"Suspicious Latitudes": Commerce, Colonies, and Patriotism in the 1730s

"Suspicious Latitudes": Commerce, Colonies, and Patriotism in the 1730s PHILIP WOODFINE The so-called War of Jenkins' Ear, which broke out between Britain and Spain in 1739, has been regarded as the first step towards a new kind of eighteenth-century war, as the precursor of global wars for commercial gain and colonial domination. It has recently been contended that this commercial drive towards, ultimately, empire was the basis of an emerging popular patriotism, and that trade and empire were central to the popular politics of the century. From around 1688, John Brewer has argued, came a triumphant alliance between land and money which gave rise to an increasingly powerful "fiscal-military state."1 This led in turn, in Lawrence Stone's words, to the creation of "a world-wide overseas commercial and in the end territorial empire."2 This imperial dimension of politics has been elaborated in a collection of essays, edited by Stone, which seems likely to provoke a great deal of further work, An Imperial State at War. As Britain grew and prospered, it came increasingly into competition with the trade and possessions of other powers and peoples, and became defined by its own citizens and politicians more and more pervasively in imperial terms. This renewed interest in empire comes at a time when the emergence of a British national identity (or, more correctly, identities) is high on the scholarly agenda. The case for the forging of a specifically British patriotism has been made in 25 26 / WOODFINE Linda Colley's acclaimed Britons, and explored, for example, in an influential collection of essays edited by Raphael Samuel, Patriotism: the Making and Unmaking of British National Identity. A caution needs to be entered at once as to how far we can rely on the concept of a unitary national sentiment, however rudimentary, with a single set of relationships to government and to overseas policy. Much of the writing on Britishness is based upon evidence for England, or even more narrowly upon metropolitan evidence, and there is likely to be much more to be said about the varied experience of the different regions of England and of the diverse experiences within the national cultures of Scotland, Ireland and Wales.3 That rider, though, may make it all the more important to examine those issues which prompted diverse peoples and regions to develop a sense of shared identity and interest. In particular the work of Kathleen Wilson has made it plain that we cannot dismiss pro-imperial attitudes among the mass of the people.4 The power of a growing imperial outlook has been argued particularly in her stimulating book, The Sense of the People.5 Wilson argues persuasively that the sense of involvement in empire became the defining characteristic of the patriotic identity of ordinary Britons in the course of the eighteenth century: "empire was a crucial component in fashioning English people's material and imaginative relations with the rest of the world and integral to shaping their own patriotic and nationalist identities."6 The nation's trading towns became the centres of a mounting protest against the foreign policies of the Walpole administration. Merchant élite groups advocated the interests of trade, in opposition to the high finance which buttressed Walpole's power: and they did so, to quite a new degree, by stressing the need for a more active colonial policy.7 This complex of urban, trade, commodity and political concerns is held by Wilson to have had the capacity to draw together elite and plebeian politics. She speaks inclusively of "the contending meanings which empire held for the various groups involved in or engaged by the mesmerizing spectacle of Britain's global expansion ."8 In this guise imperialism has reemerged as a theme of eighteenth century British history, as dominant as it was believed to be by those Victorian historians who were themselves both products and proponents of an imperial age. J. R. Seeley, writing perhaps the most widely read history book of that age, saw the beginnings of an imperial destiny as the theme of the eighteenth-century English world. He took it for granted that nationhood was bound up with the sense of superiority and...