaked, and that examining imperial rhetoric can offer us insights into the real, unstated motivations behind empire. Arguing about Empire, then, is by no means the pure discursive history that its title might seem to imply. It seeks not only to reconstruct arguments about empire, but also to connect them with imperial realities and practical political decision-making.

“As Serves our Interest best”: Political Economy and the Logic of Popular Resistance in New York City, 1765–1776

“As Serves our Interest best”: Political Economy and the Logic of Popular Resistance in New York City, 1765–1776 Michael D. Hattem (bio) During the imperial crisis of 1765 to 1776, New York acquired the reputation of a “Tory,” or loyalist, colony. This characterization arose from the colony’s apparent reticence toward independence and the continued control of the same pre-crisis elite leadership in the final years before independence. Yet, the inhabitants of the city of New York undertook actions during the Stamp Act crisis that were as “radical” as any in the other colonies. Indeed, Pauline Maier once wrote that the “worst apparent threat of anarchy” during the colonial Stamp Act resistance “occurred at New York.”1 Hence, historians of colonial New York have long been left to wonder: Why were a people so riotous in the fall of 1765 during the Stamp Act crisis unwilling to lend similar support to the radicals in 1774? How are we to understand this seemingly paradoxical shift in the behavior of colonists in New York City? When and how did New York go from a city of radical Stamp Act protestors to a city of moderate patriots and outright loyalists?2 This article argues that, in fact, colonial New Yorkers’ response to the imperial crisis remained consistent throughout. [End Page 40] Historians and contemporaries alike saw New York City as a loyalist stronghold that failed to heed “the united voice of America” and suffered from “a want of spirit in the cause of freedom.”3 Some historians, such as Roger J. Champagne, saw popular support for elite leadership throughout the imperial crisis as the product of a deferential political and social culture dominated by the elite.4 Alternatively, neo-progressive historians, including Edward Countryman and Gary B. Nash, viewed common New Yorkers in this period as radical proto-democrats engaged in a separate struggle with the colony’s elite over the “democratization” of “politics and society.”5 Neither interpretation consistently explains New Yorkers’ political behavior throughout the entirety of the imperial crisis. Surely, the people’s riotous and violent behavior during their rebellion against the Stamp Act in 1765 was anything but deferential.6 Yet, their support for the moderate, elite leadership, who were in no way committed to independence in 1775, hardly seems reconcilable with the picture of a radicalized populace seeking a “democratic revolution” ten years earlier.7 Both interpretations stem from a fundamentally ideological approach and, therefore, take for granted that New Yorkers were primarily concerned with political ideology. However, the seemingly varying popular response in New York City becomes not only reconcilable but also logical when one looks at the [End Page 41] economic circumstances surrounding the major turning points during the imperial crisis. Rather than a microhistorical focus on a single event, this article looks broadly at the entirety of the imperial crisis in New York City refracted through the lens of political economy–i.e., the intersections between politics and economy–and suggests a new perspective on the city’s popular resistance. The abstract ideas behind imperial policy and colonial resistance mattered far less to many colonists than the immediate effects such policies and resistance had on their daily lives and their immediate prospects for social mobility. Therefore, an ideological interpretation alone is simply too narrow an analytical category to fully understand the processes and events occurring in pre-revolutionary New York City. Historians have largely ignored how New York’s self-interested commercial culture influenced popular politics, especially during the imperial crisis. They seem to have understood the elite political culture of self-interest and popular political culture as distinct and isolated from each other. Indeed, the historiography of colonial New York in the last forty years has focused on the colony’s divisive features such as factionalism, class conflict, and diversity.8 These interpretations, however, have obscured underlying unifying factors, particularly the economy’s interconnectedness between classes, which meant that common New Yorkers’ own economic prosperity was directly tied to that of the city’s elite. Studies have shown that income distribution in the Middle Colonies was much more level than it is today. In 1774, the top 1% of households earned...

Otho Holland Williams in the American Revolution by John H. Beakes

Reviewed by: Otho Holland Williams in the American Revolutionby John H. Beakes T. Cole Jones Otho Holland Williams in the American Revolution. By John H. Beakes Jr.(Charleston, S.C.: Nautical and Aviation Publishing Company of America, 2015. Pp. [viii], 346. $28.95, ISBN 978-1-877853-79-1.) From the Broadway breakout sensation Hamiltonto the best seller list, the Founding Fathers are all the rage at the moment. Yet beyond the pantheon of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton, John Adams, James Madison, and Benjamin Franklin, few Americans could name another member of the Revolutionary generation. Six men, no matter how great, could not have staged a revolution. Who were their compatriots? This is the question John H. Beakes Jr. wants to answer, one forgotten founder at a time. In his third biography of a lesser-known Revolutionary, Beakes turns his pen to the life of Marylander Otho Holland Williams. This deeply researched narrative portrays Williams not unlike Alexander Hamilton, as a bright and dynamic young man who rose from obscurity and tragedy to play an indispensable role in America’s revolutionary struggle. Orphaned at the age of thirteen, Williams, who possessed the compelling combination of good looks, above-average height, and a clever mind, soon caught the attention of powerful patrons in his native Maryland. But it was the imperial crisis, and the war it ignited, that gave Williams a chance to make his name. An early volunteer for the Continental army, Williams served with distinction throughout the contest, earning accolades from Congress for his role in the southern campaigns. After the war, he parlayed his military experience into a lucrative administrative post, which he held until his untimely death in 1794. His is a story worth telling. Beakes’s book, however, is not a conventional biography. From the outset, the author is clear that his interest is in Williams the soldier. Beakes devotes over two-thirds of his study to Williams’s role in the Carolina campaigns of 1780–1782. These are events he knows well from his earlier biographies of Henry Lee and John Eager Howard. In the book’s strongest chapter, Beakes sets up his narrative with a detailed analysis of the geographic, ecological, and social histories of the southern states. Rivers are not often noted in general histories of the war, and Beakes’s discussion of the importance of waterways for the movement of troops and matériel is insightful. Additionally, Beakes’s narration of the campaigns’ various battles and skirmishes is fast paced and approachable for nonspecialists. As the story of one man’s fight for American independence, the book succeeds admirably, but it fails to live up to its potential to broaden our vision of the American Revolution. Despite some promising early gestures, the book suffers from a critical lack of context. The reader learns precious little about Williams’s place in the political, economic, and social worlds of colonial and early republican Maryland. For example, Beakes glosses over Williams’s career as a slave owner on the grounds that the relationship between the Founders and slavery is “unpleasant to contemplate” (p. 293). Beakes tells us that Williams was a Mason but includes nothing about the political salience of Freemasonry during the age of revolutions. Beakes is on firmer ground during the war years, but the reader still yearns for more contextual information about life in the Continental army. We often hear from Washington and other senior officers but rarely from the enlisted men who composed the bulk of the army. [End Page 152]Beakes compounds the bias within his source base by ignoring the excellent scholarship on the social and cultural history of the Continental army. Instead of a nuanced presentation, Beakes gives the impression that elite men like Williams secured independence by their bravery in battle and their fortitude to discipline social inferiors. These contextual shortcomings notwithstanding, the book is a highly readable retelling of the Revolutionary War through the eyes of one of its most active participants. T. Cole Jones Purdue University Copyright © 2017 The Southern Historical Association

The Comic Press, Ireland, and Empire, 1882–85

The Comic Press, Ireland, and Empire, 1882–85* Michael de Nie (bio) In the years since Éire-Ireland's 2007 special issue on Ireland and empire, scholarship on this topic has grown at a steady pace and continues to be one of the most dynamic fields of Irish Studies. Although Irish nationalist anti-imperialism still commands the lion's share of attention in Irish imperial studies, in recent years scholars have increasingly explored how Irish men and women operated within the British empire as well as created their own parallel or shadow imperial networks.1 These and other recent studies have helped us to appreciate the rich variety and depth of Irish imperial experiences. Our understanding of the place of Ireland within British imperial sensibilities, however, remains somewhat limited. Scholars have usefully explored how Irish commentators placed Britain within their understanding or philosophy of imperialism and how they used imperial events to further Irish political goals, but relatively little attention has [End Page 216] been paid to the other half of the story. Ireland was, after all, an integral, if sometimes fractious, part of the United Kingdom throughout the nineteenth century. It occupied an important position in British thinking about empire and particularly about imperial crises. A wide swath of British journalists and politicians assumed that Ireland offered useful lessons, both negative and positive, for imperial policy. British understandings of Irish society and politics provided an interpretive structure and vocabulary that were used to define and respond to events in Egypt, India, and elsewhere. If we seek to better understand Ireland's relationship with the British empire, it is essential to explore not just how Irish men and women viewed, opposed, and served in the empire, but also how Ireland and Anglo-Irish relations informed imperial policy at the metropole. The ideal approach, I believe, is one that explores opinion across the constituent parts of the United Kingdom. Empire—and particularly imperial crises—engendered rich, multivalent conversations that did not stop at the Irish Sea. Studies of regional opinion can be quite illuminating, of course, but they can also lead us to forget that these political and journalistic voices were in dialogue not only with supporters and opponents in different parts of the United Kingdom, but also in a sense with other pressing domestic and foreign issues and events. In my opinion there is simply no better source for discovering and tracing these dialogues than the popular press, the primary source of information for contemporaries on all events foreign and domestic. By studying a wide political and geographic cross-section of newspapers and periodicals, we can understand contemporary interpretations and responses to imperial and Irish events, as well as the larger, UK-wide context in which government policy was crafted. This exchange or dialogue has been largely if not entirely overlooked in the relevant historiographies. Numerous historians have examined British intervention in Egypt, from Robinson and Gallagher onward, but one finds nary a mention of the contemporaneous Land War in their writings.2 Until Paul Townend's recent masterful study one would have been likewise hard-pressed to find any acknowledgment of the Egyptian crisis in the voluminous scholarship on the Land [End Page 217] War and the rise of Charles Stewart Parnell and his party.3 Yet for contemporaries these were very much related events—events that demonstrated for some observers the mendacity of popular anti-imperial leaders and the untrustworthiness of Gladstone and his party. For others, and particularly for advanced nationalists in Ireland, they demonstrated the hypocrisy and violence at the heart of the imperial system. In both cases the events were understood as a piece, and the sooner historians begin to appreciate the comprehensive nature of imperial ideology, the sooner we can begin to craft a richer, and to my mind more satisfying, account of Ireland and empire. This essay will take a small step toward this goal by examining the ways in which comic papers and editorial cartoons published on both sides of St. George's Channel used Ireland and the Irish question as a lens through which to view and understand events in Egypt and the Sudan between 1882 and 1885 and the...

The Ideological Origins and the History of Political Thought

The Ideological Origins and the History of Political Thought1 Eric Nelson I first read Bernard Bailyn's The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution when I was a nineteen-year-old student in the Harvard History Department's sophomore tutorial. The text was assigned by my late friend and teacher Mark Kishlansky, who began our discussion of the book by posing the same deceptively simple question that he asked about each historiographical masterwork on the syllabus: "What kind of book is this?" I remember thinking rather smugly that, in this case at least, the question had an obvious and straightforward answer: surely, Ideological Origins was a work of intellectual history—and, more specifically, a contribution to the history of early American political thought. But it now strikes me that this answer, while not incorrect, was, and is, quite beside the point. Mark was not asking us a banal question about the genre to which Bailyn's monograph belonged, but rather a deep one about how Bailyn understood that genre. To present Ideological Origins as a history of political thought is, implicitly, to defend a particular conception of what sort of thing "political thought" is and what its history looks like. What, Mark wished us to ponder, is that conception? I found myself asking this question with a renewed sense of urgency more than fifteen years later as I grappled with a puzzling feature of my own contribution to the history of early American political thought. Ideological Origins is standardly presented as the urtext of the radical Whig or republican reading of patriot political theory, and it was this account that I chiefly intended to challenge in The Royalist Revolution.2 And yet, as I made (or tried to make) my revisionist case, I noticed something odd: while my disagreements with later Whig historians were quite numerous, I only rarely found myself dissenting from Bailyn himself. Surprisingly few of my claims seemed to contradict his, and vice versa. Instead, our accounts seemed to be largely orthogonal to each other. We were not, I came to see, giving rival answers to the same question, but rather answering fundamentally different questions.3 I was proposing an answer to the question: "What did American patriots think about politics?" That is, what were their constitutional views and theoretical commitments about ideas such as representation, monarchy, rights, and prerogative? This is likewise the question that Whig intellectual historians have taken [End Page 314] themselves to be answering, albeit in a very different fashion. Bailyn, to be sure, is not uninterested in what patriots thought about politics. But in Ideological Origins he chiefly asks instead: "How did patriots think about politics?" In other words, what worldview and habits of mind caused them to interpret political events as they did? At issue here is the distinction between political theory and what we might call political consciousness. Bailyn's argument is that the radical Whig intellectual culture of British America produced an "articulated worldview" that "constituted in effect an intellectual switchboard wired so that certain combinations of events would activate a distinct set of signals—danger signals, indicating hidden impulses and the likely trajectory of events implied by them."4 Patriots were "hard wired," for various reasons, to interpret the measures of the British administration as "evidence of nothing less than a deliberate assault launched surreptitiously by plotters against liberty both in England and in America."5 They had been taught to regard the political world as a site of conspiracy and corruption, in which the real intentions of government were rarely, if ever, publicly acknowledged. But this sort of political consciousness is, in principle, quite modular: it can be attached to any number of different substantive views of what liberty is and what would in fact threaten it. My basic claim is that, while Whig political consciousness remained a constant feature of the American intellectual landscape throughout the imperial crisis and the revolution, it came eventually to be paired with an anti-Whig political theory. American patriots (or a great number of them, at any rate) thought as Tories but like Whigs. I cannot of course offer an adequate defense of this claim here, but I hope...

Resurfacing Symptomatic Reading: Contrapuntal Memory and Postcolonial Method inThe Remains of the Day

AbstractThis essay onThe Remains of the Dayand modes of reading takes as its starting point the novel’s historical setting of July 1956, which coincides with the beginning of the Suez crisis. Although the crisis never explicitly registers in the narrative, various moments of imperial affirmation and anxiety suggest that it may have the status of a symptom. I read with and against this supposition. In the essay’s first section, I show how the repression of imperial crisis in Stevens’s narrative is entangled with his memories of fascist appeasement and complicity. Prompted by the text’s pervasive and self-conscious interest in Freudian figures of memory—its untimeliness and displacements—the second part argues thatThe Remains of the Dayincorporates the symptom as an aesthetic and historical strategy in order to itself theorize a postcolonial symptomatology. The novel thus helps us complicate the proposition that symptomatic reading is something critics do to texts and suggests, in its allegory of symptomatic reading, the contours of a postcolonial interpretive method.

Editors’ Introduction

Editors’ Introduction Thomas D. Beal, D.L. Noorlander, and Susan Goodier This year the editors of New York History: A Quarterly Journal plan to commemorate transitional moments in the state’s history. Two hundred years ago, New York turned its attention toward internal improvements, and, after years of debate and political conflict, it began the long and arduous process of constructing the Erie Canal. Even before its completion, the canal transformed the state’s economy and encouraged migrants and immigrants alike to settle on the western frontier. One hundred years later, in 1917, after decades of activism and calls for reform, women won the right to vote in New York. One of the central demands of those who gathered at the Seneca Falls Convention in July 1848 was achieved at the state level. With special essays and themed issues, the editors plan to devote part of this volume (our ninety-eighth) to both events. Ranging from the eighteenth to the twentieth century, the essays in this issue focus on several transitional moments. In “‘I want a Packet to arrive,’” Rohit T. Aggarwala offers an assessment of how and why New York City became the city where Great Britain headquartered its military in the eighteenth century. The Stamp Act crisis is most often associated with Boston, but residents of New York City were equally radicalized in 1765. Afterwards, however, most historians cast the city as a loyalist stronghold. Michael D. Hattem’s essay, “As Serves our Interest best,” provides a dramatic reinterpretation of the political ideology of the years after the Stamp Act, one that challenges our assumptions about the city’s response to the imperial crisis. After the American War for Independence, New York wrestled with how to punish convicted criminals. A new emphasis on incarceration and the building of a New York State Prison on Manhattan Island (often referred to as Newgate) were two of the outcomes of that debate. Locking up convicted criminals, however, created new challenges, like overcrowding and inmate discipline. The 1803 Newgate prison riot offers Jonathan Nash, in “‘The Prison has Failed,’” an opportunity to give [End Page 5] voice to those who experienced life inside the institution. The issue’s next essay examines one moment in Al Smith’s long political history. Widely considered one of New York’s most popular and charismatic political figures, Smith lost the 1928 presidential election and even his home state. In “Vanquished Warrior,” Robert Chiles offers a revisionist interpretation that focuses on downstate voters (not the more Republican-leaning upstate districts) to explain Smith’s loss. Along with a review essay and a large number of book reviews we offer readers these thoughtful essays on New York’s history. Producing New York History is both a privilege and a challenge, and the editors cannot do it alone. Peer reviewers, colleagues, friends and especially a hardworking and committed group of Research Assistants (Waldo A. Espinosa, Tierney E. Lynch, Meagan R. Moore, Sean Prahalis, Brittany E. Williams and Jennifer A. Yung) have made valuable contributions to the issue. We thank them and the readers who have sent words of criticism or encouragement; they help us produce a better product. If you have questions or comments about the journal’s contents, we encourage you to contact us by electronic mail at publications@fenimoreart.org. [End Page 6] Copyright © 2017 Fenimore Art Museum

“The Attachment of the People”: The Massachusetts Charter, the French and Indian War, and the Coming of the American Revolution

During the French and Indian War, Massachusetts colonists invoked their charter rights to control mobilization. Colonists revered their charter because it provided effective government that tangibly affected their lives. They entered the Imperial Crisis believing that British officials such as William Shirley, Francis Bernard, and Thomas Hutchinson acknowledged the charter as the inviolable constitution of the province.

Giving Peace to Europe: European Geopolitics, Colonial Political Culture, and the Hanoverian Monarchy in British North America, ca. 1740–63

As William Pepperrell, the famed commander of New England’s expedition against Louisbourg, was laid to rest at Kittery Point in 1759, his eulogist praised the departed general for giving peace to Europe. This sermon spoke to an influential yet scarcely studied strand of British North American public discourse, in which colonists meditated upon the workings of the eighteenth-century European state system and the developing role of the British Empire as a great power. During the tumultuous global conflicts from 1739 to 1763, British American geopolitical thinking exerted a profound influence on colonial political culture, fostering support for the Hanoverian monarchy as the “arbiter” of Europe while inspiring commensurate discourses of royalism and colonial British nationalism. However, British Americans participated in this transatlantic debate over British foreign policy on their own terms, fashioning distinctively colonial conceptions of intervention, allegiance, and nationality. These subtle expressions of Americanization, which would come to have a major impact on the imperial crisis after 1763, present a starting point for reconsidering the historical importance of this rich but little-quarried vein of colonial political culture.

Endgame for Empire: British-Creek Relations in Georgia and Vicinity, 1763–1776 by John T. Juricek

Reviewed by: Endgame for Empire: British-Creek Relations in Georgia and Vicinity, 1763–1776by John T. Juricek Tyler Boulware Endgame for Empire: British-Creek Relations in Georgia and Vicinity, 1763–1776. By John T. Juricek. Contested Boundaries. (Gainesville and other cities: University Press of Florida, 2015. Pp. x, 326. $74.95, ISBN 978-0-8130-6074-3.) The year 1763 was a pivotal moment in the Southeast. The Creeks emerged as the region’s most potent Indian nation, while Britain ascended as the dominant imperial power. Anglo-Creek relations thus took on added significance after the Treaty of Paris (1763), a point John T. Juricek makes in this richly detailed and nuanced account of British-Creek diplomacy between 1763 and 1776. The book builds on his earlier publication, Colonial Georgia and the Creeks: Anglo-Indian Diplomacy on the Southern Frontier, 1733–1763(Gainesville, Fla., 2010), but with emphasis on the consequential interwar years and with greater attention to the larger geopolitical context within which Creeks and Anglo-Americans maneuvered. [End Page 907] When the Seven Years’ War ended, Britain sought to improve relations with Native Americans through a sustained campaign of reform. It was, Juricek writes, “a rare time of fresh thinking in London about the Indians of North America” (p. 32). The king issued the Proclamation of 1763 in part to protect Indian lands; a congress at Augusta attempted to restore Anglo-Indian friendships, and a comprehensive reform plan in 1764 addressed two sore spots in British-Indian relations: conflicts over trade and land. The plan of 1764, in particular, introduced far-reaching measures, such as an unregulated Indian trade open to all British subjects. Two central figures in shaping and implementing postwar policy, Superintendent John Stuart and Governor James Wright, were often at odds, but they agreed that free trade was a disastrous policy. London would not budge, even after it became evident that open trade had failed miserably, leading to an “explosive increase” in traders and a mountain of debt for Indian peoples (p. 86). These debts had a direct bearing on land dealings. Accordingly, Juricek calls attention to one of the least studied but “most important Indian conferences of the entire colonial era,” which resulted in the signing of the New Purchase treaty (p. 177). In 1773 Cherokees and Creeks ceded common hunting grounds to compensate for their trading debts. A complicated land transaction followed, but the consequences of the exchange were extraordinary. The New Purchase exacerbated generational rifts within Creek society, whereby frustrated young warriors made the ceded territory too dangerous for British settlement. This hampered land sales, which meant that traders and merchants who had forgiven Indian debts in expectation of payment from the sale of lands were left empty-handed. When the American Revolutionary War erupted several years later, many of these dissatisfied traders and merchants were driven to the Patriot cause. The New Purchase, in short, was a “disaster for the imperial cause,” for it placed Britain and its agents outside well-worn paths of trade and communication (p. 215). In the end, British reform efforts failed and were largely abandoned. One reason was that Indian affairs took a backseat to the worsening imperial crisis. Second, reform did not come from an altruistic place, Juricek notes, but from concerns about Creek (and other Indian) threats to British settlement and expansion. Furthermore, while the British considered Indians as the king’s subjects, officials made few efforts to assimilate Indians into the empire. Finally, Creek resentment over trade was too ingrained, and British promises to protect Creek lands were too often left unfulfilled, both of which hampered the continuation of friendly British-Creek relations. To be sure, there were progressive individuals like Superintendent Stuart who were committed to reform, but as Juricek laments, “There were not enough John Stuarts to sustain it” (p. 247). Endgame for Empire: British-Creek Relations in Georgia and Vicinity, 1763–1776is an important study of Anglo-Creek diplomacy during a period that is often overlooked. Whereas key events such as Pontiac’s War and the Fort Stanwix treaty had lasting implications for peoples north of the Ohio River, Juricek shows that the interwar years were equally formative...

Imperial Crisis and Muslim-Christian Relations in Ottoman Syria and Palestine, c. 1770-1830

In the middle of the nineteenth century, a wave of anti-Christian violence broke out in Ottoman Syria. Prevailing interpretations tie this social turmoil to the region’s sudden integration into the modern world economy, further aggravated by state reforms that upset long-standing political hierarchies. This paper argues that the origins of these disturbances lay not in the penetration of the modern world economy but in the extended political crisis that shook the Ottoman Empire during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Sectarian tensions therefore need to be seen, at their root, as political reactions to the slow disintegration of the early-modern political order. In its timing and causes, this Ottoman experience helps to highlight a broader “sectarian turn” that overtook many other parts of Eurasia in the same period.

The Mid-Atlantic and the American Revolution

ABSTRACT This essay explores the mutual effects of the American Revolution and the Mid-Atlantic region on each other, with its principal emphasis on how the Revolution impacted the region, and somewhat less on the obverse consequences. Reviewing previously published and forthcoming arguments about how New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Delaware were a “fabricated” regional entity—a construct of political, economic, and social intention as much as or perhaps more than spatial imagination and geographical expression—it suggests that the cumulative impacts of the Seven Years' War, the British “imperial crisis” from 1763 to 1775, and the war of the American Revolution itself, uprooted and otherwise destroyed much of the spatial framing systems of the earlier colonial era. Notwithstanding these consequences, the article argues that the region's structural and functional integrity, as a shaper of both elite and more ordinary experience, largely survived the collapse and peeling away of this colonial “scaffolding.” It offers some tentative suggestions about how that improbable outcome may have obtained, and proposes some areas to which future research attention to the Mid-Atlantic should be paid.

Robert Love’s Warnings: Searching for Strangers in Colonial Boston by Cornelia H. Dayton and Sharon V. Salinge, and: Taming Lust: Crimes Against Nature in the Early Republic by Doron S. Ben-Atar and Richard D. Brown (review)

Reviewed by: Robert Love’s Warnings: Searching for Strangers in Colonial Boston by Cornelia H. Dayton and Sharon V. Salinge, and: Taming Lust: Crimes Against Nature in the Early Republic by Doron S. Ben-Atar and Richard D. Brown Thomas J. Humphrey (bio) Keywords Microhistories, Poor relief, Crime in early U.S., Early U.S. legal system Robert Love’s Warnings: Searching for Strangers in Colonial Boston. By Cornelia H. Dayton and Sharon V. Salinger. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014. Pp. 272. Cloth, $34.95.) Taming Lust: Crimes Against Nature in the Early Republic. By Doron S. Ben-Atar and Richard D. Brown. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014. Pp. 216. Cloth, $34.95.) Over the past forty years, historians have produced a veritable mountain of studies that may best be described as microhistories. When writing microhistories, historians often invoke a specific moment, or a few moments, from a subject’s life to reach some broader conclusions of that subject’s community.1 Two recent books provide excellent examples of microhistory. In Robert Love’s Warnings, Cornelia H. Dayton and Sharon V. Salinger study the copybooks and warnings issued by Robert Love to investigate the region’s mobile working population. In doing so, they uncover Boston’s civic, legal, social, and civil community in the last decade of the colonial period. In Taming Lust, Doron S. Ben-Atar and Richard D. Brown examine the lives of Gideon Washburn and John Farrell, two elderly men who, in the 1790s, were accused and convicted of bestiality. The trials and their aftermath reveal a New England in flux as residents struggled to reconcile their cultural and political traditions with the new realities of a post-Revolutionary United States. Both books use their specific subjects as windows to explore and explain the wider world these men inhabited. While Dayton and Salinger expertly detail the changes Boston’s mobile working class faced as the imperial crisis [End Page 313] intensified, Ben-Atar and Brown show us a New England in turmoil as the region’s residents tried to make sense of their new, post-Revolutionary world. Dayton and Salinger introduce readers to Love’s world by taking us on a walk. This is, however, no ordinary walk. Love was appointed to issue warnings to non-residents in Boston, a job he held from January 1765 until he died in April 1774. Thus, for roughly nine years, Robert Love spent approximately three days per week walking the streets of Boston, looking for people he needed to question. If the people he interrogated had no prospects for work or a place to live, he warned them that they had to leave the city in fourteen days. Few people saw transient and working-class people more regularly, or more closely, than did Robert Love. Love’s story of warning out is part of a larger English culture that colonists carried with them when they crossed the Atlantic. In the seventeenth century, England’s Parliament began passing a series of acts collectively termed the Poor Law that determined who was eligible for poor relief and how officials should provide it. People removed from town were ultimately sent back to their hometowns, where they might legally obtain some aid. In eighteenth-century Massachusetts, nonresidents could be warned and, if necessary, removed after authorities acquired a court order. While less onerous than the practice in England, Massachusetts used warning out as a way to minimize or eliminate the amount of poor relief paid to strangers. By the time Robert Love issued his warnings in 1765, Massachusetts officials were using warnings more as a way to keep track of people than as a way to get rid of the poor. Love kept track of his interactions in a series of notebooks, which Dayton and Salinger use to reveal the people who lived and worked in Boston in the last ten years of the colonial period. Because he relied on visual cues to remind him whom he had warned, Love often described people’s faces, hair, clothes, and accents. One man he described as middle aged with his ''own black Hair'' (60). Another was a sailor who had apparently deserted a British...

The Royalist Revolution: Monarchy and the American Founding, by Eric Nelson

The Royalist Revolution: Monarchy and American Founding, by Eric Nelson. Cambridge, The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2014. 390 pp. $29.95 US (cloth). Eric Nelson's new book is a controversial analysis of American founding. Far from being a revolt against repeated injuries and usurpations of royal power as stated in Declaration of Independence, American rebellion was a revolt in favour of royal government, driven by conviction that parliament had usurped just prerogatives of crown. Those attuned to history of American Revolution will be struck by significance of this claim. While intellectual origins of Revolution have long been subject of controversy--from Lockean liberalism of Hartz, to turn of Bailyn, Pocock, and Wood, to neo-liberalism of Appleby--few have gone so far as to suggest as a progenitor of movement. There is much to commend Nelson's intellectual revisionism. What Nelson terms royalism was a significant strand of thought and framed how many colonists understood imperial crisis. They saw in George III an executive capable of offering them protection from tyranny of parliament and imagined that he would listen to their pleas for redress. The king's rejection of colonial petitions turned Americans toward republicanism in 1776. Nelson takes his argument into era of constitution to explain why, despite their disappointments in 1775, revolutionaries kept faith with a powerful executive and saw independent prerogative powers as a crucial check to legislative tyranny. The modern--albeit circumscribed--presidential veto can be interpreted as a reflection of patriot royalism. For Nelson, 1787 Constitution was not a counterrevolution against radicalism of 1775-76; but nor was it a radical experiment in popular sovereignty. It was product of ideological consistency and inherent of Revolution: the Constitution ... upheld spirit of '75 (p. 185). The book's greatest achievement is to counter triumphalist reading of revolutionary values that have come to be described as republican synthesis. In Nelson's interpretation, revolutionary Americans were not as radical as we once thought. They wanted to turn back clock on British constitution and, far from being harbingers of modern age, were profoundly at odds with constitutional evolutions in eighteenth-century Britain. He reminds us that American Revolution was not first of modern revolutions but last of early modern revolutions. But Nelson stops short of endorsing conservative revolution theory favoured by those on modern American right and contextualizes revolutionary ideology as very much a product of its time and place. In entirely reconstructing our history of origins of Revolution, however, there are issues with this book. Nelson states that patriot was not coterminous with American Revolution as a whole (p. 9) and that he is only describing one strand of thought. One gets sense that this statement is a reaction to criticisms Nelson received in a William and Mary Quarterly roundtable in 2011 than it is a genuine statement of his reservations. …

Thomas Jefferson and the Uses of Equity

In 1795, a disgruntled George Wythe published his own edition of decisions from Virginia's newly formed High Court of Chancery, of which he was the sitting judge. Wythe's volume was replete with rebukes of his fellow justices in the court system for their lack of erudition and grounding in the distinctive principles and procedures of common law and chancery jurisdictions. His own copy of the volume, which, like many of his books that found their way into the library of his prize pupil, Thomas Jefferson, includes Wythe's handwritten appendix to the series of references he had made to classical literature and rhetoric in his own remarks, including several to the legal arguments of Demosthenes, and most strikingly to Sophocles'Antigone. Like much of their correspondence, their respective legal arguments as attorneys, and Thomas Jefferson's own massive commonplace books of common law and equity jurisprudence, Wythe's extensive commentaries signify not only the continued appeal and display of an early modern humanist legal and intellectual culture, but also the centrality and power of the idea of equity in that culture and for its successors acting in the Atlantic and imperial constitutional crisis of the second half of the eighteenth century.

The Men Who Lost America: British Leadership, the American Revolution, and the Fate of the Empire by Andrew Jackson O’Shaughnessy (review)

Reviewed by: The Men Who Lost America: British Leadership, the American Revolution, and the Fate of the Empire by Andrew Jackson O’Shaughnessy Albert H. Tillson Jr. (bio) Keywords American Revolution, King George III, Lord George Germain, British diplomacy The Men Who Lost America: British Leadership, the American Revolution, and the Fate of the Empire. By Andrew Jackson O’Shaughnessy. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013. Pp. 480. Cloth, $37.50.) In this work Andrew O’Shaughnessy attempts to answer an old question—why Great Britain lost the American Revolutionary War—by separate examinations of ten British political, military, and naval leaders who oversaw the conduct of the conflict. Because these men were subjected to satire and ridicule on both sides of the Atlantic, scholars as well [End Page 666] as popular culture have unjustly come to see them as incompetent and hidebound. To understand the roots of Britain’s defeat, O’Shaughnessy argues, requires a more nuanced and complex understanding of these men and the political and material constraints within which they operated. As a group, they were far from ignorant: Most were well educated and conversant with the British Enlightenment; a number were actively involved in literary and cultural life. Although part of an oligarchy, they and other British leaders competed for positions of power and prominence through merit and hard work. Essentially, they were confronted by a war that became for many reasons unwinnable. Yet its futility was not always clear as the war progressed; the British were in fact close to victory at several points and seemed to be so at others. Beyond simply providing a more three-dimensional portrayal of these complicated men, this book’s greatest virtue is its illumination of the strong elements of division and ambivalence regarding the war, not only within the British public but also among those who led the military effort. Perhaps inevitably, O’Shaughnessy begins with George III. Although far from a tyrant and relatively uninvolved in the early stages of the imperial crisis, the king was an energetic, informed, and articulate architect of policy from the time of the Boston Tea Party through the war years. More than other leaders, he recognized that American resistance and revolt threatened both the foundations of government within Britain and the survival of British international power. He actively pressed his prime minister, Lord North, toward a more uncompromising and aggressive pursuit of victory. Opponents of the war recognized his leading role and pursued measures in Parliament and in public discourse to reduce the king’s influence upon his ministers and government policy. Lord George Germain, the secretary of state for America, shared the king’s viewpoint. He pushed for a decisive military victory, in part to forestall French entry into the war; recognized that secure control of substantial American territory was essential; and urged close coordination between the army and navy. His ability to influence policy, however, was severely limited by an earlier court martial’s condemnation of his battlefield conduct and by his widespread reputation for homosexuality. The first Lord of the Admiralty, the Earl of Sandwich, espoused similar strategic views. Ironically, in the later years of his reign, George III came to be seen as a national icon: informal and personable, wisely resisting change in a revolutionary era, and living simply and virtuously in a [End Page 667] period of aristocratic decadence. Neither Germain nor Sandwich would experience a similar reassessment. Other political and military leaders diverged from this perspective. Lord North came to doubt the prospects for success through coercion and military force even before the outbreak of hostilities. These doubts, along with a personal aversion to confrontation and decisive action, led him to repeated efforts at peace through compromise with his American adversaries—sometimes in opposition to the wishes of the king and others—and this contributed to the persistence of disunity, indecision, and lack of clear military and diplomatic policy within his administration. On the other hand, without Lord North’s charm, intellect, and gift for compromise and persuasion, Parliamentary support for the war effort would have disappeared far more quickly. Similar assessments of the limited prospects for success through exclusively military means led the...

Independence: the tangled roots of the American Revolution

Independence: The Tangled Roots of the American Revolution. By Thomas P. Slaughter. (New York: Hill and Wang, 2014. Pp. [xx], 487. $35.00, ISBN 978-0-8090-5834-1.) In his latest work Thomas P. Slaughter treads the well-worn road that led to the American Revolution, but he introduces a new theory to explain the colonists' slow but steady progress toward disconnection from Britain. He argues that the colonists always enjoyed a substantial degree of independence within their status as colonies and therefore did not seek to become an autonomous nation but rather preferred to be left alone while enjoying the rights, privileges, and protection of the British empire. Thus, Slaughter carefully, and rightfully, differentiates between independence and separation and shows how these two ideas ultimately came together in 1776 but were mutually exclusive before then. The colonists eventually felt compelled to detach from Britain, but they did not pursue this course of action actively until the last stages of the imperial crisis. This new interpretation of the meaning of independence makes Slaughter's text noteworthy and interesting, even if his retelling of events sounds rather familiar. Colonial historians will be disappointed with the brevity and randomness with which Slaughter approaches the period before 1763. Even though he offers a good explanation in his preface for skipping around the colonial era and warns his readers that he do[es] not intend this to be a survey of British colonial America that pays equal attention to all places, people, and institutions, the first section sounds disjointed and leaves the reader unsatisfied and even confused (p. xviii). Slaughter chooses to include only events that advance his theory of colonial independence within the empire. Thus minor and local political conflicts become pivotal to the story, and while these connections may exist, it is difficult to believe that these small-scale incidents had as large an impact as Slaughter claims. He also focuses on the mid-eighteenth century, which makes sense but also presents a skewed approach to the colonial period as a whole. Slaughter could have easily made his case by condensing the first six chapters, which would have strengthened his overall argument and allowed the reader to get to the more persuasive and coherent sections of his book more quickly. Once Slaughter reaches the critical year of 1763, he enters more recognizable territory and skillfully links his theory to important events as they unfolded and as both colonists and British administrators (mis)interpreted them. …

Conservative Politics in National and Imperial Crisis: Letters from Britain to the Viceroy of India 1926–31. By Stuart Ball.

<i>Conservative Politics in National and Imperial Crisis: Letters from Britain to the Viceroy of India 1926–31</i>. By Stuart Ball.

The Politics of Fashion in Eighteenth-Century America

The Politics of Fashion in Eighteenth-Century America

ADAM SMITH AS ADVOCATE OF EMPIRE, c. 1870–1932

ABSTRACTThis article examines howThe wealth of nations(1776) was transformed into an amorphous text regarding the imperial question throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Adam Smith had left behind an ambiguous legacy on the subject of empire: a legacy that left long-term effects upon subsequent British imperial debates. In his chapter on colonies, Smith had proposed both a scheme for the gradual devolution of the British empire and a theoretical scheme for imperial federation. In response to the growing global popularity of protectionism and imperial expansionism, the rapid development of new tools of globalization, and the frequent onset of economic downturns throughout the late Victorian and Edwardian eras, turn-of-the-century proponents of British imperial federation formed into a formidable opposition to England's prevailing free trade orthodoxy – Cobdenism – a free trade ideology which famously expanded upon the anti-imperial dimensions ofThe wealth of nations. Ironically, at the turn of the century many advocates for imperial federation also turned to Smith for their intellectual inspiration. Adam Smith thus became an advocate of empire, and his advocacy left an indelible intellectual mark upon the burgeoning British imperial crisis.