H-Diplo Article Review 568 on “'Founded in Lasting Interests

H-Diplo H-Diplo Article Review 568 on “‘Founded in Lasting Interests’: British Projects for European Imperial Collaboration in the Age of the American Revolution.” [19 November 2015]

Discussion published by George Fujii on Thursday, November 19, 2015

H-Diplo Article Reviews No. 568 Published on 19 November 2015

H-Diplo Article Review Editors: Thomas Maddux and Diane Labrosse Web and Production Editor: George Fujii Commissioned for H-Diplo by Thomas Maddux

Stephen Conway. “‘Founded in Lasting Interests’: British Projects for European Imperial Collaboration in the Age of the American Revolution.” The International History Review 37.1 (2015): 22-40. DOI: 10.1080/07075332.2013.879915. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/07075332.2013.879915

URL: http://tiny.cc/AR568

Review by Wendy H. Wong, McNeil Center for Early American Studies

Failure, and not just success, can be illuminating when it comes to historical activity. Banalities and clichés aside, history is not always written from the perspective of ‘the winners’: beyond restating obvious results and final outcomes, both success and failure beg the larger question of what is at stake. In addition, drawing attention to a nation’s or an empire’s failures sounds a much-needed note of caution against presumed historical inevitability.

Stephen Conway, professor of History at the University College of London, examines failed British schemes to elicit French and Spanish collaboration against American independence. Historians have long neglected and dismissed these schemes—in good part because they were failures. But on the contrary, Conway argues, these failures provide insight into the British imperial mindset at the time, particularly with regard to the European balance of power. American fears of European intrigue are well known. But while Americans had little to fear about French plots to suppress their revolution, they did, however, have good reason to fear British ones. British ministers and diplomats at or near the center of power seriously considered that British-European collaboration to suppress the American Revolution was, in fact, at times possible. Though it was not mainstream opinion, hints and suggestions of European cooperation nonetheless circulated among the British public during and after the American War for Independence.

American fears notwithstanding, British efforts at European collaboration were for naught. European

Citation: George Fujii. H-Diplo Article Review 568 on “‘Founded in Lasting Interests’: British Projects for European Imperial Collaboration in the Age of the American Revolution.” [19 November 2015]. H-Diplo. 11-19-2015. https://networks.h-net.org/node/28443/discussions/96298/h-diplo-article-review-568-%E2%80%9C%E2%80%98founded-lasting-interest s%E2%80%99-british Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. 1 H-Diplo powers were unwilling to help the British put down the American rebellion due to prior loss of prestige and defeat in the Seven Years’ War. Furthermore, British politicians at the center of power were ultimately uninterested in cooperating with European rivals in imperial matters a decade before the start of the American War for Independence. Britain was willing to restore Bourbon holdings in the Caribbean, but did not wish to share eastern North America with either France or Spain. Conway concludes that “committed as they remained to the balance of power in Europe, [British ministers] were no longer interested in maintaining it in the wider world” (35).

This article gains its title from a proposal by William Henry Nassau de Zuylestein, Earl of Rochford and Secretary of State responsible for relations with southern Europe. Rochford claimed that his proposal was “founded in lasting interests” that were shared by all European states with imperial possessions (27). Conway draws upon pamphlets, newspaper pieces, and the letters of individuals outside of the British government in order to gauge the discussion of possible British-European collaboration in repressing the American Revolution. There, he discerns the various reasons why British commentators contended that “the Bourbon monarchies had an obvious interest in the failure of the American insurrection,” (24) since its success would spell unfortunate imperial consequences for the European powers. France and Spain could be possible allies to Britain, and not always implacable enemies. The European monarchies could not afford an insurrection among their subjects at home and abroad. They could not afford to lose their West Indian possessions, either. As a result, they be would be unlikely to intervene in or take advantage of a war between Britain and its American colonies. And with no European intervention on the American side forthcoming, the Americans would despair of the foreign aid that Congress had told them was imminent, fatally undermining the rebellion. Moreover, a mutual guarantee would deter France or Spain from attempting to smuggle goods to the rebels.

Although “we will never know whether [ideas of British-European cooperation] to be found in newspapers, pamphlets, and private letters helped to shape ministerial thinking on the Bourbon powers,” Conway notes that it is likely that “ministers sought to influence debate in the public sphere at least as much as they were influenced by that debate” (25). Intriguing as those points are, they leave the reader wanting more. Further attention to the public sphere’s function in British politics and reference to the publishing history of newspapers and pamphlets might have allowed for better establishment of interaction between British ministers and the wider public debate.

The article’s effectiveness, however, lies largely in its emphasis on contingency: the need for imperial co-operation rose or fell depending on British or American military success during the War for Independence, and whether Britain’s West Indian colonies required protection after the war. The story of possible British-European collaboration emerges from beneath the familiar and expected story of French assistance to the American cause in 1778 after the battle of Saratoga. British ministers discussed collaboration when American military successes— such as those at Lexington and Concord in the spring of 1775— demonstrated how difficult it was to suppress the rebellion in the colonies (26). When the military situation appeared to be looking up, as it was by the fall of 1776, British incentives for collaboration diminished. After General John Burgoyne’s surrender to the Americans at Saratoga, thoughts of European collaboration increased once more. In addition, British ministers feared that the Bourbon monarchies might intervene and offer assistance to the American rebels before the Franco-American alliance of 1778 became a reality. When French intervention did in fact happen, Lord North’s government responded by downgrading its commitment to regaining

America (33).

“Founded in Lasting Interests” is a recent entry in the author’s larger body of work that places the British Empire and Ireland within the context of the European continental state system. Notably, Conway proposes that transnational approaches to British history can and should be seen as a complement, rather than an antidote, to national approaches. This article also bridges older scholarship on the British Empire and the American Revolution that includes Sir Lewis Namier, Charles McLean Andrews, and Lawrence Henry Gipson with newer work like that of Hamish Scott [1] and Linda Colley. Furthermore, it appears at a time when more recent historians of the Atlantic World such as Andrew Jackson O’Shaughnessy, Steven Pincus, and Maya Jasanoff are rightly paying [2] renewed attention to the British Empire’s side of the American Revolution. O’Shaughnessy in particular has recently argued that “the men who lost America” were far from the incompetents and blunderers of popular imagination: they lost America only to set the stage for British imperial dominance in the nineteenth century. Likewise, Conway emphasizes that there were larger factors than character and competence that account for the failure of British schemes to elicit European cooperation against the American colonists—namely how British ministers and statesmen chose to view the imperial holdings of their continental rivals and how they responded to the latter’s ambitions at various times. To that end, given that the West Indies hover at the edges of this article, there is [3] room for their further integration into the larger story of Britain and the European balance of power.

Conway’s emphasis on situating the British Empire’s consolidation, expansion, and defense within the context of the continental balance of power also prompts American scholars, who in recent years increasingly study the American Revolution as a global and international event, to contemplate how revolutions and state formation do not occur in a vacuum. While “American fears [are] familiar to some historians” (23)—perhaps to the point that familiarity can breed contempt— palpable fears remain an apt reminder of American weaknesses and insecurities during and after the American Revolution, regardless of any sensationalism of expression. In addition, Conway’s emphasis on the European state system provides historians of U.S. foreign relations and historians of Early America and American Empire with opportunities to revisit and mine works such as Peter Onuf’sFederal [4] Union, Modern World, and Eliga H. Gould’s Among the Powers of the Earth. As Americans formed both a new nation state and their own empire, they had to contend with a world influenced by the European balance of power. It was a world that they sought to enter, and a balance that their nation and empire would claim to make ‘more perfect.’

Wendy Wong recently received her Ph.D. in Early American History and the History of U.S. Foreign Relations from Temple University. She is the author of an essay entitled “John Adams: Diplomat” that was published in the Blackwell Companion to John Adams and John Quincy Adams(Malden, MA: Wiley Blackwell, 2013), edited by David Waldstreicher. Currently a Research Associate at the McNeil Center for Early American Studies in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, she is researching and writing her current book project tentatively entitled Diplomatic Subtleties and Frank Overtures: Print Publicity, Neutrality, and the Politics of Slavery in the Early Republic, 1793-1801.

Notes

[1] Lewis Namier, England in the Age of the American Revolution (London: Macmillan, 1961); Charles McLean Andrews, The Colonial Background of the American Revolution: Four Essays in American Colonial History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1961); Lawrence Henry Gipson,The British Empire before the American Revolution, 15 vols. (New York: Knopf, 1947-1970); H.M. Scott, British Foreign Policy in the Age of the American Revolution (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990); Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707-1837 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992).

[2] Andrew Jackson O’Shaughnessy, The Men Who Lost America: British Leadership, the American Revolution, and the Fate of the Empire (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013); Steve Pincus, “1776: The Revolt against Austerity,”New York Review of Books, May 20, 2015 [http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2015/may/20/1776-revolt-against-austerity/?utm_source..., accessed: July 1, 2015]; Maya Jasanoff, Liberty’s Exiles: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary World (New York: Vintage, 2012). See also Eliga H. Gould,The Persistence of Empire: British Political Culture in the Age of the American Revolution (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000).

[3] See for example O’Shaughnessy, An Empire Divided: The American Revolution and the British Caribbean (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000).

[4] Peter S. Onuf and Nicholas Onuf, Federal Union, Modern World: the Law of Nations in an Age of Revolutions, 1776-1814 (Madison: Madison House, 1993); Eliga H. Gould, Among the Powers of the Earth: The American Revolution and the Makings of a New World Empire (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2012).