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When Benjamin Franklin, aged 42, retired from his publishing business in 1748, he expected to devote more time to scientific and philosophical studies. Having achieved both fortune and status in Philadelphia, he now considered himself a “gentleman,” a “Man of Leisure” and disinterested reflection. In his case, this included studying the differences between American society and that of Europe, particularly England, then in the early stages of industrialization. His major work on the subject, an essay entitled Observations Concerning the Increase of Mankind published in late 1754, circulated widely in both Europe and America for more than a decade and likely influenced the writings of Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, and David Ricardo. Franklin intended the Observations as a blueprint for the longrange expansion of a self-sufficient British Empire, but it also expressed widely shared American beliefs that would help inspire coherent visions of a westwardexpanding New World civilization for generations to come.¹ While writing the Observations, Franklin did not anticipate, or desire, the independence of the colonies. Like most colonial Americans, he regarded the British Empire as the freest and most enlightened since the fall of Rome. Some of Franklin ’s views on settling the western regions resembled later economic belief on that subject, but in the early 1750s he prescribed only a course for British empire building and saw America’s western lands as key to that enterprise. Looking at empires more as processes than structures, that is, the creation of people involved directly on the ground as well as decision makers in faraway metropolitan centers, the British approach had been distinct from the start. Theirs was an empire based on conquest and settlement of the land and the building of permanent, self-sustaining colonies as opposed to the commercial style of their principal rival, the French, whose New World expansion pursued more the trading of goods that their trappers and adventurers extracted from unsettled regions with the cooperation of native inhabitants. By the mid-eighteenth century, however, British imperial officials had come to see their increasingly prosperous American p r o l o g u e “A Great Country, Populous and Mighty” “A Great Country, Populous and Mighty” 9 colonies not just as a source of agricultural materials but as a market for English manufactured goods. While colonial Americans remained intractably committed to land development—no more than one in twenty made a living apart from farming—their growing propensity to consume drew some into occupations like rudimentary textile production and shoemaking. The gradual emergence of smallscale manufacturing in the colonies, despite the ongoing shortage of investment capital and the high cost of labor in America, registered in London as a threat to homeland mercantilism, a competitive danger to English investors. Parliament responded in 1750 with legislation that outlawed colonial manufacture and export of specified textiles, and it issued the Iron Act, which banned American construction of slitting and rolling mills, plating forges, and iron furnaces—a drastic limitation on production of finished iron products in the colonies. Believing these moves to be based on misinformation, overreaction, and a logic of mercantilism that Franklin found faulty, he argued that England had little reason to fear competitive development in America, especially when the coming of war between Britain and France for ultimate control of the North American continent seemed only a matter of time.² Influenced by European physiocratic thought, which argued the primacy of agriculture for the health and progress of civilization, the main point of the Observations was that America’s vast territorial reserve would enable population to increase dramatically without heavy reliance on domestic industry. Such industry at that time offered the only means of employing surplus labor in geographically small European nations. “In countries full settled,” Franklin wrote, “all hands being occupied and improved to the Heighth: those who cannot get Land, must labor for others that have it.”³ But no such difficulty threatened expansion-minded Americans—only the French presence west of the Appalachians and the Native Americans. With the eventual removal of both, the colonies easily could withstand a doubling of inhabitants every twenty years. So vast was the territory of North America, Franklin explained, “that it will require many Ages to settle it fully; and till it is fully settled, Labour will never be cheap here.”⁴ With a lot of available land to lure away would-be industrial workers, little need for New World manufacturing could exist, he thought. “The danger therefore of these Colonies...

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