The Rise and Fall of Empires: An Essay in Economic and Political Liberty

In June 1764, Ezra Stiles, the Congregationalist minister of Newport, Rhode Island, and future president of Yale College, was provoked by the policies of the new British Prime Minister George Grenville into musing about the rise and fall of empires. “The measures and despotisms of the crowns of France and Spain towards their provinces have been the cause which has prevented the growth of their colonies, between which and ours there is a confessed difference principally owing to our politics and liberty,” Stiles informed his friend and fellow minister John B. Hubbard, “by means of which we have surpassed them, though they had a century’s advantage of us in settlement.” “Among the Greeks, Romans, and every colonization in the world, even those of Goths and Vandals,” Stiles continued, “franchises, liberties, legislative powers were in the nature of things necessary to be granted to their adventurers.” His wide-ranging reading in history had convinced Stiles that “there never has been any successful plantation in ancient ages or modern times without this.” ¹ Yet Stiles was a modern. When he came to examine the British Empire, and Stiles was a great admirer of the British empire-builder William Pitt the elder, he argued that its unique success was the result not of Britain’s commitment narrowly to constitutional liberty, but to political economic prosperity. ² “Whatever tends to render us a wealthy and flourishing people,” Stiles concluded, “must naturally make us the most beneficial to the Mother Country.” ³

For Ezra Stiles and a wide variety of commentators on both sides of the Atlantic, the crisis that American historians have come to call the Stamp Act Crisis was in fact a much broader, even global, crisis in the political economy of empires. Stiles understood that in fact the events were part of the “worldwide struggles for liberty and revolution AD 1765 and 1766.” ⁴ Stiles was right. As a consequence of the immense national debts accumulated during the Seven Years’ War (1757–63), the French, Spanish, and British empires all ratcheted up their imperial policies of austerity and extraction. These new policies provoked colonial revolts that threatened to break apart these great European Empires in Quito, Vera Cruz, Saint Domingue, as well as in colonial North America. They also led to widespread uprisings in Europe—the Spitalfields riots in London, the Whiteboys and Liberty Boys uprisings in Ireland, the widespread Parlementaire revolts in France, and the great Esquilache riots in Madrid and provincial Spain. ⁵

In the British Empire, and throughout Europe, these uprisings gave rise to a profound and wide-ranging debate about the political economy of empires. Most American historians who have studied this period have followed Edmund and Helen Morgan in asserting that the “Stamp Act crisis,” understood in narrow geographic and chronological terms, was a crisis of political liberty understood in the most restricted sense. For these historians, indeed this represents the default position of those who still care to write about the crisis of the 1760s, the Stamp Act—a tax measure that provoked Americans to enunciate their commitment to the priority of political over economic liberty: “no taxation without representation.” If this was indeed the first stage of the American Revolution, this implied that the Revolutionaries were committed to separation from the British Empire because they understood that they could have no economic liberty without first achieving political liberty through self-government.

I argue, in contrast, that historians have misunderstood this fundamental moment in the history of liberty–political and economic, civil and religious–because they have understood it as a narrowly national or anticolonial moment. ⁶ Instead, the later eighteenth-century crisis was an imperial crisis—an imperial crisis that affected the Spanish and French as well as the British empires. And that crisis was debated not in narrowly constitutional terms, or exclusively within the conceptual framework of moral philosophy, but in terms of political economy, the unifying language of the enlightenment. ⁷ While there is evidence for a political economic debate about Empire taking place in France and in Spain, the most public and...