[Political Mimesis: A Consideration of the Historical and Cultural Roots of Legislative Behavior in the British Colonies in the Eighteenth Century]: Reply

1969 ◽  
Vol 75 (2) ◽  
pp. 364 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jack P. Greene
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Legislative Behavior ◽  
Cultural Roots ◽  
British Colonies

Origins of the Eighteenth-Century Evangelical Revival: England and New England Compared

1987 ◽  
Vol 26 (4) ◽  
pp. 361-397 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael J. Crawford
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
New England ◽  
Reform Movement ◽  
Western Society ◽  
Great Awakening ◽  
Cultural Contexts ◽  
First Great Awakening ◽  
Revival Movements ◽  
British Colonies

Current interpretations of North America's first Great Awakening present a paradox. Historians commonly interpret the Great Awakening as part of the revival of evangelical piety that affected widely scattered elements of the Protestant world in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; however, studies of the Great Awakening have almost exclusively focused on the particular local circumstances in which the revival movements developed. Since historians of the Great Awakening have emphasized the peculiar circumstances of each of the regional manifestations, the Revival often appears in their writings to have been composed of several distinct movements separated in time, character, and cause and united only by superficial similarities. In contrast, to say that the local revival movements, despite their distinctive characteristics, were manifestations of a single larger movement is to imply that they shared the same general causes. If we suppose that the Great Awakening was part of the Evangelical Revival, our attempts to explain its origins should take into account those general causes.Two recent reconsiderations of the eighteenth-century revival movements in their broader context come to opposite conclusions. Jon Butler underscores the span of time over which the revivals occurred across the British colonies, their heterogeneous character from one region to the next, and the differences in cultural contexts in which they appeared. He concludes that “the prerevolutionary revivals should be understood primarily as regional events.” Although he sees the eighteenth-century American revivals as part of the long-term evangelical and pietistic reform movement in Western society, he denies any common, single, overwhelmingly important cause.

Atlantic Dimensions of the American Revolution: Imperial Priorities and the Portuguese Reaction to the North American Bid for Independence (1775-83)

2012 ◽  
Vol 2 (3) ◽  
pp. 247-285
Author(s):  
Timothy Walker
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
North American ◽  
Atlantic World ◽  
English Language ◽  
Power Dynamics ◽  
Revolutionary Era ◽  
Stable Relationship ◽  
The North ◽  
Long Eighteenth Century ◽  
British Colonies

This article explains and contextualizes the reaction of the Portuguese monarchy and government to the rebellion and independence of the British colonies in North America. This reaction was a mixed one, shaped by the simultaneous but conflicting motivations of an economic interest in North American trade, an abhorrence on the part of the Portuguese Crown for democratic rebellion against monarchical authority and a fundamental requirement to maintain a stable relationship with long-time ally Great Britain. Although the Lisbon regime initially reacted very strongly against the Americans’ insurrection, later, under a new queen, the Portuguese moderated their position so as not to damage their long-term imperial political and economic interests. This article also examines the economic and political power context of the contemporary Atlantic World from the Portuguese perspective, and specifically outlines the multiple ties that existed between Portugal and the North American British colonies during the eighteenth century. The argument demonstrates that Portugal reacted according to demands created by its overseas empire: maximizing trading profits, manipulating the balance of power in Europe among nations with overseas colonies and discouraging the further spread of aspirations toward independence throughout the Americas, most notably to Portuguese-held Brazil. The Portuguese role as a fundamental player in the early modern Atlantic World is chronically underappreciated and understudied in modern English-language historiography. Despite the significance of Portugal as a trading partner to the American colonies, and despite the importance of the Portuguese Atlantic colonial system to British commercial and military interests in the eighteenth century, no scholarly treatment of this specific subject has ever appeared in the primary journals that regularly consider Atlantic World imperial power dynamics or the place of the incipient United States within them. This contribution, then, helps to fill an obvious gap in the historical literature of the long eighteenth century and the revolutionary era in the Americas.

British Industry and the West Indies Plantations

1990 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 117-149 ◽  
Author(s):  
William Darity
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
West Indies ◽  
Industrial Revolution ◽  
Well Being ◽  
The West ◽  
British Industry ◽  
Economic Progress ◽  
Mother Country ◽  
African Slaves ◽  
British Colonies

Is it not notorious to the whole World, that the Business of Planting in our British Colonies, as well as in the French, is carried on by the Labour of Negroes, imported thither from Africa? Are we not indebted to those valuable People, the Africans for our Sugars, Tobaccoes, Rice, Rum, and all other Plantation Produce? And the greater the Number of Negroes imported into our Colonies, from Africa, will not the Exportation of British Manufactures among the Africans be in Proportion, they being paid for in such Commodities only? The more likewise our Plantations abound in Negroes, will not more Land become cultivated, and both better and greater Variety of Plantation Commodities be produced? As those Trades are subservient to the Well Being and Prosperity of each other; so the more either flourishes or declines, the other must be necessarily affected; and the general Trade and Navigation of their Mother Country, will be proportionably benefited or injured. May we not therefore say, with equal Truth, as the French do in their before cited Memorial, that the general Navigation of Great Britain owes all its Encrease and Splendor to the Commerce of its American and African Colonies; and that it cannot be maintained and enlarged otherwise than from the constant Prosperity of both those branches, whose Interests are mutual and inseparable?[Postlethwayt 1968c: 6]The atlantic slave trade remains oddly invisible in the commentaries of historians who have specialized in the sources and causes of British industrialization in the late eighteenth century. This curiosity contrasts sharply with the perspective of eighteenth-century strategists who, on the eve of the industrial revolution, placed great stock in both the trade and the colonial plantations as vital instruments for British economic progress. Specifically, Joshua Gee and Malachy Postlethwayt, once described by the imperial historian Charles Ryle Fay (1934: 2–3) as Britain’s major “spokesmen” for the eighteenth century, both placed the importation of African slaves into the Americas at the core of their visions of the requirements for national expansion. Fay (ibid.: 3) also described both of them as “mercantilists hardening into a manufacturers’ imperialism.” For such a “manufacturers’ imperialism” to be a success, both Gee and Postlethwayt saw the need for extensive British participation in the trade in Africans and in the maintenance and development of the West Indies.

scholarly journals “To Renew the Covenant”

2018 ◽  
Vol 1 (4) ◽  
pp. 1-115
Author(s):  
Jon R. Kershner
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Golden Rule ◽  
Relationship With God ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Recent Developments ◽  
History Of ◽  
Liberty Of Conscience ◽  
George Fox ◽  
British Colonies

AbstractIn“To Renew the Covenant”: Religious Themes in Eighteenth-Century Quaker Abolitionism, Jon R. Kershner argues that Quakers adhered to a providential view of history, which motivated their desire to take a corporate position against slavery. Antislavery Quakers believed God’s dealings with them, for good or ill, were contingent on their faithfulness. Their history of deliverance from persecution, the liberty of conscience they experienced in the British colonies, and the ethics of the Golden Rule formed a covenantal relationship with God that challenged notions of human bondage. Kershner traces the history of abolitionist theologies from George Fox and William Edmundson in the late seventeenth century to Paul Cuffe and Benjamin Banneker in the early nineteenth century. It covers the Germantown Protest, Benjamin Lay, John Woolman, Anthony Benezet, William Dillwyn, Warner Mifflin, and others who offered religious arguments against slavery. It also surveys recent developments in Quaker antislavery studies.

The coronial manual and the bureaucratic logic of the coroner's office

2016 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 195-209
Author(s):  
Marc Trabsky
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Public Service ◽  
Technical Knowledge ◽  
The Public ◽  
Administrative Procedure ◽  
Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries ◽  
Death Investigation ◽  
Operational Processes ◽  
British Colonies ◽  
Investigation Process

AbstractThis paper examines the coronial manual as a technique of occupying office in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The manual guided coroners in the performance of their duties, obligations and responsibilities. It was preoccupied with questions of technical knowledge, operational processes and administrative procedure. The language ofofficethat characterised coronial treatises prior to the eighteenth century was gradually supplemented in the nineteenth century by the discourse of bureaucracy. This paper argues that the guidebook professionalised the office of coroner in Australia by setting out procedures, forms and rituals for assuming responsibility for the dead. It also provided advice to coroners for devoting themselves to a vocation in the public service. The paper thus traces historical shifts in the technology of the coronial manual in British colonies and examines how a bureaucratic logic of the coroner's office affected the way in which coroners pursued justice during the death investigation process.

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