Imperial Crises and British Political Ideology in the Age of the American Revolution, 1763-1773

Imperial Crises and British Political Ideology in the Age of the American Revolution, 1763-1773 By Ben Joseph Gilding Thesis submitted to the Faculty of Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies in partial fulfilment of the requirements of the MA degree in History University of Ottawa © Ben Joseph Gilding, Ottawa, Canada, 2014. ii ABSTRACT The Seven Years’ War and the resulting Treaty of Paris of 1763 represent a watershed in British domestic and imperial histories. Not only did the war result in Britain acquiring vast new territories and rights in North America and South Asia, but it also saddled Britain with a national debt of over £140,000,000. The challenge for British politicians in the post-1763 era was not only finding a balance between the need to secure territorial gains while searching for a means to reduce costs and raise revenues to pay down the debt, but rather to do so without infringing on the constitutional rights of colonists and chartered companies. The political ramifications of the Treaty of Paris were equally important. Disputes over the terms of the Peace tore apart the Newcastle-Pitt coalition, resulting in the dissolution of the Whig Broadbottom. With the Duke of Newcastle and his allies in opposition alongside William Pitt, the political situation was thrown into turmoil. Although the confused state of politics in the short-term undoubtedly resulted in an opposition which acted, as Namier suggested, on the basis of self-interest rather than on principles, it can also be said to have provided the matrix within which historians can observe the genesis of new policies of domestic and imperial governance. It was precisely the lack of ideological identification in politics at the accession of George III that allowed British political ideologies in the age of the American Revolution to so quickly develop alongside the formulation and implementation of, as well as in the opposition responses to, the new challenges facing British parliamentarians in the governance of the Empire. This work therefore traces the development of distinct imperial ideologies among British politicians as they emerged in response to the various imperial crises of the 1760s and 1770s. Additionally, it will be shown that the new and unprecedented crises in both American and Indian affairs were brought about primarily as a means of obtaining revenues for the Treasury. The interrelated nature of the imperial problems in the east and the west, as well as the attempts of British politicians to resolve them, will be examined primarily through the policies made surrounding the article of tea. iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS First of all I would like to thank my family for their encouragement and support throughout my studies. In particular, those family members in England who made me feel so at home during my research abroad. I wish to express my appreciation to the staff of University of Nottingham’s Manuscripts and Special Collections department, the Sheffield Archives, the British Library, and the National Archives in Kew all of whom were extremely courteous, helpful, and encouraging throughout. Special thanks must also go to Sir Edward Dashwood and to Alan Readman, the County Archivist at the West Sussex Record Office, who granted me permission to make use of the papers of the Dashwood family and the Dukes of Richmond and Lennox, respectively. I must acknowledge a most particular debt of gratitude to Professor Miles Taylor, the Director of the Institute of Historical Research, who provided me with the necessary support and supervision for my research overseas. The staff at the IHR, especially Kerstin Lehr and James Lees, who organised my meetings with Miles, invited me to lectures, and generally provided me with a comfortable base away from home on the 3rd floor of Senate House. Additionally, in Britain I had the good fortune to benefit from the generous and influential advice of Perry Gauci, P.J. Marshall, and Stephen Conway, without which this work would certainly have been inferior. I would also like to thank the faculty members and administrators of the University of Ottawa’s departments of History and Philosophy. In particular, Daniel Kofman, for offering me a position as a teaching assistant when otherwise I would not have had the pleasure and experience; David Raynor for his general assistance on questions relating to David Hume, John Wilkes, and Henry Seymour Conway, not to mention the many wonderful conversations! Naomi Davidson, whose undergraduate courses inspired me to pursue in greater depth the connections between imperial and domestic histories; Corinne Gaudin, for her tireless assistance in helping me to prepare this research project; and Michael Behiels, whose criticism and encouragement of my work has been of immense value. I owe a great debt of gratitude to the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, who not only provided generous funding for my first year of studies, but supplemented the costs of the overseas research for this project. Also I would like to thank the Government of Ontario for providing funding through the OGS program. There is one individual, however, who deserves far more praise, far more thanks, far more respect than could ever be expressed on a page of this kind. He has been a continual inspiration not only for the present work, but more importantly for the work that I aspire to complete in the future. One could not find a supervisor as generous in time, as knowledgeable in the subject, nor as friendly in providing honest advice. The greatest debt to whom I owe the completion of this work is certainly to my thesis supervisor and my mentor in the field, Richard Connors. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS TITLE PAGE i ABSTRACT ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS iii TABLE OF CONTENTS iv INTRODUCTION: THE IMPERIAL DIMENSION IN BRITISH POLITICS IN THE EARLY YEARS OF THE REIGN OF GEORGE III 1 ONE: THE PEACE OF PARIS, BRITISH POLITICAL IDEOLOGY, AND THE GENESIS OF THE IMPERIAL PROBLEMS AT THE ACCESSION OF GEORGE III 21 TWO: REVENUE AND THE RIGHTS OF PARLIAMENT: IMPERIAL AND IDEOLOGICAL CONSOLIDATION AND THE AMERICAN PROBLEM IN BRITISH POLITICS, 1764-1770 84 THREE: “TO DRESS TAXATION, THAT FATHER OF AMERICAN SEDITION, IN THE ROBES OF AN EAST INDIA DIRECTOR”: BRITISH POLITICS AND THE EAST INDIA COMPANY 1765-1773 159 CONCLUSION 209 BIBLIOGRAPHY 220 1 INTRODUCTION INTRODUCTION: THE IMPERIAL DIMENSION IN BRITISH POLITICS IN THE EARLY YEARS OF THE REIGN OF GEORGE III A good starting point for redressing this balance would be an understanding of the practical realities governing parliamentary debate about imperial issues. In short, it proved no different from discussion on any domestic problem. Indeed, for the participants, problems concerning British citizens, whether in Calne, Calcutta, or Chicoutimi, were domestic issues – Philip Lawson1 Historians writing on eighteenth century Britain have too often separated the study of imperial and domestic politics and political culture. Throughout much of the twentieth century, historians of Britain and the British Empire seemed content to ignore the interrelated nature of their fields. Just as domestic historians paid little close attention to the historiographical trends affecting historical discourse on empire, many imperial historians chose to relegate the metropole in their analysis of the periphery. There are certainly advantages to focusing on the study of imperial peripheries in their own right, and the field owes a great deal to those historians who focused on a certain region or group of regions within the Empire; but through such narrow analyses, one is unable to grasp a concept of the whole. For in the case of the British Empire, and perhaps any empire, the scholarly consensus suggests that the whole represents far more than the sum of its parts. In other words, there is something significant to be gained from a broad study of the whole Empire which simply cannot be obtained from a narrow national or regional study of a periphery or, for that matter, of the metropole itself. Within the past few decades, attempts have been made to address this issue through the construction of various transnational imperial narratives. Historians have 1 Philip Lawson, “The Missing Link: The Imperial Dimension in Understanding Hanoverian Britain,” The Historical Journal 29, no. 3 (September 1986): 750. 2 begun to consider different parts of the Empire as members of an Atlantic or Oceanic system of trade and negotiated power relations.2 Empire, considered as a whole at the turn of the twenty-first century, is not merely undergoing a cyclical return to the self- congratulatory Whiggish imperial narratives of the nineteenth, in which Britain thoroughly dominated the peripheries. The influence of history-writing from the peripheries in the twentieth century has led to an acknowledgement of the necessity of understanding the terms of the fluid and varying negotiated settlements which underpinned British rule and authority throughout the Empire.3 In what can certainly be seen as both an influence of, and a challenge to, many works of postcolonial scholarship, imperial historians have begun to acknowledge the extent to which British expansion overseas often involved not only the consent, but also the active participation, of sectors of the indigenous populations.4 The study of this negotiated authority often places emphasis on the contact points between British officials and indigenous elites in the colonies themselves. The place of Westminster in these narratives is largely downplayed or ignored. But viewing the

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