Making the imperial nati.., p.1
Making the Imperial Nation, page 1
MAKING THE IMPERIAL NATION
THE LEWIS WALPOLE SERIES
IN EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY CULTURE AND HISTORY
The Lewis Walpole Series, published by Yale University Press with the aid of the Annie Burr Lewis Fund, is dedicated to the culture and history of the long eighteenth century (from the Glorious Revolution to the accession of Queen Victoria). It welcomes work in a variety of fields, including literature and history, the visual arts, political philosophy, music, legal history, and the history of science. In addition to original scholarly work, the series publishes new editions and translations of writing from the period, as well as reprints of major books that are currently unavailable. Though the majority of books in the series will probably concentrate on Great Britain and the Continent, the range of our geographical interests is as wide as Horace Walpole’s.
Published with assistance from the Annie Burr Lewis Fund.
Copyright © 2023 by Gabriel Glickman.
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CONTENTS
Map of English America in 1708
Introduction: “This New Nature Come Among Us”
PART ONE: MAPPING THE RESTORATION EMPIRE, 1660–C. 1670
1 The Restoration and the Geography of English Overseas Expansion
2 The Moral Image of Empire in Restoration England
3 Conflict, Commerce, and Political Economies of Empire
PART TWO: THE IMAGE AND THE GOVERNANCE OF THE ENGLISH COLONISTS, 1660–1688
4 “People of Another World”: Colonial Subjects, Colonial Liberties, and English Domestic Opinion
5 Protestantism, Pluralism, and the Politics of Allegiance in the Restoration Empire
PART THREE: COLONIZATION AND THE DISCONTENTS OF ENGLISH DOMESTIC POLITICS, 1667–1688
6 Warfare, Luxury, and the Domestic Critique of English Overseas Expansion
7 “Popery,” Europe, and the Crisis of English Overseas Expansion, 1675–1688
PART FOUR: BRITAIN, EUROPE, AND THE POST-REVOLUTIONARY EMPIRE, 1689–C. 1700
8 Revolution and the Redefinition of Empire
9 The Colonies and the Meaning of “Britain”
Conclusion
Notes
Acknowledgments
Index
MAKING THE IMPERIAL NATION
ENGLISH AMERICA IN 1708
From Hermann Moll, A New Map of North America, in John Oldmixon, The British Empire in America (1708).
Introduction: “This New Nature Come Among Us”
IN 1685, AN “ESSAY” EXPLORING THE “Interest of the Crown in American Plantations & Trade” was produced for the consumption of James II’s Privy Council. Most plausibly the work of William Blathwayt, a longstanding colonial strategist and administrator, it surveyed the historic creation of the English dominions outside Europe and examined “the Influence those Colonies have on our People at home.”1 England, the author surmised, had been “infected by Trade and Navigation,” with the kingdom undergoing its own sea change as it unleashed its energies on an uncharted world. Of the 200,000 English colonists dwelling in the New World, four in five had left their native shores within the previous fifty years. The newcomers represented such a broad slice of society that there were now “few of the middle Gentry of the Nation if not of the Nobility, but can reckon some younger branch of their family transplanted and thriving in those parts.” The experience was all the more remarkable for the way in which it had been accomplished. Most European colonizing powers had relied on state administrations and centrally funded armed forces to build up their power bases overseas. The expansion of England, by contrast, had come out of a spillage of independent trade and travel: “a natural Emanation of the minds Freedom, every man being left to his own choice in a manner, from what part of the World to raise his Revenues by.” It was “the industry of some few Private undertakers” that had pushed the realm across oceans and continents: the gambles taken by projectors and adventurers had enabled the English to contend with the world’s great potentates and become “not only their equals in Power & Strength, but able (would the King permit) to make ourselves their Masters.”
Yet the “Essay” warned of perils as well as opportunities arising from this achievement. When the plantation of sovereign institutions had trailed in the wake of private initiatives, the extension of the royal domain had come with no proportionate increase in the power of the Crown. Without oversight from the mother kingdom, the English overseas world risked becoming a monument to all the disorders that attended on unchecked human liberty, with consequences refracting back into domestic society. It was the bustle of global traffic, novel tastes, and exotic encounters that gave vent to “that eternal noise and wild manner of talk” among merchants thronging together “in Citty Coffee houses”—many so transfigured by their exposures that “a stranger might believe there was not one Englishman in the room.” Carried into the political domain, the consequences were even more dangerous. Ideas picked up overseas had served to feed those “Popular & Republican notions” that had encouraged “our discontented Demi-Politicians” to posture in and outside Parliament, with grave implications for England’s stability. After a century of colonial activity, the author concluded, “the very genius of the people is alter’d.” It was now in the “interest of the Crown” to revisit the way in which it governed its people, at home and overseas, and to “proportion its maxims to this new nature come among us.”
The themes of the “Essay” characterized the hopes and anxieties that had inflected the political and social landscapes of the seventeenth century, as England’s relationship with a wider world underwent lasting change. This book looks at how the ripple effects of colonial ventures entered into the political, moral, and religious debates of the domestic kingdom, arousing expectations for its future, sowing fears for its stability, and casting reflections back on the nature and identity of an expanding nation. In 1660, English interests beyond Europe were dispersed and underdeveloped, comprising chiefly scattered settlements, commercial outposts, and private fiefdoms. Over the coming four decades, however, governments endeavored to convert these dominions into a more coordinated base of territorial power. Frontiers were stretched north and south across the American Atlantic seaboard, from Maine to the borders of Spanish Florida. The creation of trading depots, forts, and settlements in India and the Gulf of Guinea showed further glimmerings of global ambition, while the vast resources poured into the city of Tangier presaged new plans for dominion and occupation along the Mediterranean shoreline. The colonial grip over these possessions was secured through an escalating movement of men, women, and children out of the British Isles. Proceeding in the background was the cultural and demographic transformation of great tracts of the West Indies, through African slave labor. Stuart monarchs ruled a political community that was expanding geographically and in numbers of subjects, with far-reaching implications for the religion, culture, society, and economy of the domestic realm.
Over three centuries later, the significance of “this new nature come among us” is still being disinterred. Moral questions concerning the origins of empire crashed back into British public life in the summer of 2020, amid vehement debate over the statues, memorials, museums, and other material remains linked to seventeenth-century magnates who had built imperial power on a foundation of territorial conquest and slave labor.2 The vociferous nature of these exchanges would not have been surprising to those engaged in the public sphere of later Stuart England. Through the later seventeenth century, questions over the strategy and morality of overseas expansion filled books, pamphlets, theatrical productions, and parliamentary debates. But whereas the development of the English (later British) Empire is still retailed in many public forums as a near-invincible rise to global domination, seventeenth-century commentators saw fewer grounds for self-confidence. In 1660, English engagements outside Europe took place primarily in crowded shipping lanes and disputed borderlands, in regions plagued by skirmishes on land and piracy offshore. Colonization was punctuated by setbacks, reverses, and roads not taken. Regular defeats to native powers and European rivals exposed the gulf between the ambitions and the real capability of the Crown. Even in more settled domains, English governors had created an environment in which sovereignty was uneven, territorial limits contested, and royal authority stood entangled with the interests of landed proprietors and self-governing corporations. Domestic commentators described not a coherent, expansionist operation, but a more fluid and troubling arena of global encounter, one that all too commonly exposed the limits of English power in the world. This book suggest
The Meaning of Empire in Seventeenth-Century England
Modern scholarship has reasserted the international context to the history of the early modern British Isles. Influential essays and monographs have offered a picture of seventeenth-century English men and women mediating between their affinities toward compatriots, fellow Protestants, and Europeans.3 Some of this focus has extended to the realm of plantation and colonization. We now possess a rich intellectual history of the early British Empire, and an increasingly comprehensive anatomy of the patterns of trade and migration that made up the Atlantic world.4
It is one of the principal intuitions of “Atlantic history” that early modern maritime ventures transformed adjoining regions of Europe, just as much as they altered the New World.5 The challenge invited by this insight, however, has been taken up less assiduously by historians of the British Isles than by their counterparts focusing on North America. Colonial designs and colonial peoples have been featured only sparingly in the domestic political and religious histories of seventeenth-century England. The expansion of the realm is still commonly presented as having occurred above the cut and thrust of domestic affairs, with colonial policy itself portrayed as the preserve of governmental and diplomatic inner sanctums—that is, as a subject of marginal interest to most participants in the public domain. In many works of scholarship, the political impact of colonial expansion has been expressly downplayed, in favor of alternative ways of positioning early modern England within the wider world. Architects of the “new British history,” sensitive to the importance of Scotland and Ireland in Stuart politics, have argued that the language of “empire” and “plantation” belonged to political experiments internal to the three kingdoms, with “greater Britain” possessing, at most, secondary salience.6 For other scholars, the “empire” that held the gaze of more influential seventeenth-century commentators was the Habsburg Holy Roman dominion, reflecting the primacy of Europe in English politics, over and above the pockets of territory emerging further afield.7 A renewed focus on the British and European dimensions to the Civil War, the politics of the Restoration, and the 1688 Revolution has ironically set up blockades against the recognition of influences from outside Europe. In most British universities, the overseas dominions have been researched and taught in the separate sphere of early American colonial history.
Doubts over the political importance of the early English colonies have been reinforced by more rigorous attention paid to the early modern conception of “empire.” The term is still deployed with near universality in studies of English overseas expansion—even by authors who have raised questions over its proper application.8 It does, however, open up multiple problems of definition, as the progenitors of modern colonial historiography, Charles McLean Andrews and George Louis Beer, identified in the early twentieth century.9 Modern imperial paradigms do not provide an easy framework for examining the loose agglomeration of overseas provinces claimed by the Stuart Crown, with each dominion legally and politically distinct from the others, and all outside the jurisdiction of the Westminster parliament. Neither did early colonization conform to the seventeenth-century idea of “imperium,” which, in its origins, alluded rather to the possession of sovereign authority, or autonomy, than to control over an extended landmass. For the authors of the anti-papal tenet “this realm of England is an Empire,” which powered the Henrician break from Rome, the political meaning of “empire” equated more closely to the modern notion of a sovereign state.10 For some seventeenth-century commentators, the overseas dominions were emphatically not part of the “empire of the King of England,” because they stood outside the integrated realm bound by uniform laws, governmental structures, and an established Church.11 Of the 225 English works printed between 1660 and 1700 that carried the term “empire” in the title, only one alluded to the colonies and plantations belonging to the house of Stuart.12 To write about the “politics of empire” or to discern an “imperial dimension” to later Stuart affairs, therefore, risks transposing a set of ideas that would have had limited meaning to contemporaneous authors. The problem of nomenclature has compounded a view of England’s overseas dominions as out of sight and out of mind—remote from the political and ideological choices of the domestic setting, just as they stood outside its legal apparatus.
The difficulties posed by names and terms, can, however, be overstated. In the seventeenth century, no less than in the modern world, “empire” was “one of the most evocative words in the political vocabulary,” as James Muldoon has put it, and a term capacious enough to cover “a wide range of political situations.”13 Looking back into antiquity, early modern commentators could find the concept of an “imperium Romanum” applied by Sallust to designate the geographical extent of territories brought under the city’s control.14 By the later seventeenth century, this variant of the term was being re-excavated by some commentators, as they sifted through their political vocabulary to diagnose the processes of territorial acquisition and competition taking place between states in and outside Europe. For Samuel von Pufendorf, an “empire” was a polity distinguished by its physical magnitude. This type of domain sat at odds with “those Communities” (duchies, republics, city-states) that had formed “when Mankind was divided into a prodigious Variety of distinct Governments,” but which had now become vulnerable—“too little since the forming of mighty Empires.”15 For the political economist Nicholas Barbon, “the growth of Empire” meant the extension of a state’s authority over new zones.16 England, agreed his contemporary Charles Davenant, could be called “the seat of Empire” because it stood at the center of a nexus of dominions and plantations.17 Following the same definition, William Penn saluted “so glorious an empire, as the Colonys of America make to the Crown.”18
These asides, and many others like them, suggest that by 1700 the idea of “imperium” was undergoing a subtle conceptual shift. The “modern name of empire” was now applicable, according to the diplomat Sir William Temple, to “a nation extended over vast tracts of land and numbers of people.”19 The adaptation was fitful and untidy. There was no recognizable territorial unit called “the English Empire” as a term to unite all of the kingdom’s scattered outposts and to distinguish them from the mother kingdom. Even if “empire” increasingly meant a polity that controlled spaces beyond its traditional borders, there was persistent doubt as to whether England actually merited that title, in view of the haphazard and decentralized nature of its own territorial enlargement. But the word was, nonetheless, being applied more consistently within a frame of reference created by English overseas colonization. Rhetorically and strategically, the expansion of the realm was being integrated into domestic politics—with the state of the overseas dominions becoming part of the way in which contemporaries assessed the character and interests of the kingdom, and judged its performance within a wider world.
If it did not meet the credentials of a conventional empire, the expanding community of Stuart England can be examined through other lenses and by alternative methodologies. Taking their cue from the works of Jack Greene and Bernard Bailyn, modern scholars of English America have highlighted the political, commercial, and religious bonds that connected subjects of the Stuart world in the absence of imperial power, thereby challenging by implication the exclusion of migrants and colonists from domestic historiographies.20 Studies by Carla Pestana, Owen Stanwood, and Evan Haefeli—and, some decades earlier, David Lovejoy’s analysis of America and the 1688 Revolution—have recast early colonists not as refugees, but as would-be participants in the upheavals of the kingdom, attentive to the politics of Old England and the “balance of Europe,” as the perceived foundations of their territorial security, civic liberties, and religious inheritance.21 These insights have played a part in invigorating broader new approaches to the history of the Americas. The rediscovery of a “vast early America,” pioneered in the pages of the William and Mary Quarterly, has encouraged scholars to trace the imprint of the New World’s “deep interior” on the colonizing kingdoms of Europe, and even on imperial operations taking place on other continents.22 Yet attempts to connect study of the Old and New Worlds have emerged overwhelmingly from authors with a background in colonial American scholarship. While the English context has been imported more fully into study of the Americas, fewer historians of the Stuart realm have probed the logical implication that colonial and transatlantic influences could have exerted reciprocal influence over affairs in seventeenth-century Britain.
