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. $23.95 (paper), ISBN 978-0-8078-4846-3; $59.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-8078-2529-7.

Reviewed by John Money (Department of History, University of Victoria, British Columbia)
Published on H-Albion (August, 2000)

The end being the sovereignty of Parliament, and "subjecting an empire or letting it go" being the option before them, the British avoided the errors of Rome in 1782 by choosing the second course. "The political nation was supporting its Parliament as usual"; therefore it was wrong to "believe that the loss of America was a terrible shock to the British nations and marked a profound crisis in the stability of their governing institutions.... The loss of America was an effect of the stability of eighteenth-century politics, much more than of their instability, or of the fact that they were beginning to change, and was accepted in a way which did their stability no harm at all."[1] Thus John Pocock, twenty years ago now, on the third British Revolution: against Parliament. Writing thirteen years later on "Empire, revolution and the end of early modernity" in The Varieties of British Political Thought, 1500-1800 (Cambridge, 1993), he added a rider. Though constitutional revolution at the heart of Empire was averted "and we may say that it was never probable or even possible..., history consists not only in what did happen, but of what those living in it knew or believed might happen"[2]: hence the British response to the reforming aspirations of the Friends of the People and the London Corresponding Society a decade later.

And now Eligah Gould, of whom it could justly be said, as of King Wenceslaus's Page, that "in his master's steps he trod": "Although Britons could not have foreseen it in 1775, one of the great ironies of the American Revolution was that the loss of such an important part of Britain's Atlantic Empire not only failed to disrupt in any permanent way the ordinary pattern of domestic politics, but arguably left the Whig regime of George III at least as secure as it had been twenty years before" (p. 179). At the time, however, this was far from obvious: least of all to George III's Scotch subject the earl of Stair, who in 1781 implored his King, the "Sovereign of willing subjects, husband of a virtuous wife, father of many children of great hopes..., to stop on the extreme verge of the precipice on which we stand." By his "eventual recognition of American Independence" George did so, thereby making "a personal sacrifice worthy of Bolingbroke's Patriot King." Thus it transpires that "the Constitution was saved and public virtue restored," (p. 202) not in 1784 by the King's dismissal of the Fox-North Coalition, as usually recounted, but two years earlier, at the supposed nadir of his reign.

Though he deals at a level less lofty than his master, Gould echoes Pocock throughout. In general, his book does three things. First, it provides a lucid synthesis if a very large body of more specialized historiography. The recurrent refain of Gould's footnotes is that "the literature on this or that subject is vast, but see...." It is just as well that the primary and secondary citations which follow have been allowed proper fullness, because they do duty for the usual formal bibliography of secondary materials. Some readers may miss that convenience; but its absence is amply compensated by the provision of a chronological checklist of contemporary pamphlets and other printed ephemera, most of them unfamiliar because they come from well outside the usual canon of such sources.

This introduces Gould's second contribution. The Persistence of Empire joins a number of other recent works on the "first" Empire: H.T. Dickinson's edited collecton on Britain and the American Revolution (London, 1998); Peter Marshall's volume on the eighteenth century in The Oxford History of the British Empire (Oxford, 1998); the first volume (to 1784) of F.P. Lock's biography of Burke (Oxford, 1998), and the American War volume in the Oxford edition of Burke's writings and speeches (1996). It also joins the chorus on the forging of Britannic identity inaugurated by Linda Colley's Britons of 1992. In particular, Gould depicts contemporary political culture from an angle complementary to, but also strikingly different from, Kathleen Wilson's The Sense of the People (Cambridge, 1995). Thereby, he documents something which is easily overlooked in the conventional haste to read American origins back into mid-century English popular oppositionism: that the same antihanoverian, anti-European "Blue-water Patriotism" thus celebrated could and did lead in the 1760s and 70s to virtually the opposite political conclusion.

Bolstered by a moralistic and reform-minded sense of "positive Liberty" as distinct from Old Whig "negative" libertarianism, that conclusion pointed to the need to maintain the integrity and public credit of a "Britain" which spanned the Atlantic as well as Hadrian's Wall, Offa's Dyke and the Irish Sea, as Europe's best defence against Bourbon Universal Monarchy. It was the reconfiguring of this after 1783 which underpinned "the persistence of Empire" in a Britain now more narrowly defined: no longer a single, all-embracing Sovreignty, but the politically and culturally distinct head of a congeries of multilingual posessions, all of which, however diverse their cultures, were nevertheless to be guided along by the stadial road to Civility by the distinctive brand of authoritarian liberalism engendered by the North British philosophical history of William Robertson, Adam Smith, John Millar and Dugald Stewart.

The third contribution is what this suggests about Britain and Empire, not just as a self-referential story, but as a phenomenon in world history which has implications for the nature and wisdom of Mission Civilisatrice and Manifest Destiny which go far beyond the British example. This is more implicit than explicit, and only becomes fully apparent in Gould's closing allusion to the Victorian Sir John Seeley, who wrote a hundred years later that in 1783 "the English mind" had been left with "a doubt, a misgiving which affects our whole forecast of the future of England" (p. 214).

That could mean one or both of two things. As Gould maintains in an American Historical Review historiographical symposium (April 1999) on the global dimensions of the British past, it could mean that after the loss of America, the British were pragmatically content with a "Virtual Empire" in which potential conflicts over sovereignty were studiously avoided before they could jeopardize the domestic stability of the redrawn British polity itself. Hence, his book concludes that "never again would the British think of their empire as an extension of their own nation -- at least not in the way they had before 1776" (p. 214). Well, maybe; and from an American perspective on the course and lessons of Empire this is no doubt generally cogent. Whatever the view may be from the top of Mount Pocock, however, the implication of such olympian hindsight, that bar the shouting the die was fully cast in 1783, makes rather light of an inconvenient fact. It was not until 1840, following the Upper Canada Rebellion and the Durham Report, that Westminster, repealed the Canada Act of 1791, thereby relinquishing the effort of William Pitt and William Grenville, who had remained convinced that "the British Constitution is sufficient to pervade the world,"[3] to secure that pervasion's persistence in North America against the territorial and commercial aspirations of the new republic, by systematically setting up in Canada the closest possible replica of the British polity, comprised of nobility, gentry and clergy, governed under the crown by means closely modelled on previous colonial example.

There are other problems too. Besides its pragmatic meaning, Seeley's observation could also imply, rather more ambiguously, that having learned their lesson, the still-imperial British were thereafter historically fit to be trusted with the freedom of the world. On the face of it, the two senses are complementary. Both imply a cautious internal drawing together among the components of a metropolitan Britain newly conscious of its limitations. Hence, the outcome could be presented as a lesson in Empire analogous to that impressed on Monarchy in 1688. Anxiety, however, was not new in 1782. It had been global ambition's doppelganger from the start; and the second meaning, which repeats a reassuring trope about God and his Englishmen which had been part of the providential armour of protestant Empire since as far back as the Protectorate's response to the failure of Cromwell's Western Design, and would remain so ("Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet, Lest we forget -- lest we forget!") at least until Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee, when the Captains and the Kings began to depart, was as much a call to go forth as to draw in.

Alongside its new realism, the chastened moral earnestness of Britain's post-American identity also invented the prototypes of the White Man's Burden in the conviction-politics of Abolition and the rhetoric of Warren Hastings's impeachment. In the 1780s England's putative Ancien Regime still had nearly fifty years to run; but in the dialectic between those introvert and extrovert proclivities, the imperial debates of Disraelian, Gladstonian and Salisburian Britain were foreshadowed. Considering the connections likely to have been made in his own time by Seeley's readers, whatever his own intention, between his words and the Greater Britain of Sir Charles Dilke, empire east of Suez and the denial of Irish Home Rule -- no concession in the face of domestic threat this time, despite Mr Gladstone; and even his motives defy easy analysis -- one might well wonder to what exactly Gould's final qualifier about British attitudes after 1783 actually boils down.

Gould's presentation of the changes in the internal disposition of the British polity at the heart of these bigger transformations turns on his discussion of the militia issue. Notwithstanding the classical republican rhetoric of free citizenship in which the patriot spin-doctors of Pitt and Popularity couched it, response to the 1757 Militia Act was decidedly mixed. In pitting custom against Parliamentary innovation, its authoritarian potential exposed a disjunction between the language of Patriotism and the limits of Law, respect for which, as the Earl of Hardwicke observed, was apt to be undermined by the contradiction of conscription in defence of Liberty. The ballot, which was supposed to resolve this problem, proved in practice to be both socially and fiscally regressive.

Though the act produced a new and rather reluctant cohesion among the post-Jacobite gentry, the riots which greeted it set the languages of patrician/pleb and patriot/polite at cross purposes, and exposed latent tensions which foreshadowed later polarities. As Sir George Savile, descendant of James II's trimming Marquess of Halifax and later a prominent actor in the Yorkshire Association of Christopher Wyvill, warned, mobilizing the subaltern orders of society was not only of doubtful military value; it was also risky. Faced with this, the government changed its tune. The ballot was played down; "Virtue" a dangerously two-edged word whose connotations were still classically Public rather than privately Christian, was replaced by Manly Duty in defence of Women and Family; conditions of service were eased by parliamentary guarantees of compensation and dependent-support. Nevertheless, the militia did produce a new sense of disciplined connection between metropolis and province, made manifest in public spectacle and graced by royalty. Thanks in no small part to suitably selective newspaper coverage, it thus achieved its primary political objective.

Reading this discussion, one is struck, not only by the extent to which the imperial issues and positions of the next two decades were already latent, on both sides of the argument, in the domestic situation of the 1750s, but also by its foreshadowing of the 1790s, when a considerable amount of propaganda originally dating from the Seven Years' War was recirculated, especially in the tracts of the Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge. Gould's discussion of the second mobilization, in the 1770s, prompts similar reactions. This time, he argues, the government had a freer hand with the militia card, not only because the force's command and auxiliary structures were already in being, but also because after 1776, political opposition had no option but grudging assent or at worst, indifference, and because France's declaration of war divided Patriotism against itself. For all that power-dressed Whig noblewomen might strut round Tunbridge Wells or inspect the camps at Coxheath and Warley in quasi-military uniform, the government was able to isolate and divert potential trouble from militia regiments of oppositionist provenance, while now making much play with the manliness of "volunteering."

The primary unit of loyalty behind this, however, remained its regimental base: not the nation but the county, or in some cases the civic community, where the militia's auxiliary paraphernalia --military bands at public breakfasts and other genteel assemblies, sporting associations with foxhunting, cricket and other games, not least its rapid permeation by freemasonry -- integrated it into the accepted fabric of identity and tradition. This was not always plain sailing, however. In Warwickshire, Birmingham supporters of subscription to raise additional forces used the prospect of being surpassed by Manchester and other great towns to overcome resistance and kick-start the town's own contribution, only to object when the Birmingham Companies thus raised were absorbed into the Warwickshire contingent, on the grounds that this would surrender them into the hands of placemen. More could have been said on this aspect, because the diverse impetus behind the additional mobilization of 1778 bears in complex ways on the nature and fortunes of Christopher Wyvill's County Association Movement.

The Association Movement also gets rather short shrift. Granted, the movement was compromised on the imperial issue, and its direct ascendancy, before the capture of Charleston and the impact of the Gordon Riots took the wind out of its sails, was brief. But there was a good deal more to it than that, and one of the still missing pieces in the puzzle, though the account of Wyvill's press-management in Hannah Barker's recent Newspapers, Politics and Public Opinion in Late Eighteenth-Century England (Oxford, 1998) supplies one aspect, is a full study of the County Association movement on the ground and in all its dimensions, not just as a short term problem at Westminster. Benjamin Franklin may have dismissed the federalism of some of the Association's supporters as a chimera; but they were not so very different from those propounded by the colonists not long before. And the London meeting of what Wyvill called the "great collective body of the nation" spoke a political language not dissimilar from that of Bernard Bailyn's "Logic of Rebellion" and of the Continental Congress itself. The neutralization of these elements by the Crown's rescue of parliamentary and public virtue did not happen, nor did the association movement die, overnight. Indeed, the political stability which returned in 1784 owed much to the fact that in the eyes of most, Pitt was able to assume the Wyvillite mantle following the King's dismissal of the Fox-North coalition.

This returns to the postponed question of the relationship between that episode and the supreme patriot sacrifice which Gould rather poetically ascribes to the King two years previously. Based on what is offered here, this can only be posed, not answered. For the actual circumstances one must go back to a previous generation of historians: John Cannon, Ian Christie; above all Richard Pares. It seems rather simplistic, however, to suggest that "the British friends of America ultimately played almost no role in determining the Revolution's outcome -- or rather none beyond drawing attention to mounting war weariness among the general public" (p. 177), or that the great volunteer meetings in Dublin and Dungannon only signified by proxy as a theatric pretext for metropolitan armchair patriotism. In Ireland at least, a not inconsiderable player, both in the immediate game and in the whole future of reconfigured Britain and its persistent Empire, they were taken rather more seriously. Nor should it be forgotten, amid talk of prudent retreat, royal patriotism and efforts by tolerant anglicans to limit the conflict's potential for odium theologicum, that it was the later stages of the American War which cemented George III's limpet-like attachment to the Protestant Constitution, thereby initiating the leitmotif which runs like a smouldering fuse through the subsequent history of the British Union, from 1801 to the Good Friday Agreement.

But these considerations are another story. Meantime, there is plenty here to remind that persistent things have deep roots: not only Empire, but also its cognates, Euroscepticism and "The Special Relationship." Without stretching the imagination too far, the conundrum which they jointly comprise can be topically caricatured. Think of the sporting event which embodies the ambivalent essences of all three: the All-England Championships at Wimbledon. After sharpening his game in earlier rounds against a succession of continental clay-courters, none of whom have given him serious difficulty, though the French semi-finalist ran him close until late in the fourth set, the defending champion unexpectedly finds himself pitted in the final against an unseeded opponent, hitherto his doubles partner. The match is in its fifth set and he is in trouble. He's dropped his service; he has no answer to his challenger's unorthodox tactics; the crowd has turned against him. The score is six-all: tie-break time. But there is no fifth set tie-break at Wimbledon; and so the match goes on, and on, and on.

Notes

[1]. J.G.A. Pocock, "1776: the Revolution against Parliament," in Three British Revolutions: 1641, 1688, 1776, ed. J.G.A. Pocock (Princeton, 1980), pp. 279-80.

[2]. Pocock, "Empire, revolution and the end of early modernity," pp. 288-9.

[3]. For a succinct account of the genesis of the Canada Act of 1791, cf. John Ehrman, The Younger Pitt, the Years of Acclaim(London, 1969), pp. 354-71. Granted, the desire to avoid previous mistakes by working out a middle way between direct control from Westminster and virtual autonomy meant that previous colonial examples were modified. Nevertheless, the overall intent to sustain what could not be achieved by direct authority through tighter management of patronage in a controlled reproduction of England's ancien regime polity seems little different from the prospect which had aroused the suspicions of New Englanders in the late 1750s. The original Chathamite principle that the British Constitution was sufficient for the whole world had been explicitly maintained in 1783 by Chatham's political heir,the Earl of Shelburne, as the basis of his negotiating position on the peace preliminaries (Op. Cit., p. 99). Conceded in the case of America, it nevertheless remained according to Ehrman "a commonly held, more far reaching creed"(Op. Cit., p 365), in the Britain of the Younger Pitt: who had been a member of Shelburne's Cabinet, and in whose regime returned loyalists figured more prominently than is often realized. The creed had no stronger believer than Grenville, Pitt's cousin and closest cabinet ally, who took charge of the postponed settlement of Canadian affairs between 1789 and 1791. In the legislation which he developed he had the full support of his leader. As for George III, whatever Patriotic sacrifices he may have made in 1782, his attitude was one of grudging acceptance of the ministry's proposed modifications to the government of his Canadian subjects, combined with grumbling that things could not have been left as they had been before.

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Citation: John Money. Review of Gould, Eliga, The Persistence of Empire: British Political Culture in the Age of the American Revolution. H-Albion, H-Net Reviews. August, 2000.
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