Epilogue

This chapter describes The Abbé Raynal's A Philosophical and Political History of the Settlements and Trade of the Europeans in the East and West Indies, one of the Enlightenment treatises that blazed like a comet across the night sky of the ancient régime. Widely translated and published, twenty official and fifty illegal editions produced between 1770 and 1796. While the Philosophical History was a bestseller throughout the Atlantic world, it was particularly widely discussed and debated in Britain and its empire. The work was the most detailed and critical examination to date of European overseas expansion, and it was avidly read in Britain—where it most famously influenced Adam Smith while he was in the final stages of composing An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations.

The Triumph of the New Toryism and the Spirit of the Second British Empire

This chapter details events that occurred between the 1760s and 1770s. During this period, the oligarchic order largely supported the New Tory imperialism, which laid down the foundations of the Second British Empire. However, this general trend was briefly interrupted in July 1766 with the formation of the Chatham administration. William Pitt, now the Earl of Chatham, regained power and set out to create a national unity government similar to the one he had led with the Duke of Newcastle in the late 1750s. The radicals allied with the Chatham ministry advocated a range of measures designed to transform the oligarchic order and the British Empire. While the New Tories were committed to preserving the unreformed and landed parliamentary state and consolidating an autocratic and tributary empire in North America and South Asia, radical Whigs wanted to reform the parliamentary political order and to expand Britain's maritime “empire of liberty.”