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— seven — Britain’s Overseas Empire before 1780 Overwhelmingly Successful and Bureaucratically Challenged I As a result of the American War for Independence, the British overseas empire in 1783 lost just under half of the thirty-three Atlantic colonies it had held when war began in 1775. In addition to the thirteen that became the United States, East and West Florida were retroceded to Spain, and the French did not return Tobago, which they had captured during the war. Over the next half century, the focus of empire shifted heavily to India, which until the 1760s had been a lucrative commercial venture presided over by a publicly chartered but privately controlled company with no significant territorial jurisdiction and very little state oversight. Before 1783, however, the British Empire had been primarily an Atlantic empire divided into thirty-four separate and self-contained polities, one in Ireland, eighteen in North America, eleven in the West Indies, three in the western Atlantic, and one in Africa. Formal political connections among these polities ran through London, and, except for the African colony of Senegambia, they were all settler colonies in the sense that settlers either constituted the overwhelming majority of the population or controlled most patented land and bound labor and dominated political and economic life. Indeed, settler demand for slaves accounted for the vast majority of British activities in Africa.¹ Formal political ties among its various parts in this sprawling polity ran This chapter was written for presentation at “Empires and Bureaucracy: A Colloquium Exploring the Comparative History of European Empires from Late Antiquity to the Modern World,” at Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland, June 17, 2111, and will be published in Peter Crooks and Timothy Parsons, eds., Empires and Bureaucracy from Late Antiquity to the Modern World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013). 1. This chapter draws heavily upon the author’s ideas from earlier writings, especially Peripheries and Center: Constitutional Development in the Extended Polities of the British Empire and the United States, 1607–1788 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1986); Negotiated Authorities: Essays in Colonial Political and Constitutional History (Charlottesville: University Greene, final pages 113 Greene, final pages 113 2/12/13 2:27 PM 2/12/13 2:27 PM 114 Governance through London, not laterally among overseas provinces. Although commercial exchanges and boundary issues often brought neighboring polities together and colonies were generally free to trade with one another over long distances, they had no constitutional connection to one another. From very early on, the colonies had enjoyed considerable self-government, and for most of the eighteenth century, various commentators spoke with pride of the fact that, as George Dempster put it in the British House of Commons in October 1775, Britain, in contrast to the ancient Roman and the modern Spanish, French, Dutch, and Turkish empires, had, in the best British tradition, diffused “the blessings of liberty and good government . . . through our remotest provinces.”² Yet, from the mid-seventeenth century, metropolitan authorities contested the extent of that liberty, making sporadic efforts to assert greater control over the colonies and provoking strong colonial resistance. The recurrent tensions over the extent to which British colonists might enjoy the traditional hallmarks of English liberty, specifically the right to consensual governance and the rule of law, were never resolved before the American Revolution. In addition to strong and increasing commercial ties, powerful cultural attachments and, beginning in the late 1730s, defense needs bound the provinces to the metropolis and held Britain’s loosely textured empire together. Rooted in the early colonists’ determination to re-create the Old World in the New by founding their new societies on English law and English traditions, the strength of this cultural attachment increased over time as, particularly after the early decades of the eighteenth century, the rapid development of these new societies lent plausibility to colonial elites’ mimetic aspirations to anglicize all aspects of provincial life and thereby reinforced metropolitan charisma throughout the colonies.³ Press of Virginia, 1994); “Transatlantic Colonization and the Redefinition of Empire in the Early Modern Era: The British-American Experience,” in Christine Daniels and Michael V. Kennedy, eds., Negotiated Empires: Centers and Peripheries in the Americas, 1500–1820 (New York and London: Routledge, 2002), 267–82; “Traditions of Consensual Governance in the Construction of State Authority in the Early Modern Empires in America,” in Maija Jansson, ed., Realities of Representation: State Building in Early Modern Europe and European America (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 171–86; and The Constitutional Origins of the American...

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