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The Rise and Fall of Empires: An Essay in Economic and Political Liberty

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 March 2017

Steven Pincus
Steven Pincus*
Affiliation:
Yale University
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Journal of Policy History , Volume 29 , Special Issue 2: Is Political Liberty Necessary for Economic Freedom? , April 2017 , pp. 305 - 318
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Copyright © Donald Critchlow and Cambridge University Press 2017 

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References

NOTES

1. Ezra Stiles (Newport) to John B. Hubbard, 12 June 1764, Correspondence Box 5, 1763–65, Beinecke, MS Vault Stiles/Folder 432.

2. By political economic liberty, Stiles, and the Patriots, meant much more than free trade.

3. Ezra Stiles (Newport) to John B. Hubbard, 12 June 1764, Correspondence Box 5, 1763–65, Beinecke, MS Vault Stiles/Folder 432.

4. Ezra Stiles, Memoirs and Extracts, 1766–67, Beinecke, MS Vault Stiles, MP/Folder 402, 43–47.

5. I have drawn upon J. H. Elliott, Empires of the Atlantic World (New Haven, 2006); Stanley J. Stein and Barbara H. Stein, Apogee of Empire: Spain and New Spain in the Age of Charles III (Baltimore, 2003); Allan J. Kuethe and Kenneth J. Andrien, The Spanish Atlantic World in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge, 2014); Jeremy Adelman, Sovereignty and Revolution in the Iberian Atlantic (Princeton, 2006); John D. Garrigus, Before Haiti (New York, 2006); R. R. Palmer, The Age of Democratic Revolutions (Princeton, 2014); José Andrés Gallego, El Motín de Esquilache, America y Europa (Madrid, 2003); Morgan, Edmund S. and Morgan, Helen M., The Stamp Act Crisis: Prologue to Revolution (Chapel Hill, 1962).Google Scholar

6. See, for example, Edmund S. Morgan, The Birth of the American Republic, 3rd ed. (Chicago, 1992); Jack P. Greene, Peripheries and Center (Athens, 1986); P. D. G. Thomas, British Politics and the Stamp Act Crisis (Oxford, 1975); Jack Rakove, Revolutionaries (New York, 2011); Wood, Gordon S., The American Revolution (New York, 2002).Google Scholar

7. John C. Robertson, “The Enlightenment above National Context,” Historical Journal 40, no. 3 (September 1997); John C. Robertson, Case for the Enlightenment: Scotland and Naples, 1680–1760 (Cambridge, 2005); Sophus A. Reinert, Translating Empire (Cambridge, Mass., 2011); Franco Venturi, Utopia and Reform in the Enlightenment (Cambridge, 1971).

8. It should be clear that I understand economic liberty in a broad eighteenth-century sense. I do not mean narrowly free trade. American colonials did not want free trade—they wanted preferential treatment for their goods within the British Empire. What they wanted was the ability to conduct protected commerce—protected by British naval might with preferences as against colonial competitors.

9. Kennedy, Paul, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers (New York, 1987), xvi.Google Scholar

10. This is often assumed. The position has been defended recently by David Armitage, Declaration of Independence: A Global History (Cambridge, Mass., 2007), in which he argues that the American Declaration of Independence marked the transition form a world of empires to a world of states.

11. Charles Maier, Among Empires (Cambridge, Mass., 2006), 3; Julian Go, Patterns of Empire (Cambridge, 2011), 6.

12. Stephen Howe, Empire: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford, 2002), 14; Maier, Among Empires, 7.

13. Gould, Eliga, Among the Powers of the Earth (Cambridge, 2012).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

14. I have been influenced in this section by Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper, Empires in World History (Princeton, 2010), 1–3, 8–11.

15. I provide a great deal more evidence for the arguments advanced here about George Grenville and the global imperial context in chapter 2 of Heart of the Declaration (New Haven, 2016).

16. For an analysis of Bolingbroke’s political economy in dialogue with that of the Whigs, see Pincus, Steve, “Addison’s Empire: Whig Conceptions of Empire in the Early Eighteenth Century,” Parliamentary History 31, no. 1 (February 2012): 99–117.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

17. Until this point Britain had been unusual among European powers in spending a substantial proportion of its revenue on infrastructure and civil development, especially in the colonies: see Steve Pincus and James Robinson, “Faire la guerre et faire l’état,” Annales, no. 1 (January–March 2016): 7–35.

18. Grenville’s inner circle—Charles Jenkinson, Robert Clive, Thomas Whately—were all Francophiles. The clearest statement of the admiration for France comes in the writings of Henry McCulloh, one of the architects of the Stamp Act: Henry McCulloh, A Miscellaneous Essay Concerning the Courses Pursued by Great Britain in the Affairs of her Colonies (London: R. Baldwin, 1755); The Wisdom and Policy of the French (London: R. Baldwin, 1755).

19. I have not quoted the ideological justifications for Grenville’s program because they are often assumed as natural and inevitable. They are discussed in Heart of the Declaration, 54–68. The most articulate statements of Grenvillian political economy are to be found in Thomas Whately, The Regulations Lately Made Concerning the Colonies (London: J. Wilkie, 1765); Thomas Whately, Considerations on the Trade and Finances of this Kingdom, 2nd ed. (London: J. Wilkie, 1766); and in George Grenville’s Letterbooks at the Huntington Library: ST 7/I and II .

20. For the analysis of France in particular, see Philippe Minard, La Fortune du Colbertisme (Paris, 1988); Charles Woolsey Cole, Colbert and a Century of French Mercantilism (New York, 1939), vol. 2.

21. John Huske, “Observations on the Trade of Great Britain to her American Colonies,” c. 1765–66, BL, Add 33030, fol. 318. Many Americans had wrongly come to believe that Huske had remained a Grenvillian supporter.

22. John Huske, “Observations on the Trade of Great Britain to her American Colonies,” c. 1765–66, BL, Add 33030, fol. 318.

23. Samuel Garbett, “Thoughts on the Colonies,” 1766, WCL, Shelburne, 49:4.

24. William Bollan, A Succinct View of the Origin of Our Colonies (London, 1766), 7.

25. Ibid., 32.

26. Ibid., 33–36.

27. Ibid., 36–37.

28. Dickinson, John, The Late Regulations Respecting the British Colonies (Philadelphia: William Bradford, 1765), 4–5.Google Scholar

29. Ibid., 30. Having spent three years reading law at the Middle Temple in London, Dickinson knew whereof he spoke.

30. Ibid., 31.

31. Ibid., 8, 32. Dickinson also condemned Grenville’s restrictions on trade with Spanish America, especially in the case of West Florida: ibid., 37.

32. Ibid., 30. Samuel Adams made the same argument: Samuel Adams (Boston) to John Smith, 19 December 1765, Henry Alonzo Cushing, ed., The Writings of Samuel Adams, 1:41.

33. Thomas Cushing and Samuel Adams (Boston) to Reverend G[eorge] W[hitefield], 11 November 1765, in Cushing, The Writings of Samuel Adams (New York, 1968), 1:31; James Otis, Thomas Cushing, Samuel Adams, and Thomas Gray (Boston) to Dennys de Berdt, 20 December 1765, Cushing, The Writings of Samuel Adams, 1:62.

34. Samuel Adams (Boston) to John Smith, 19 December 1765, Cushing, The Writings of Samuel Adams, 1:43.

35. Thomas Cushing and Samuel Adams (Boston) to Reverend G[eorge] W[hitefield], 11 November 1765, Cushing, The Writings of Samuel Adams, 1:38.

36. George Washington (Mt. Vernon, Virginia) to Francis Dandridge, 20 September 1765, in Theodore J. Crackel, ed., The Papers of George Washington Digital Edition (Charlottesville, 2008), Colonial Series, 7:395; Washington (Mt. Vernon) to Robert Cary and Company, 20 September 1765, Crackel, Washington Papers, Colonial Series, 7:395–96.

37. Washington (Mt. Vernon) to Capel and Osgood Hanbury, 25 July 1767, in Crackel, Washington Papers, Colonial Series, 8:15.

38. David Hume, “Of Civil Liberty,” in Knud Haakonssen, ed., David Hume: Political Essays (Cambridge, 1994), 52–57.

39. I am arguing for the inverse of the position adopted by Pomeranz and the California School. Whereas they argued that European colonial production, in the form of ghost acreage, created the conditions for the Great Divergence, I am positing that it was colonial consumption, consumption made possible by state investment, that allowed Europe and above all Britain to diverge from the Chinese growth pattern in the eighteenth century: Kenneth Pomeranz, Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy (Princeton, 2000). My position is conceptually much closer to that advanced by Prasannan Parthasarathi, Why Europe Grew Rich and Asia Did Not (Cambridge, 2011).