Resisting Independence

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brad A. Jones
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
New York City ◽  
American Revolution ◽  
Port Cities ◽  
British Atlantic ◽  
American Colonies ◽  
Daunting Task ◽  
Close Study ◽  
New Nation

This book maps the loyal British Atlantic's reaction to the American Revolution. Through close study of four important British Atlantic port cities — New York City; Kingston, Jamaica; Halifax, Nova Scotia; and Glasgow, Scotland — the book argues that the revolution helped trigger a new understanding of loyalty to the Crown and empire. The book reimagines loyalism as a shared transatlantic ideology, no less committed to ideas of liberty and freedom than the American cause and not limited to the inhabitants of the thirteen American colonies. The book reminds readers that the American Revolution was as much a story of loyalty as it was of rebellion. Loyal Britons faced a daunting task — to refute an American Patriot cause that sought to dismantle their nation's claim to a free and prosperous Protestant empire. For the inhabitants of these four cities, rejecting American independence thus required a rethinking of the beliefs and ideals that framed their loyalty to the Crown and previously drew together Britain's vast Atlantic empire. The book describes the formation and spread of this new transatlantic ideology of loyalism. Loyal subjects in North America and across the Atlantic viewed the American Revolution as a dangerous and violent social rebellion and emerged from twenty years of conflict more devoted to a balanced, representative British monarchy and, crucially, more determined to defend their rights as British subjects. In the closing years of the eighteenth century, as their former countrymen struggled to build a new nation, these loyal Britons remained convinced of the strength and resilience of their nation and empire and their place within it.

British Military Sites from Albany to Crown Point

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
David R. Starbuck
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
New York City ◽  
Native American ◽  
North America ◽  
American Revolution ◽  
Hudson River ◽  
Transportation Corridor ◽  
British Military ◽  
Lake George

British forces on the frontier of eighteenth-century North America faced potent adversaries in the form of French armies and forts, often accompanied by their Native American allies. The lack of easily traversed roads could have been a logistical nightmare, but armies were able to overcome this by travelling along the waterways that formed a natural transportation corridor between Canada and New York City. Numerous British fortifications were constructed in the 1750s along Lake Champlain, Lake George, and the Hudson River north of Albany, and many of these positions were reoccupied twenty years later during the American Revolution. Strategically positioned forts were accompanied by large seasonal encampments, by specialized structures that included blockhouses and hospitals, and by battlefields where clashes occurred. Archaeologists have conducted excavations at many of these sites, seeking to understand the strategies, provisioning, and building techniques employed by British Regulars as they fought on the American landscape.

Governance through Documents: The Board of Trade, Its Archive, and the Imperial Constitution of the Eighteenth-Century British Atlantic World

2020 ◽  
Vol 59 (2) ◽  
pp. 264-290
Author(s):  
Asheesh Kapur Siddique
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
British Empire ◽  
American Revolution ◽  
Atlantic World ◽  
British Atlantic ◽  
American Colonies ◽  
British Atlantic World ◽  
Long Eighteenth Century ◽  
British State

AbstractThis article examines the role of documents, their circulation, and their archivization in the enactment of the imperial constitution of the British Empire in the Atlantic world during the long eighteenth century. It focuses on the Board of Trade's dispatch of “Instructions” and “Queries” to governors in the American colonies, arguing that it was through the circulation of these documents and the use of archives that the board sought to enforce constitutional norms of bureaucratic conduct and the authority of central institutions of imperial administration. In the absence of a singular, codified written constitution, the British state relied upon a variety of different kinds of documents to forge the imperial Atlantic into a governed space. The article concludes by pointing to the continuing centrality of documents and archives to the bureaucratic manifestation of the imperial constitution in the immediate aftermath of the American Revolution.

Introduction

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-13
Author(s):  
Brad A. Jones
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Nova Scotia ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
American Revolution ◽  
York City ◽  
Port Cities ◽  
The North ◽  
The Face ◽  
The North Atlantic

This introductory chapter provides an overview of how the American Revolution shaped a popular transatlantic understanding of British loyalism, focusing on the four port cities spanning the North Atlantic: New York City; Kingston, Jamaica; Halifax, Nova Scotia; and Glasgow, Scotland. During the early stages of the revolution, a shared transatlantic understanding of what it meant to be British in these four communities initially crumbled in the face of the Patriots' assertion that their cause was rooted in a defense of Protestant British liberty. Patriot arguments led loyal Britons in these places to question what defined their attachment to the empire. Out of these crises there emerged a new understanding of loyalism rooted in a strengthened defense of monarchy and duly constituted government. After the Franco-American alliance of 1778, loyal Britons were also able to reclaim their belief in the supremacy of Protestant British liberty, which they contrasted with the alleged tyranny of American Patriots and their French Catholic allies. Ultimately, the British loyalism as it developed in the wake of the American war was more conservative and authoritarian, reaching its apogee in the reaction against the radicalism of the French Revolution and the despotism of Napoleon.

A Body Politic

2021 ◽  
pp. 14-39
Author(s):  
Brad A. Jones
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Communication Networks ◽  
Body Politic ◽  
Circulatory System ◽  
Shared Understanding ◽  
National Unity ◽  
British Atlantic ◽  
National Importance ◽  
The Many

This chapter discusses how newspapers helped to integrate the vast British Atlantic. Reports and editorials appearing in the dozens of “Weekly Mercuries” carried by ships crisscrossing the ocean gave meaning to an emerging, shared understanding of loyalty and loyalism among the ocean's many and varied British inhabitants. This shared understanding of Britishness drew on Protestant subjects' deeply held fears of their nation's long-standing Catholic enemies, France and Spain. The makings of Daniel Fowle's “Body Politic,” however, depended on reliable Atlantic communication networks, a circulatory system capable of carrying news quickly and regularly to all corners of Britain's vast empire. News of national importance was filtered through these more immediate webs of contact, which played a significant role in shaping distinctive local political cultures and identities in places like New York City, Glasgow, Halifax, and Kingston. During the many wars fought against France and Spain in the first half of the eighteenth century, anti-Catholic rhetoric was able to overshadow divisions within the empire, providing a language of national unity that was so intentionally broad as to appeal to the nation's diverse inhabitants. But in the absence of these wars and these enemies, as was the case for much of the 1760s and 1770s, subjects in these communities struggled to understand what exactly united them as Britons.

“In Favour of Popery”: Patriotism, Protestantism, and the Gordon Riots in the Revolutionary British Atlantic

2013 ◽  
Vol 52 (1) ◽  
pp. 79-102 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brad A. Jones
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
New York City ◽  
North America ◽  
Political Culture ◽  
Print Culture ◽  
British Government ◽  
British Atlantic ◽  
Political Independence ◽  
The Government ◽  
Gordon Riots

AbstractIn 1778, in response to news of the American alliance with France, the British government proposed a series of Catholic relief bills aimed at tolerating Catholicism in England, Scotland, and Ireland. Officials saw the legislation as a pragmatic response to a dramatically expanded war, but ordinary Britons were far less tolerant. They argued that the relief acts threatened to undermine a widely shared Protestant British patriotism that defined itself against Catholicism and France. Through an elaborate and well-connected popular print culture, Britons living in distant Atlantic communities, such as Kingston (Jamaica), Glasgow, Dublin, and New York City, publicly engaged in a radical brand of Protestant patriotism that began to question the very legitimacy of their own government. Events culminated in June 1780, with five days of violent, deadly rioting in the nation's capitol. Yet the Gordon Riots represent only the most famous example of this new, more zealous defense of Protestant Whig Britishness. In the British Caribbean and North America, unrelenting fears of French invasions and the perceived incompetence of the government mixed with an increasingly confrontational Protestant political culture to expose the fragile nature of British patriotism. In Scotland, anti-Catholic riots drove the country to near rebellion in early 1779, while in Ireland, Protestants and Catholics took advantage of this political instability to make demands for economic and political independence, culminating in the country's legislative autonomy in 1782. Ultimately, Catholic relief and the American alliance with France fundamentally altered how ordinary Britons viewed their government and, perhaps, laid the foundations for the far more radical political culture of the 1790s.

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