WO things are attempted here. First, this essay disputes certain claims which establishment historians often make about the most important crisis that beset the British empire in the I76os and I 770s. Second, a new interpretation of the conflict between Englishmen in England and Englishmen overseas is offered, namely, that the rhetoric of the American pamphleteers makes sense as soon as it is realized that their predicament, shortly after the Seven Years' War, bore a striking resemblance to that of the black slaves in their midst. The outrage of the colonials stemmed from their conviction that only black people in America were deserving of servile status.

Even the most hasty reading of the pamphlets of the American Revolution will yield the fact that the men who spearheaded the opposition to British imperial policies-men who enjoyed a great deal of freedom and autonomy, who were prosperous, well educated, and successful, who had the leisure to read, think, speak, and write persuasively,-who, in fact, did constitute the ruling class in America-described their condition as one of slavery, as comparable to that degraded status to which colonial Americans, by various legislative decrees, had reduced the vast majority of the sons and daughters of Africa who were in their power. The widely quoted syllogism of John Dickinson, Philadelphia's largest slaveowner for a number of years, is, without doubt, a compelling expression of this equation:" Those who are taxed without their own consent, expressed by themselves or their representatives, are slaves. We are taxed without our own consent, expressed by ourselves or our representatives. We are therefore-SLAVES." 1 Two years earlier, a colonial agent in London claimed that the