6 - The Myth of “Salutary Neglect”: Empire and Revolution in the Long Eighteenth Century

Summary

This essay challenges the historiographical myth of salutary neglect on many levels, beginning by exploring how it came to its current, dominant interpretive status. I argue that it grows out of a desire to see the colonies as relatively democratic and independent, but that such a perception is deeply problematic. The levers of imperial control were powerful throughout the colonial period; colonial political systems did not develop “in a state of nature”; the tendrils of legal control were invidious and far-reaching; and force–the power of empire–was never far away. British navies, in particular, supplemented by occasional armies and colonial militias under the command of the Governor, along with all the mechanisms of legal control–sheriffs and executions, heads on stakes at the public crossroads–lurked always on the horizon, ready to intervene if necessary, sometimes only in the public imagination, but often in fact. This chapter is a call to think deeply about the power of empire during the colonial period. Doing so will lead to a richer understanding of what broke down between 1763 and 1776, but also of what came before. Salutary neglect it was not.