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

by Eliga H. Gould

The American Revolution was the longest colonial war in modern British history and Britain's most humiliating defeat as an imperial power. In this lively, concise book, Eliga Gould examines an important yet surprisingly understudied aspect of the conflict: the British public's predominantly loyal response to its government's actions in North America.
Gould attributes British support for George III's American policies to a combination of factors, including growing isolationism in regard to the European continent and a burgeoning sense of the colonies as integral parts of a greater British nation. Most important, he argues, the British public accepted such ill-conceived projects as the Stamp Act because theirs was a sedentary, "armchair" patriotism based on paying others to fight their battles for them. This system of military finance made Parliament's attempt to tax the American colonists look unexceptional to most Britons and left the metropolitan public free to embrace imperial projects of all sorts--including those that ultimately drove the colonists to rebel.
Drawing on nearly one thousand political pamphlets as well as on broadsides, private memoirs, and popular cartoons, Gould offers revealing insights into eighteenth-century British political culture and a refreshing account of what the Revolution meant to people on both sides of the Atlantic.

(Published for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, Williamsburg, Virginia)

Genres: History, American History

288 pages, Paperback

First published March 6, 2000

About the author

A specialist on the American Revolution, with an emphasis on the revolution’s “outer” history in the Americas, Africa, Europe, and the wider world, Eliga Gould is professor of history at the University of New Hampshire. Gould earned his A.B. from Princeton University, an M.Sc. from the University of Edinburgh, and an M.A. in History Teacher Education and a Ph.D. in History from Johns Hopkins University.

Reviews

[K. G. Whitehurst · Rating 5 out of 5]

An excellent study of the political ideas swirling in Britain during the War of Independence: Where they came from--Patriot Whig ideas that insisted on a blue water approach, not a Continental one wherein Britain had to be tied to Hanover hand and glove, thus getting involved in all the Continental wars of the 1st half of the 18th century--what they insisted--Parliament had absolutely sovereignty over its empire, as it did in Britain--and how those bruised, even discarded those ideas became during after the war. It explains a lot about the change in the nature of the British empire, from one more rooted in "English liberty" to one that became more authoritarian. Liberty under benevolent Parliamentary authority (and we can debate how benevolent it actually was) at home could not be extended to the far corners of the earth lest said liberty be threatened at home.

[Adam Gutschenritter · Rating 5 out of 5]

I had almost no knowledge of the American faction within British politics during the American Revolution. This book gave a great overview of the how/why/when of the opposition. This book focused mostly on the high level politics of Rockingham and Chatham (mostly Chatham) but was a great read on the creation of Britain's Blue Water Empire and how it caused the American Revolution and what Britain learned from that experience.

[Karen · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 stars. I wish I had read this immediately after Linda Colley's Britons as it is very much an extension and in the same vein of her book. This work is in the genre of New British history which attempts to seat Britain as an empire within (or of?) the Atlantic World. Indeed, Gould emphasizes throughout the work Pitt's "Blue Water Policy" which was his administration's aim to build up power and riches by claiming as much territory in the Atlantic as possible, especially the Caribbean Islands - even at the cost of having to wrest them away from the French and other European powers.

Another effect of New British History, at least for Americanists, is to remind us that Britain really did have other concerns on their collective mind than 13 renegade colonies. In reading both Gould and Colley, it is interesting to see how peripheral America was in much of the British focus, which also goes a long way toward explaining, as Gould does, why Britain didn't disintegrate or really even change that much in the wake of American Independence. The upshot seems to be that they had a melancholy reflective pause, said "humph", and moved on. A rather anticlimactic response from the American perspective. Although, considering that the War of 1812 soon followed, I would challenge Gould that perhaps the political story there is a bit more complex than he tells it. (I guess I now need to read Alan Taylor's work to find out!)

[Denise Kettering · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a strong consideration of the support that the British people provided for the British crown in the midst of the American Revolution. Certainly a strength of the book is the use of a tremendous amount of source and pamphlet literature to support the author's argument that the British were largely, although not universally supportive of the crown and that an important factor was how the Americans were the same as/different from other colonial enterprises in the vast British empire. This book is a thoughtful read in political history of the Revolutionary period.