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John Money on the Persistence of Empire: British Political Eliga Gould. The Persistence of Empire: British Political Culture in the Age of the American Revolution. Chapel Hill, London: University of North Carolina Press, 2000. xxiv + 262 pp. $59.95, cloth, ISBN 978-0-8078-2529-7. Reviewed by John Money Published on H-Albion (August, 2000) The end being the sovereignty of Parliament, British response to the reforming aspirations of and "subjecting an empire or letting it go" being the Friends of the People and the London Corre‐ the option before them, the British avoided the er‐ sponding Society a decade later. rors of Rome in 1782 by choosing the second And now Eligah Gould, of whom it could just‐ course. "The political nation was supporting its ly be said, as of King Wenceslaus's Page, that "in Parliament as usual"; therefore it was wrong to his master's steps he trod": "Although Britons "believe that the loss of America was a terrible could not have foreseen it in 1775, one of the shock to the British nations and marked a pro‐ great ironies of the American Revolution was that found crisis in the stability of their governing in‐ the loss of such an important part of Britain's At‐ stitutions.... The loss of America was an effect of lantic Empire not only failed to disrupt in any per‐ the stability of eighteenth-century politics, much manent way the ordinary pattern of domestic pol‐ more than of their instability, or of the fact that itics, but arguably left the Whig regime of George they were beginning to change, and was accepted III at least as secure as it had been twenty years in a way which did their stability no harm at before" (p. 179). At the time, however, this was far all."[1] Thus John Pocock, twenty years ago now, from obvious: least of all to George III's Scotch on the third British Revolution: against Parlia‐ subject the earl of Stair, who in 1781 implored his ment. Writing thirteen years later on "Empire, King, the "Sovereign of willing subjects, husband revolution and the end of early modernity" in The of a virtuous wife, father of many children of Varieties of British Political Thought, 1500-1800 great hopes..., to stop on the extreme verge of the (Cambridge, 1993), he added a rider. Though con‐ precipice on which we stand." By his "eventual stitutional revolution at the heart of Empire was recognition of American Independence" George averted "and we may say that it was never proba‐ did so, thereby making "a personal sacrifice wor‐ ble or even possible..., history consists not only in thy of Bolingbroke's Patriot King." Thus it tran‐ what did happen, but of what those living in it spires that "the Constitution was saved and public knew or believed might happen"[2]: hence the H-Net Reviews virtue restored," (p. 202) not in 1784 by the King's lead in the 1760s and 70s to virtually the opposite dismissal of the Fox-North Coalition, as usually re‐ political conclusion. counted, but two years earlier, at the supposed Bolstered by a moralistic and reform-minded nadir of his reign. sense of "positive Liberty" as distinct from Old Though he deals at a level less lofty than his Whig "negative" libertarianism, that conclusion master, Gould echoes Pocock throughout. In gen‐ pointed to the need to maintain the integrity and eral, his book does three things. First, it provides a public credit of a "Britain" which spanned the At‐ lucid synthesis if a very large body of more spe‐ lantic as well as Hadrian's Wall, Offa's Dyke and cialized historiography. The recurrent refain of the Irish Sea, as Europe's best defence against Gould's footnotes is that "the literature on this or Bourbon Universal Monarchy. It was the reconfig‐ that subject is vast, but see...." It is just as well that uring of this after 1783 which underpinned "the the primary and secondary citations which follow persistence of Empire" in a Britain now more nar‐ have been allowed proper fullness, because they rowly defined: no longer a single, all-embracing do duty for the usual formal bibliography of sec‐ Sovreignty, but the politically and culturally dis‐ ondary materials. Some readers may miss that tinct head of a congeries of multilingual poses‐ convenience; but its absence is amply compensat‐ sions, all of which, however diverse their cul‐ ed by the provision of a chronological checklist of tures, were nevertheless to be guided along by the contemporary pamphlets and other printed stadial road to Civility by the distinctive brand of ephemera, most of them unfamiliar because they authoritarian liberalism engendered by the North come from well outside the usual canon of such British philosophical history of William Robert‐ sources. son, Adam Smith, John Millar and Dugald Stewart. This introduces Gould's second contribution. The third contribution is what this suggests The Persistence of Empire joins a number of other about Britain and Empire, not just as a self-refer‐ recent works on the "first" Empire: H.T. Dickin‐ ential story, but as a phenomenon in world histo‐ son's edited collecton on Britain and the Ameri‐ ry which has implications for the nature and wis‐ can Revolution (London, 1998); Peter Marshall's dom of Mission Civilisatrice and Manifest Destiny volume on the eighteenth century in The Oxford which go far beyond the British example. This is History of the British Empire (Oxford, 1998); the more implicit than explicit, and only becomes ful‐ first volume (to 1784) of F.P. Lock's biography of ly apparent in Gould's closing allusion to the Vic‐ Burke (Oxford, 1998), and the American War vol‐ torian Sir John Seeley, who wrote a hundred years ume in the Oxford edition of Burke's writings and later that in 1783 "the English mind" had been left speeches (1996). It also joins the chorus on the with "a doubt, a misgiving which affects our forging of Britannic identity inaugurated by Linda whole forecast of the future of England" (p. 214). Colley's Britons of 1992. In particular, Gould de‐ That could mean one or both of two things. As picts contemporary political culture from an an‐ Gould maintains in an American Historical Re‐ gle complementary to, but also strikingly different view historiographical symposium (April 1999) on from, Kathleen Wilson's The Sense of the People the global dimensions of the British past, it could (Cambridge, 1995). Thereby, he documents some‐ mean that after the loss of America, the British thing which is easily overlooked in the conven‐ were pragmatically content with a "Virtual Em‐ tional haste to read American origins back into pire" in which potential conflicts over sovereignty mid-century English popular oppositionism: that were studiously avoided before they could jeopar‐ the same antihanoverian, anti-European "Blue- dize the domestic stability of the redrawn British water Patriotism" thus celebrated could and did polity itself. Hence, his book concludes that "nev‐ 2 H-Net Reviews er again would the British think of their empire as least until Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee, an extension of their own nation -- at least not in when the Captains and the Kings began to depart, the way they had before 1776" (p. 214). Well, was as much a call to go forth as to draw in. maybe; and from an American perspective on the Alongside its new realism, the chastened course and lessons of Empire this is no doubt gen‐ moral earnestness of Britain's post-American erally cogent. Whatever the view may be from the identity also invented the prototypes of the White top of Mount Pocock, however, the implication of Man's Burden in the conviction-politics of Aboli‐ such olympian hindsight, that bar the shouting tion and the rhetoric of Warren Hastings's im‐ the die was fully cast in 1783, makes rather light peachment. In the 1780s England's putative An‐ of an inconvenient fact. It was not until 1840, fol‐ cien Regime still had nearly ffty years to run; but lowing the Upper Canada Rebellion and the in the dialectic between those introvert and extro‐ Durham Report, that Westminster, repealed the vert proclivities, the imperial debates of Dis‐ Canada Act of 1791, thereby relinquishing the ef‐ raelian, Gladstonian and Salisburian Britain were fort of William Pitt and William Grenville, who foreshadowed. Considering the connections likely had remained convinced that "the British Consti‐ to have been made in his own time by Seeley's tution is sufficient to pervade the world,"[3] to se‐ readers, whatever his own intention, between his cure that pervasion's persistence in North Ameri‐ words and the Greater Britain of Sir Charles Dilke, ca against the territorial and commercial aspira‐ empire east of Suez and the denial of Irish Home tions of the new republic, by systematically set‐ Rule -- no concession in the face of domestic ting up in Canada the closest possible replica of threat this time, despite Mr Gladstone; and even the British polity, comprised of nobility, gentry his motives defy easy analysis -- one might well and clergy, governed under the crown by means wonder to what exactly Gould's fnal qualifier closely modelled on previous colonial example. about British attitudes after 1783 actually boils There are other problems too. Besides its down. pragmatic meaning, Seeley's observation could Gould's presentation of the changes in the in‐ also imply, rather more ambiguously, that having ternal disposition of the British polity at the heart learned their lesson, the still-imperial British of these bigger transformations turns on his dis‐ were thereafter historically ft to be trusted with cussion of the militia issue.
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