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Ten: An Empire of Freemen? The British Debate over the Status of Overseas Representative Assemblies, 1763–1783
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— ten — An Empire of Freemen? The British Debate over the Status of Overseas Representative Assemblies, 1763–1783 I Many eighteenth-century Britons celebrated the representative institutions that settlers had devised in the early colonies and that had subsequently become a standard feature of British colonial governance as the central element that allegedly distinguished Britain’s free overseas empire from those that other nations established. In America, proudly declared the agricultural writer Arthur Young in 1772, “Spain, Portugal and France have planted despotisms; only Britain liberty.”¹ “The Case of a Free country branching itself out in the manner Britain has done and sending to a distant world colonies which have there, from small beginnings and under free legislatures of their own, increased and formed a body of powerful states,” wrote the philosopher Richard Price, was unprecedented “in the history of mankind.”² Similarly, Adam Smith, in his extensive dilation in the Wealth of Nations in 1776 upon the causes of the rapid development in new colonial societies in the Englishspeaking world, directly linked the colonies’ rapid development to their extensive self-governing authority and more specifically to the fact that their liberties were “secured in the same manner” as were those “of their fellow-citizens at home . . . by an assembly of the representatives of the people.”³ This chapter is an abbreviated version of a lecture presented at the Yale Center for the Study of Representative Institutions, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut, November 29, 2011, and as a lecture at the University of Notre Dame, South Bend, Indiana, December 6, 2012. It is here published for the first time. 1. Arthur Young, Political Essays Concerning the Present State of the British Empire (London, 1772), 20. 2. Richard Price, Richard Price and the Ethical Foundations of the American Revolution: Selections from His Pamphlets, with Appendices, ed. Bernard Peach (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1979), 82. 3. Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776), in The Glasgow Edition of the Works and Correspondence of Adam Smith, ed. R. H. Campbell and A. S. Skinner, 6 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976–83), 2:572, 583–85. Greene, final pages 226 Greene, final pages 226 2/12/13 2:27 PM 2/12/13 2:27 PM An Empire of Freemen? 227 But such declamations concealed a deep and longstanding rift within the empire over whether a free empire required that colonial assemblies have parliamentary status within their respective jurisdictions. Long a bone of contention between colonial political establishments and Crown officials, the character and authority of the colonial representative institutions were subjects that lay at the heart of the intense and wide-ranging debate over the nature of the British imperial constitution during the last half of the eighteenth century and that deserve far more emphasis than scholars have accorded them over the past five or six decades. How these questions were contested within Britain itself, before, during, and after the debate over what came to be known as the American question from the early 1760s into the mid-1780s, is the subject of this chapter. More specifically, it will examine the intense debate over whether in a free empire colonial legislatures had to exercise an exclusive authority over taxation and the domestic affairs of their respective polities and how contingent developments, arising mainly out of conflicts with revolting colonies, a restless Ireland, and a problematic territorial venture in India, affected the outcome of that debate. II For more than eighty years, from the late 1670s through the early 1760s, questions about the constitutional basis of the colonial assemblies and the scope of their authority shaped debate whenever metropolitan authorities made one of their periodic efforts to shore up Crown authority in the colonies, and at no time more so than during the fifteen years from 1748 to 1763. Without the fiscal and utilitarian resources or the coercive power to enforce the royal will in the colonies, however, these mostly unsustained metropolitan initiatives accomplished little by way of limiting assembly authority in the colonies. On the contrary, during the eighteenth century, as the growing complexities of the political process rendered those bodies indispensable to the functioning of the colonial polities, they developed a much more articulate sense of their corporate rights and otherwise sought to give substance to the ideal that, as the sole givers of all statutory law operating inside a colony and as the presumed equivalents of the House of Commons within that sphere...