Revolution Against Empire: Taxes, Politics, and the Origins of American Independence

by Justin du Rivage

A bold transatlantic history of American independence revealing that 1776 was about far more than taxation without representation

Revolution Against Empire sets the story of American independence within a long and fierce clash over the political and economic future of the British Empire. Justin du Rivage traces this decades-long debate, which pitted neighbors and countrymen against one another, from the War of Austrian Succession to the end of the American Revolution.

As people from Boston to Bengal grappled with the growing burdens of imperial rivalry and fantastically expensive warfare, some argued that austerity and new colonial revenue were urgently needed to rescue Britain from unsustainable taxes and debts. Others insisted that Britain ought to treat its colonies as relative equals and promote their prosperity. Drawing from archival research in the United States, Britain, and France, this book shows how disputes over taxation, public debt, and inequality sparked the American Revolution—and reshaped the British Empire.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, American Revolution, Politics, Americana, American History, War

352 pages, Hardcover

First published June 27, 2017

About the author

Justin du Rivage received his Ph.D. from Yale and previously taught early American history at Stanford.

Reviews

[Matthias]

History-writing, like so many things, is always a balancing act between less flexible methods (in the machine learning sense) that impose order and comprehension at the cost of introducing bias, and more flexible methods that simply describe One Damn Fact After Another. Du Rivage's "Revolution Against Empire," while eminently scholarly, embraces all of the best and worst features of the former, and while it has elements of blow-by-blow description, these were among the least interesting (as they usually are.) The best thing that can be said about Rivage's conceptual schema is that it explains a lot that isn't explicitly addressed (about which more later); the worst is that a lot of his terms are clearly theoretical constructs not used by people of the time - which imposes a higher level of evidence that isn't quite met - and that a lot of the themes rhyme with contemporary politics a bit too neatly.

That said - and it could be said of many worthy books - let's get to Rivage's schema in particular, the broad outlines of which are laid out in the introduction and first chapter (and extremely helpful list of dramatis personae that sorts all the major actors into his three ideological categories.) The politics of the British Empire at and after the Seven Years' War (both in the British Isles and American Colonies) were factional, but these factions are ones that Rivage names - establishment Whigs, radical Whigs, authoritarian reformers - rather than institutionalized parties. (After all, this was at the time of the Whig Ascendancy, when the Whigs were numerically dominant in Parliament but weakly ideologically organized in turn.) Each of these factions, which saw themselves as patriotic supporters of the British Empire and its goals of capital accumulation and global Protestantism, had particular strategies that they wanted this superpower to pursue, reflecting both their conceptions of political economy and the interests of their supporters. (If you really want to simplify, you could characterize the establishment Whigs as the "capital" party, the radical Whigs as the "labor" party, and authoritarian reformers as the "land" party, but that's probably a bit too much.)

The establishment Whigs, as the name implies, were the centrists who had long had control of government. They had also driven the state into a great deal of debt, not least through the prosecution of the Seven Years' War against France. This didn't bother them too much, however, because their supporters were the major bondholders! These well-connected gentlemen were thus invested both in financial instruments, the state, and in a particular kind of state - one that would permanently be both willing and able to service debts, meaning one where Parliament had considerable authority unchecked either by Kings or King Mob.

As might be expected, these centrists faced heat from both the left and right. From the right, including the young king George III, the government's finances, the country's morality and the structure of the empire needed to be restored by deep austerity. In their vision of political economy, the upper classes had been corrupted by their getting rich off government debt and sinecures, while the poor had gotten corrupt off excessively high wages that allowed them to get drunk, lazy, and altogether uppity. The government had also made strategic errors of imperial overstretch, spending more on the colonies than they could be worth without extracting greater revenue from them. The overall political-economic strategy they embraced was a supply-side one of reducing overall cost structure - by means of excise taxes to lower effective wages and limits on government spending on costly wars, not only would the British state become solvent, but industrious, obedient, and cheap laborers would produce competitive goods, achieving traditional mercantilist goals of finding positive trade balances that would in turn allow the state to support wars (when necessary, anyway.) Like the establishment Whigs, the authoritarian reformers needed a particular kind of state to achieve these goals - on that placed considerable emphasis on royal prerogative to exercise control over recalcitrant subjects of many stripes. And since the support base of this faction was the landed gentry, they strongly opposed land taxes as the basis for control.

From the "left" - at least if we ignore its deeply positive stance towards the expansion of the enslavement-colonization cycle in the Americas - "radical Whigs" supported a vision of the British Empire that would invest in expansion of the global commercial economy. Like the authoritarian reformers, radical Whigs criticized a government which allowed a few connected grandees to enrich themselves with sinecures and government debt, but from their perspective, the problem was not too much government spending, but misdirected government spending. Rather than directing revenues towards these unproductive gentlemen, the state should spend them on public goods, especially the expansion and connectivity of the global economy - communications infrastructure, westward expansion in the Americas, defeating the threat from attempted universal monarchies such as that of France. In their conception of political economy, high wages would induce greater demand for commercial production, and since all of this would spur the division of labor, extensive economic growth would inherently lead to intensive economic growth as well. And like the other factions, this strategy demanded a particular kind of state - one in which representative institutions exercised discipline over the government, ensuring that spending was directed toward genuinely public purposes rather than the self-enrichment of unaccountable rulers. This "no taxation without representation" doctrine, and the ideology's emphasis on consumption, expansion, and commerce made it popular in the American colonies, but also in the likewise commercial and politically underrepresented industrial centeres of the British Isles.

(Rivage's elucidation of radical Whig political economy makes Adam Smith in particular make a lot more sense. We all know the stuff about the invisible hand, but why does he spend so much time on questions like demand being a spur to manufactures, the absolute size and communicative ability being the enablement of productivity growth, the distinction between productive and unproductive economy, and so on - questions that are in fact far more prominent in the Wealth of Nations than the invisible hand stuff? Well, because those were all partisan issues of the time, and Smith is articulating the radical Whig position on them. Rivage doesn't directly address this, but his model makes a lot of sense of it, so I'm inclined to count that as a strength of the model - though I could admit that a mostly-unquoted Smith could be one of his major sources for his characterization of the strategy.)

How does all of this explain the American revolution? As noted, the blow-by-blow of events is a bit less interesting than the theoretical elucidation of these ideological groupings, but the long and the short of it is that the authoritarian reformers - ascendant due to the king's sympathies and the, ahem, electoral system that favored rural propertyholders - preferred means of governing and extracting revenue from the colonies clashed with, and fanned the flames of, radical Whig notions in the colonies. In terms of Fearon's three "rational reasons for war," you had at least indivisible goods (differing conceptions of state authority) and incomplete information (authoritarian reformers consistently underestimated colonial radicals' commitment to their cause, consistently viewing them as whiny children who just needed one more spanking before they saw the light of day; radical Whigs in the colonies not just correctly saw that authoritarian reformers wanted a more royalist empire but embraced conspiracy theories that they wanted to effectively turn back the Glorious Revolution and perhaps even establish a Catholic universal monarchy.) The establishment Whigs, who as centrists might have played the role of mediators, were successful at a few episodes - for instance with the Declaratory Act's insistence that Parliament had right to tax the colonies but shouldn't - but these were ultimately self-undermining. In terms of Fearon's third reason, the stance of establishment Whigs that "we may tax you but won't" is indeed a face-saving compromise but one that really rejects even the ability to commit to bargains, and their own interests really prevented them from embracing either the radical Whig solution (taxation with representation, which would have cut into their slice of the political pie) or the authoritarian reformer one (keeping the colonies at all costs.) And ultimately the establishment Whigs got what they wanted - neither taxing nor representing the American colonies - by virtue of the war being abandoned as not worth the cost. Ultimately the American Revolution wasn't won so much in this telling on the battlefield or even French intervention, but by the fact that 2/3 of the major factions in British government itself thought the war was a terrible idea, and that in the colonies radical Whigs had sidelined, often quite literally tarred and feathered, so many of their opponents.

As noted, so much of this - austerity, the power of disproportionate representation, wage-cutting in the name of "competitiveness," left-wing fear of a coming dictatorship and right-wing fear of mob violence, simultaneous left and right criticism of a small number of politically connected centrist finance capitalists - rhymes with contemporary concerns. (Like the less scholarly Radical Hamilton, Rivage's work also makes a number of asides emphasizing how the American independence leaders and ideology wasn't opposed to government taxing and expenditure as long as it was subject to popular oversight; but the other issues come up more organically.) This makes me a bit suspicious, all told, but it's also not wrong to say that many of these issues have enduring histories and significance beyond the present moment, and those who want history to be Relevant will find it valuable.

I highly recommend the introduction and first chapter to anyone who has made it thus far in this long review, and the rest of the book to anyone who is interested in the American Revolution in particular.

[Boone Ayala · Rating 4 out of 5]

The American Revolution was the result of a clash between British imperial political parties. The rise of authoritarian reformers in Britain in response to disorder and riot in the wake of the post-7 Years’ War recession exacerbated existing divisions between authoritarian reformers, establishment Whigs, and radical Whigs. The rise of radical whigs in the colonies, a response to their own financial difficulties (exacerbated by Authoritarian reforms) made the war a clash between the two visions of empire.
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For several decades, the historiography of the American Revolution has enjoyed a tranquil stasis. The central problematic of the period – why did the Revolution happen? Has been tacitly answered with references to the ideological and republican synthesis of the 1970s and 1980s. Authors have focused on late-colonial commerce or the mental consequences of the War for Independence, but the explanation for the Revolution itself has long gone unquestioned.

Yet in recent years, an imperial revival has been in the works. A collection of monographs, such as Steven Pincus’s The Heart of the Declaration, follow early twentieth century historians like Charles M. Andrews or Leonard W. Labaree, who viewed the Revolution as a backlash to necessary imperial policies pursued in the wake of the Seven Years’ War.

In Revolution Against Empire, Justin Du Rivage builds on this imperial foundation, but fixes his attention on the importance of party politics and competing ideological camps. Unlike earlier imperial historians, the Du Rivage’s Revolution was a result of an imperial partisan divide, not a clash of local and imperial interests. In Britain, spiritual debts at the end of the Seven Years’ War created economic anxiety that led much of the enfranchised classes to embrace authoritarian reform, aimed at limiting excesses through austerity and restoring hierarchical government. It was the triumph of this political cohort, not the indisputable fact of postwar debt, that led to the Stamp Act, the Declaration Act, and ultimately the Revolution. In the 13 colonies, dire financial straits (brought on by the restrictive taxes of the authoritarian parliament) led many colonists to embrace radical Whig views of political economy, which emphasized progressive taxation and colonial economic development as ways to stimulate consumption of British manufactures. Du Rivage makes sure to point out that both of these ideologies (as well as their conservative rivals, the establishment Whigs) existed throughout the empire; the success of either ideology depended on contingent factors, not on fundamental political or ideological cleavages between center and periphery.

The source base is eclectic in a way that befits the imperial method. Du Rivage draws as eagerly on pamphlets and political economic tracts as he does on newspapers, correspondence, parliamentary debates, and political cartoons.

Revolution Against Empire is well-sourced and powerfully argued. However, its externalist explanation leaves something to be desired. The challenge with balancing externalist and internalist explanations is always that a purely internal analysis smacks of contextually-independent exceptionalism, while a purely external one fails to account for what makes divergent cases unique. Du Rivage mentions briefly that the West Indies, for example, did not revolt because of conflicting commercial interests with the North American colonies and the larger British military presence stationed in the region. In total, West Indian’s failure to revolt covers about half a page. This is inadequate. An Imperial account of the American Revolution demands a truly imperial focus. If political alliances throughout the empire were responsible for independence, then as much attention must be paid to explaining the persistence of union as to explaining the rupture. Else we are left wondering what, if anything, made the thirteen colonies exceptional at all.

While Revolution doesn’t quite manage to deliver an imperial account of the Revolutions that did – and did not – happen, Du Rivage does brilliantly eviscerate the ideological arguments about colonial unanimity, as well as the traditional geographic divide between colonies and metropole. The politics of the Revolution took place on a global stage; the ideologies that motivated its actors and shaped their perspectives transcended colonial and metropolitan borders. Radicals clashed with authoritarians in the Massachusetts colonial assembly, in the halls of Westminster, and in newspapers and pamphlets across the Atlantic. The rift between Britain and her colonies was not a fluke, nor was it an inevitability – it was the result of conscious choices made by political actors within an imperial framework. In this, Du Rivage’s argument is perfectly convincing.

Yet perhaps the most exciting feature of Revolution is what it represents. The game is afoot once more! The best-tread ground in American historiography continues to bear fruit. It merely awaits the intrepid scholar who will endeavor to show the Revolution in its full imperial scope. Alas, Revolution Against Empire, despite its strengths, is not that book – but it is a necessary and worthy step.

[prbeckman · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a very interesting book. It places the revolt of the American colonists within the context of British politics and the competition between three ideological factions and their differing visions for the British Empire.

[Joe Fitzgerald · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very good book which explains the American Revolution in economic and political terms.

[John · Rating 5 out of 5]

Analogy to Global Recession of 2008
meaning 'the American war for Independence' in the 18th century was a Global phenomenon of events happening through out the world--