Sigonio in Anglo-American Projects to Reform the Imperial Constitution, 1751–1777

2020 ◽  
pp. 95-113
Author(s):  
Mark Somos
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Roman Empire ◽  
British Empire ◽  
United States Of America ◽  
American Identity ◽  
American Colonies ◽  
Anglo American ◽  
Long Term Impact ◽  
Intense Debate

This chapter explores Carlo Sigonio’s long-term impact by zooming in on the nascent United States of America. It shows that Sigonio was seen as a leading comparative constitutional historian and one of the most cited authorities that would-be reformers turned to in the intense debate on the reform of the British imperial constitution in the second half of the eighteenth century. His analyses of the Roman Empire yielded timeless lessons for metropolitan and colonial administrators alike. Most importantly, Sigonio structured his studies of Roman, Athenian, Hebrew, and medieval Italian laws and customs in a way that revealed these complex historical states’ constitutional essence, making comparative analysis possible. This chapter shows why American lawyers, British politicians, and merchants and soldiers with a true British–American identity, explicitly drew on Sigonio’s analysis of Roman colonization in several reform plans for the British Empire, with particular attention to the American colonies.

Sophistry, Security, and Socio-Political Structures in the American Revolution; or, Why Jamaica did not Rebel

1986 ◽  
Vol 29 (2) ◽  
pp. 319-344 ◽  
Author(s):  
T. R. Clayton
Keyword(s):  
North America ◽  
British Empire ◽  
American Revolution ◽  
North American ◽  
Western Hemisphere ◽  
American Colonies ◽  
Constitutional Principle ◽  
Mother Country ◽  
Political Structures

Britain's most important American colonies did not rebel in 1776. Thirteen provinces did declare their independence; but no fewer than nineteen colonies in the western hemisphere remained loyal to the mother country. Massachusetts and Virginia may have led the American revolution, but they had never been the leading colonies of the British empire. From the imperial standpoint, the significance of any of the thirteen provinces which rebelled was pale in comparison with that of Jamaica or Barbados. In the century before 1763 the recalcitrance of these two colonies had been more notorious than that of any mainland province and had actually inspired many of the imperial policies cited as long-term grievances by North American patriots in 1774. Real Whig ideology, which some historians have seen as the key to understanding the American revolution, was equally understood by Caribbean elites who, like the continental, had often proved extremely sensitive on questions of constitutional principle. Attacks of ‘frenzied rhetoric’ broke out in Jamaica in 1766 and Barbados in 1776. But these had nothing whatsoever to do with the Stamp Act or events in North America.

‘The Asylum of Liberty’

2020 ◽  
pp. 287-336
Author(s):  
D.H. Robinson
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
International Order ◽  
American Identity ◽  
Anglo American ◽  
Free People

This chapter shows how ideas about Britain’s unique destiny shaped shifting conceptions of American identity during the imperial crisis. The conflicts of the mid-eighteenth century bequeathed to colonists the hope of British hegemony in the European world. This hegemony was to be geopolitical, but also cultural, reflecting the triumph of a Shaftesburian Anglo-French Kulturkampf over the Berkeleian idea of Anglo-American translatio imperii and translatio studii. The sense of America’s contribution to this destiny acted as an important catalyst for the development of a discretely American sense of corporate honour. This process was intensified by the idea of British guardianship over an international order of free states, which allowed colonists to identify themselves with a brotherhood of free people as an alternative to the British imperial community, grounded in new understandings of history that undercut the traditional mores of Hanoverian loyalism.

The British Credit Crisis of 1772 and The American Colonies

1960 ◽  
Vol 20 (2) ◽  
pp. 161-186 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard B. Sheridan
Keyword(s):  
British Empire ◽  
Financial Institutions ◽  
Capital Investment ◽  
Public Expenditure ◽  
Credit Crisis ◽  
Public And Private ◽  
Private Finance ◽  
American Colonies ◽  
Mother Country ◽  
Anglo American

Few stones have remained unturned in an effort to reconstruct Anglo-American history in the critical years from the Treaty of Paris in 1763 to the outbreak of the Revolution in 1775. Much has been learned by investigating such problems as public finance, colonial administration, and mercantile policy within the context of an expanded British empire. It is not always realized, however, that by the Treaty of 1763 Great Britain acquired new fields for capital investment as well as vast new lands to govern. In addition to taxation and public expenditure, such problems were raised as capital recruitment and allocation, the modification of financial institutions, and the adjustment of debtor-creditor relationships. Though distinct in certain respects, public and private finance impinged upon each other in the period from 1763 to 1775. This was especially the case after the British credit crisis of 1772, when, in addition to the controversy over tea, debtor-creditor relations between the thirteen colonies and the mother country underwent marked deterioration.

Introduction

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Justin du Rivage
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
British Empire ◽  
American Revolution ◽  
North American ◽  
The United States ◽  
American Colonies ◽  
Eighteenth Century Britain

This introductory chapter briefly considers why the British American colonists had broken away from an empire that they had long revered. Americans like to think of themselves as fundamentally different from Europeans—both more democratic and more libertarian. But during the eighteenth century, Britain and its North American colonies were actually becoming more alike. However, the United States followed a different path from the dramatic transformation that painted the globe French blue and British red. That path reflected the fact that the American Revolution was a revolution not for or against monarchy, but against the authoritarian transformation of the British Empire.

scholarly journals Brexit, boundaries and imperial identities: A comparative view

2017 ◽  
Vol 17 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-26 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew Gardner
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
British Empire ◽  
Identity Politics ◽  
Second World War ◽  
The European Union ◽  
British Identity ◽  
The Uk ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Second World

The year 2016 will be marked as a year in which identity politics reached new levels of significance. Among numerous dramatic events, the UK referendum on membership of the European Union has brought many issues of interest to archaeologists to the fore. These range from entirely contemporary concerns, such as the future of research funding in Britain, to topics of more longitudinal significance, including the interactions between different identity groups in particular economic and political circumstances. In this paper, I wish to explore aspects of the distinctive position of Britain as an illustration of identity dynamics in the long term, focussing on the relationship between imperialism and identities and viewed through the lens of recent work in Border Studies. Brexit can be seen as the culmination of the collapse of the British empire, and transformation of British identity, in the post-Second World War era and the particular dynamics of this process invite comparison with Britain’s earlier position as one of the frontier provinces of the Roman empire, especially in the 4th and 5th centuries AD. This comparison reveals two paradoxical dimensions of imperial identities, the first being that so-called ‘peripheries’ can be more important than ‘cores’ in the creation of imperial identities and the second that such identities can be simultaneously ideologically powerful yet practically fragile in the circumstances which follow imperial collapse. Such insights are important because, at a time of apparently resurgent nationalism in many countries, archaeologists need to work harder than ever to understand identity dynamics with the benefit of time depth.

From John Smith to Adam Smith

Virginia 1619 ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 282-308
Author(s):  
Jack P. Greene
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Adam Smith ◽  
Systematic Survey ◽  
Anglo American ◽  
Settler Colonization ◽  
Wealth Of Nations ◽  
The Many ◽  
Working Out ◽  
Considerable Experience

This chapter explores the long-term legacies of 1619 for the construction of an English settler colonial model. While contemporary Irish plantation projects gave the English colonizing movement considerable experience with settler colonization in densely populated and recognizably European areas, that experience by no means prepared that movement for planting in far-off lands inhabited by unfamiliar people with exotic cultures. As England’s first sustained experience with settler colonization at a distance, the Virginia colony played a foundational role in identifying, confronting, and working out solutions to the many problems that colonizers throughout the Anglo-American world would face as they created in the Americas the powerful and highly successful settler empire that many observers, including Adam Smith in the Wealth of Nations (1776), would celebrate during the last half of the eighteenth century. This essay treats the Virginia colony as a learning laboratory and offer a systematic survey of the problems the colony confronted and how its solutions would inform and influence later English settler colonizing projects.

Exponential Growth of Populations

1993 ◽  
Author(s):  
Garrett Hardin
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Roman Empire ◽  
Exponential Growth ◽  
World Population ◽  
Human History ◽  
The World ◽  
Long Time ◽  
Normal Fluctuations ◽  
History Books

Historians took a long time to appreciate the importance of biological factors in human history. As the French naturalist Jean Henri Fabre (1823-1915) said: "History celebrates the battlefields whereon we meet our death, but scorns to speak of the plowed fields whereby we thrive. It knows the names of the King's bastards, but cannot tell us the origin of wheat." No doubt Fabre's criticism helped in turning the tide against the old-fashioned sort of history. History books now being written are more inclusive, more interesting. Some of them even mention population. A century before Fabre was born, even the fact of population growth was denied by some otherwise well-informed scholars. In 1721 the Baron de Montesquieu asked, in all sincerity, "How does it happen that the world is so thinly peopled in comparison with what it once was?"1 Until the nineteenth century the taking of censuses was a sporadic activity; most of the world, most of the time, lived uncensused. Primitive travel and slow communication made the counting of population over large areas difficult—and perhaps pointless. Without censuses or sampling, general impressions had to serve. When speaking of "the world" as "it once was," the baron, an educated European, no doubt had in mind the last days of the Roman Empire. There is much uncertainty about the size of world population in the olden days, but the following estimates are probably not far off.2 Over a period of about thirteen hundred years, ending in Montesquieu's time, the population of the world increased from some 190 million to about 610 million. This was more than a threefold increase, but an intelligent European could easily be unaware of both the direction and the extent of the change—for several reasons. To begin with, most of the increase in population took place outside Europe. Despite reports like Marco Polo's, to European eyes Europe was the world. Viewing the sparsely inhabited ruins of Rome, eighteenth-century Europeans deduced a decrease in world population. Awareness of long-term growth was made more difficult by erratic (but normal) fluctuations in populations. It was quite common for a region to lose a percent or two of its population during a single year because of disease.

‘SCEPTICISM IN EXCESS’: GIBBON AND EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY CHRISTIANITY

1998 ◽  
Vol 41 (1) ◽  
pp. 179-199 ◽  
Author(s):  
B. W. YOUNG
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Roman Empire ◽  
Early Church ◽  
Critical Attitude ◽  
History Of ◽  
High Church ◽  
Eighteenth Century Britain ◽  
Role Of Religion ◽  
Intense Debate

Since the appearance of volume I of The decline and fall of the Roman empire in 1776, the religion of Edward Gibbon has been subject to intense debate. He has been variously identified as an atheist, a deist, even as a somewhat detached Christian. Examination of his relations, both personal and scholarly, with the varieties of religion and irreligion current in eighteenth-century Britain leads to the conclusion that he remained resolutely critical of all such positions. He did not share the convictions of dogmatic freethinkers, still less those of determined atheists. The product of a nonjuring family, Gibbon benefited from the scholarly legacy of several high church writers, while maintaining a critical attitude towards the claims of Anglican orthodoxy. It was through the deliberate and ironical adoption of the idiom of via media Anglicanism, represented by such theologians as the clerical historian John Jortin, that Gibbon developed a woundingly sceptical appraisal of the history of the early church. This stance made it as difficult for his contemporaries to identify Gibbon's religion as it has since proved to be for modern historians. Gibbon appreciated the central role of religion in shaping history, but he remained decidedly sceptical as to Christianity's ultimate status as revealed and unassailable truth.

scholarly journals The Cromwellian Protectorate and the languages of empire

1992 ◽  
Vol 35 (3) ◽  
pp. 531-555 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Armitage
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
British Empire ◽  
Historical Argument ◽  
Modern Britain ◽  
The Caribbean ◽  
American Intellectual ◽  
Anglo American ◽  
American Intellectual History

AbstractThis article recovers some of the classical, constitutional, and religious languages of empire in early-modern Britain by a consideration of the period between the end of the first Anglo-Dutch war in 1654 and the calling of the second Protecloral Parliament in 1656. It examines in particular the strategic and political motivationsfor CromweWs ‘western design’ against the Spanish possessions in the Caribbean and presents the response to thefailure of the design and the oppositiorud literature published around the second Protectoral Parliament as the immediate context for the publication of James Harrington's Oceana (1656). It is argued that Harrington's Machiavellian meditation on imperialism is intended as a critique of the expansion of the British republic, so placing Harrington more firmly within the oppositiorud bloc of the late Protectorate. A concluding section details the recovery of this moment of historical argument in the heat of the opposition to Sir Robert Walpole during the early stages of Anglo-Spanish hostility in 1738—9, and leads to some wider refUctions both on the ideological uses of history in the aeation of the British empire and on the centrality of the languages of empire to an understanding of Anglo-American intellectual history up to the late eighteenth century.

‘Our Masculine Systems’: Virtual Representation and the Formation of an Anglo-American Gender Frontier

2019 ◽  
Vol 9 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 199-228
Author(s):  
Matt Reardon
Keyword(s):  
British Empire ◽  
Analytical Tool ◽  
American Identity ◽  
The Political ◽  
Causative Role ◽  
Maturation Process ◽  
Sex And Gender ◽  
Property Ownership ◽  
Anglo American ◽  
And Gender

This manuscript privileges gender as both analytical tool and investigated object to argue for its causative role in American independence. It posits the political doctrine of virtual representation that Britain’s Parliament evoked to assert sovereignty over America in the 1760s generated a transatlantic debate over who and what constituted a freeborn Englishman, a figure at the center of power in the British Empire. For American Whigs the concept both denied to them their gendered prerogative to consent to legislation and arrested the male maturation process that they deemed critical to achieving masculine autonomy. Denied access to traditional avenues of power provided by property ownership and family mastery America men began emphasizing more readily obtainable categories of identity such as sex and gender to claim access to rights. This discursive shift produced a gender frontier that prevented reconciliation and allowed for the coherence of an American identity necessary for separation.

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