The Persistence of Empire: British Political Culture in the Age of the American Revolution (review)

The Persistence of Empire: British Political Culture in the Age of the American Revolution. By Eliga H. Gould (Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 2000) 262 pp. $49.95 cloth $18.95 paper

"The Age of the American Revolution," as considered in this book, spanned the half century between 1740 and 1790; the "British political culture" belonged to what Gould takes to be a persistent majority devoted to "sedentary patriotism." It would be tempting to describe it as a silent majority, were it not for the fact that in its own time, it generated tracts and pamphlets in such numbers that Gould's "selective list" of them takes over thirty pages of his book's bibliography. (His industry in searching them out and then reading them is remarkable.) Yet, this culture of "sedentary patriotism," Gould contends, has been relatively silent in historical scholarship, not least in works written during the late twentieth century.

The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot, to borrow a phrase from Tom Paine, cheered George II's victory at Dettingen but scarcely bestirred themselves to resist Prince Charles Edward's Jacobite invaders in 1745 and found frequent fault with Hanoverian troops posted in Britain. Britons enthusiastically applauded William Pitt's leadership and British victories around the world during the late 1750s, but the government's attempt to channel this enthusiasm into a rehabilitated and effective militia fell notably flat. By the early 1760s, George Grenville and his colleagues were all too aware of widespread apprehension among the public about the material costs of the war and the prospect of additional costs to sustain Britain's much-increased imperial commitment. The public was clearly averse to higher taxes, especially upon basic necessities for ordinary people, to pay these costs. On both sides of the Atlantic, ritual professions of a common patriotism concealed mutual misunderstanding: Britons wanted Americans to assume the burden of their own defense, while Americans rejected the British conception of a sovereign parliament competent to impose that burden. The result was the Stamp Act crisis and then the American Revolution itself.

Gould develops his thesis in six beautifully constructed and lucidly written chapters. He deploys his surely unmatched knowledge of the pamphlet literature to consistently persuasive effect, and sets this knowledge firmly in the context of wide reading in the secondary literature on the period. A persnickety critic might notice the absence of any reference to the important works of Browning on the political ideas of the Court Whigs, the Duke of Newcastle, and the War of the Austrian Succession.¹ An astringent quantifier would prefer fewer references to what "most Britons" thought and "most commentators" said; "many" would have probably served Gould just as well. But such observations should not be allowed to dim the luster of this impressively conceived and executed study.

Gould presents a British political culture in the 1770s and 1780s not actively opposed to the North government's ambivalent efforts both to conciliate and suppress the American rebels, but baffled and confused by American attitudes and willing to give the King's government the benefit of any doubts that Britons may have had. Britons came but slowly to appreciate the emergence of an American sense of nationhood different from their own. In an important bit of historical revision, Gould argues that the most significant feature of the British political crisis of 1780 was its brevity, and that an underlying "armchair patriotism" meant that the regime still commanded the passive loyalty of its subjects.

Looking to the nineteenth-century future, Gould incisively observes how the loss of America forced a reconceptualization of the empire, less British and more culturally diverse than before. Those who know Colley's account of British national identity under the pressure of the French Revolution will find in Gould's work additional reasons why the Pitt government...