‘The Asylum of Liberty’

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.

‘In a National Light’

This chapter shows how continentalism and colonial British nationalism created a distinctive language of political legitimation in the colonies during the mid-eighteenth century. This standard of behaviour was imposed on a wide range of wartime activities, from the voluntary and commercial practices of militia associations and privateers to fast and thanksgiving days. But it also assumed a critical role as a barometer against which to judge the conduct of colonial legislatures, and it was in this capacity that it underwrote a dramatic revolution in colonial politics during the crisis point of the Seven Years War. The same barometer was also applied to British statesmen and military men like William Pitt, the Earl of Bute, and Admiral John Byng. At the end of the conflict, the beginnings of the patriot movement would use its rhetoric to debate the virtues of the Treaty of Paris.

‘The Patron of Mankind’

This chapter looks at the impact of geopolitical thinking on colonial conceptions of nationality. Paying particular attention to the influential parties that gathered around the Livingston family in New York and William Smith in Philadelphia during the 1750s, it shows how the idea of Britain as the ‘arbiter of Europe’ informed a continentalist understanding of Britain as a nation defined by its unique role in the European system. This, in turn, left an enormous mark on the way in which colonists conceived of the Hanoverian monarchy, underwriting the personality cults of George II and—in his early reign—George III. Similar phenomena affected other national leaders, most notably William Pitt the Elder. At the same time, the continentalist flavour of colonial nationalism promoted a porous kind of Britishness, allowing for the incorporation of settlers from other parts of Europe like the Netherlands and Germany, and even other religious groups—including, on some rare occasions, Roman Catholics and non-Europeans.

‘Giving Peace to Europe’

This chapter looks at colonial attitudes to British foreign policy during the War of the Austrian Succession (1740–8), the brief peace of 1748–57, and the Seven Years War (1757–63). It touches on themes including the balance of power, the Hanoverian connection, the Austrian, Prussian, and Dutch alliances, the Diplomatic Revolution of 1756, and the Treaties of Aix-la-Chapelle (1748) and Paris (1763). It follows how colonists understood struggles with France and Spain in the Americas within these larger conflicts, from the capture of Louisbourg by the Massachusetts militia in 1745 to events in the Ohio Valley in the mid-1750s, and came to view the colonies as part of the European geopolitics system. And it explores how colonial and metropolitan sentiments about European warfare began to diverge during these conflicts.

‘Peace and Tranquillity’

This chapter recounts the gestation of English and British foreign policy into two competing strategies between 1689 and 1739: the interventionist continentalism of the Court Whigs and the blue-water policy of the Tory and Country Whig factions, each of which was accompanied by a distinctive attitude towards the relationship between British and European culture. It shows how, in parallel with the consolidation of Court Whig supremacy in England, continentalism had triumphed in British America by the end of the Wars of the Grand Alliance (1689–1714) and continued to hold sway throughout the interwar years 1714–39.

‘Arbitress of the Universe’

This chapter looks at the theories of geopolitics, political economy, and constitutional order that accompanied post-war visions of British hegemony, and how the patriot movement came to repurpose these ideas as an argument for American independence. Throughout the imperial crisis, colonists discussed imperial commercial policy in the context of geopolitics, and these discussions bore fruit in the conception of an empire not as a proto-federation but as an unequal league, in which trade and diplomacy were governed from the metropole. The leading voices of the patriot movement would endorse this vision of British power until—and in some cases beyond—the threshold of armed conflict. When the turn to revolution and secession finally came, it too was mediated by ideas about the balance of power, the geopolitics of empire, and the future shape of the international system that lay deep in the colonial past.

‘The Rose of Sharon’

This chapter explores metropolitan and colonial English thinking about England’s place in Europe from the Reformation of the sixteenth century to the Glorious Revolution of 1688, including the emergence of primitive ideas about English hegemony from the pens of Francis Bacon and James Harrington. It also looks at the impact of foreign affairs on England’s domestic politics, including the Civil War and the Restoration. And it shows how the early colonization of North America, from Hakluyt’s narratives to the revolutions in Boston and New York in 1688, via John Winthrop’s Long March and Oliver Cromwell’s Western Design, was conducted in close and conscious union with thinking about the European system and the peace of Christendom.

‘Events Abroad’

This concluding chapter recapitulates the argument of The Idea of Europe and the Origins of the American Revolution, and offers a few reflections on the post-revolutionary period. It traces its implications of colonial geopolitical thinking for the competing American futurities of Thomas Jefferson and Fisher Ames after 1783, as well as the transition from formal to effective independence and American foreign policy in the nineteenth century and beyond.

‘The Venerable Head’

This introductory chapter sets out the argument of The Idea of Europe and the Origins of the American Revolution. It gives an overview of the ways in which colonial thinking about European geopolitics and European civilization shaped American politics and culture during the century prior to the Revolution. The introduction then reflects on the current historiographical consensus on the origins of the Revolution and the interplay of international relations with political culture in the eighteenth century. It concludes with some remarks on the challenges of writing histories of political culture and discusses the methodological problems of writing about the public sphere.

‘Magna Britannia’

This chapter reveals the continuity of colonial thinking about geopolitics after the end of the Seven Years War. It shows how the unsettled state of Europe continued to trouble colonists after 1763. From its earliest days, the patriot movement warned about the renewal of international tensions, criticizing British colonial policy alongside the isolationist turn of British foreign policy as sources of weaknesses. Despite the conquest of Canada, the prospect of a French war of revenge and the spectre of French infiltration continued to dominate colonial discourse, maintaining its hold over conspiratorial thinking. These fears reached a height in the late 1760s and early 1770s, when a string of international crises in Poland, Corsica, the Falkland Islands, and Sweden unleashed a series of major war scares that shaped and tempered patriot manoeuvrings during the imperial crisis.