The British Empire before the American Revolution. Volume I, The British Isles and the American Colonies: Great Britain and Ireland, 1748-1754

1959 ◽  
Vol 45 (4) ◽  
pp. 658
Author(s):  
Carl B. Cone ◽  
Lawrence Henry Gipson
Keyword(s):  
Great Britain ◽  
British Empire ◽  
American Revolution ◽  
British Isles ◽  
American Colonies

scholarly journals Essay: The Mad Patriot

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel Adams
Keyword(s):  
Bipolar Disorder ◽  
Great Britain ◽  
British Empire ◽  
American Revolution ◽  
Sufficient Evidence ◽  
John Adams ◽  
American Colonies ◽  
Exact Moment ◽  
Precise Time

Historians have tried to trace the origin of the American Revolution, but few, if any, have dared indicate an exact moment in time. Yet sufficient evidence points to the chilly afternoon of February 24, 1761, inside the Old Town House (now the Old State House) in Boston as the precise time and place. Future president John Adams, who, as a 25-year-old Boston attorney in attendance at that occasion, later declared, “Then and there was the first scene of the first Act of opposition to the arbitrary claims of Great Britain. Then and there, the Child Independence was born” (Adams to Tudor, 29 March 1817). It was “then and there” that one of the American colonies’ most notable attorneys, James Otis, Jr., gave a speech that caused tremors throughout the British Empire. Textbooks have often downplayed this moment because the man who first sparked the American Revolution—James Otis, Jr.—was considered mad. However, we know today that James Otis Jr. was probably suffering from bipolar disorder and his condition was exacerbated by alcoholism.

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.

II. Adam Smith's Project of an Empire

1925 ◽  
Vol 1 (3) ◽  
pp. 249-283 ◽  
Author(s):  
E. A. Benians
Keyword(s):  
Great Britain ◽  
British Empire ◽  
Adam Smith ◽  
Natural System ◽  
American Colonies ◽  
Colonial Policy ◽  
The Future ◽  
History Of ◽  
Wealth Of Nations ◽  
General Opinion

It is now nearly one hundred and fifty years since the publication of the Wealth of Nations and the Declaration of American Independence. The two events, closely associated in time, recall each other; for in his famous chapter on colonies Adam Smith predicted, with little apparent regret, the loss of the American colonies, and outlined the project of an empire which he thought could have been preserved and been worth preserving. That chapter, though it did not influence the course of the controversy which called it forth, nor, for a time, the colonial policy of Great Britain, has become, none the less, a landmark in the history of the British Empire. After Adam Smith had written, it was possible to think of colonies in a new way, though it was still not impossible to treat them in the old. The united empire of which he dreamed never became a fact, or even a political programme, but the ideas which he advanced bore their fruit in general opinion, and the spirit in which he wrote was in due course to animate a generation of colonial reformers and to bring forth a new and better colonial policy. Durham and his friends did not advocate Smith's imperial Parliament, the “States General of the British Empire,” and they did advocate imperial control of colonial trade, and not his “natural system of perfect liberty and justice”; but one may believe that the faith in the future of the British Empire which inspires the speeches of Molesworth and Buller, the Report on Canada and the Art of Colonization, owed some of its vitality to the courageous Utopia imagined in the Wealth of Nations.

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.

The British Elections of December, 1923

1924 ◽  
Vol 18 (2) ◽  
pp. 331-340 ◽  
Author(s):  
William Thomas Morgan
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Great Britain ◽  
British Empire ◽  
The United States ◽  
National Election ◽  
British Isles ◽  
British Government ◽  
British People

Not only were the results of the British national election of last December momentous for the British people themselves, but it may be doubted whether any other election in the country's history ever excited as much interest in foreign lands. The United States was much concerned at the possibility of Great Britain erecting a tariff wall around not only the British Isles but the British Empire as well. The dominions were vitally interested. The whole of Europe awaited with increasing anxiety the decision of the British electorate, as upon it depended to some degree, at any rate, the next step of the British government in the settlement of the all-important problem of reparations upon which the reconstruction of Europe depended.

The British Isles and the American Colonies: Great Britain and Ireland, 1748-1754

1959 ◽  
Vol 16 (3) ◽  
pp. 423
Author(s):  
Clarence L. Ver Steeg ◽  
Lawrence Henry Gipson
Keyword(s):  
Great Britain ◽  
British Isles ◽  
American Colonies

British Historians and the American Revolution

1971 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 43-58 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Middleton
Keyword(s):  
British Empire ◽  
American Revolution ◽  
American Colonies

In the year of Lexington, the irascible Dr Johnson wrote to a correspondent: ‘The Americans, sir, are a race of convicts and ought to be thankful for anything we allow them short of hanging.’ Extreme in his Tory views, Johnson nevertheless reflected popular sentiment concerning the American colonies and their pretensions to independence, and his bias was to be reflected in many of the writings of the first historians who attempted to account for the late destruction of the first British empire.

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