The Empire Hangs On

Eliga H. Gould. The Persistence of Empire: British Political Culture in the Age of the American Revolution. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000. xxiv + 262 pp. Figures, maps, notes, bibliography, and index. $49.95 (cloth); $18.95 (paper).

J. G. A. Pocock recently expressed skepticism about some aspects of the "new" British history. He noted that his original purpose in proposing such a history twenty-five years ago was to emphasize that Britain is constituted of a "plurality of histories"; the "pluralization of histories is intended to enhance their autonomy, not diminish it." Yet, Pocock notes, other scholars want to "bend" this approach "in other directions," away from multiplicity and complexity and toward a kind of homogenizing view of European history. As he puts it, pluralization "does not satisfy the Eurocratic mind. Any proposal to recount the British histories in their archipelagic settings is met with the response that this is not enough and the demand that they be situated in one more 'European.'" The "Eurocrats," Pocock suggests, underestimate the importance of national histories and national difference, and see in the "new" British history an opportunity to challenge the parochialism of English and American exceptionalisms, and even "to annihilate the histories of all particular nations." ¹

Pocock's historiographical concern has a deep-rooted political analogue. Britons have been reluctant to embrace the idea of a European Union in recent years in part because of its resonance with older schemes of European empire-building, the opposition to which has been Britain's principal role in European affairs for at least three hundred years. In the eighteenth century, Britons feared that a universal monarchy might take root in Europe and destroy Britain's political autonomy, along with the commercial vitality and personal liberties that were considered to be the distinctive achievements of the British nation. At one time the British empire, as Eliga Gould reminds us, was widely regarded by English-speaking people on both sides of the Atlantic as the world's pre-eminent defender of liberty, both at home and abroad. While the events that led to the American Revolution certainly challenged this view among colonial radicals, many Britons remained convinced that Parliamentary policy was just and the British empire was sound. In The Persistence of Empire, Gould sets out "the arguments that made the actions of George III and his ministers seem acceptable to the metropolitan public" (p. vii).

The result is an extraordinarily rich, sophisticated discussion of political discourse in England between the 1740s and 1783. Like Linda Colley's Britons (1992), Gould's book is engaged less with the radical fringes of Britain's political nation than its solid center, where, he argues, the ministry maintained a high level of public support even during the crisis that accompanied the Revolution. The core of his research is a body of almost a thousand pamphlets, supplemented with newspapers, memoirs, speeches, and the like. Taken together, they offer something like a composite portrait of eighteenth-century British patriotism.

The currents of British national pride ran strong at midcentury. Britain had developed a "matchless constitution" (p. 14), characterized by political moderation, religious toleration, and a high degree of "what modern political philosophers would call 'negative liberty'" (p. 22). These characteristics of the Whig ascendancy, the hard-won product of a century of political upheaval and civil war, grew up alongside a robust foreign trade, which was thought to sustain the liberties of Englishmen at the same time that it demanded substantial involvement in the affairs of Europe. While that involvement had deep roots, in the eighteenth century Britons were primarily concerned with preserving the balance of power and upholding a "vision of Europe as a community of independent states" (p. 12) bound together by commercial relations.

Yet by midcentury many writers questioned whether Britain's substantial and prolonged commitments on the Continent were worth the cost. Whig policy repeatedly plunged Britain into wars which, Tories contended, threatened to exhaust both the national treasury and...