Search Results

Provides background accounts of political development in the USA from the American War of Independence to the Philadelphia Convention, and establish that, by 1787, Congress was marked by military weakness and financial insolvency. Here, an account is given of the efforts of Congress to implement the fiscal clauses of the US Constitution, which shows that the national government created by the Articles of Confederation experienced serious difficulties in its ability to raise money, and in the end failed to raise sufficient money to meet its expenses. The focus of the chapter is on the means by which Congress raised money from the outbreak of the War of Independence up to the Philadelphia Convention, and also on how, one by one, these means were lost, so that by 1787 the insolvency of the national government was total. The first two parts of the chapter describe the attempts of Congress to raise money through fiat (printed) money, loans, and taxes, with the author contending that the Federalists accepted existing restrictions to taxation and formed a tax system that would be able to generate sufficient income for the national government without putting undue pressure on the American people. The last section of the chapter looks at the problem of the public debts run up by Congress and the states during the War of Independence, and at the reasons for the federal assumption of state debts – whether they were democratic or economic – and the reasons given by the Federalists as to why Congress had to resume payment of the public domestic and foreign debt.

Jeremy Black focuses on British policy and strategy in the so‐called ‘long’ eighteenth century, beginning with the Glorious Revolution of 1688 and ending with the battle of Waterloo in 1815. Chapter 7 provides a contextual debate on the relationship between policy and strategy, discussing the dynamics between strategy and dynasticism, the complexity of strategic culture, the character of British imperialism, and the concept of power, with the associated challenges of reach and overreach. These factors collectively explain what the author refers to as the limitations to strategic planning. Black next describes the dynamics between strategy and policy in three case studies—the Seven Years War (1756–63), the American War of Independence (1775–83), and the French Revolution (1789–99)—and briefly analyses the Napoleonic Wars. Each conflict exhibited important geopolitical and strategic continuities as well as important political differences, and was shaped by Britain's domestic conditions and priorities.

This chapter discusses the impact of the American Revolution on the democratic and revolutionary spirit in Europe, to the desire, that is, for a reconstitution of government and society. The first and greatest effect of the American Revolution was to make Europeans believe, or rather feel, often in a highly emotional way, that they lived in a rare era of momentous change. They saw a kind of drama of the continents. The successful War of American Independence presented itself as a great act of retribution on a cosmic stage. There were many Europeans who said that America would someday, in its turn, predominate over Europe.

This chapter examines classical rhetoric's central role in the formation of early American cultural identity. It surveys classical education in eighteenth‐ and early nineteenth‐century America, focusing on the way claims about the universalist appeal of eloquence and certain habits of elocution transformed the exemplary tradition of civic republican virtue into a lived stylistics of democracy. Inculcating a personal style of classical ‘simplicity’ and ‘naturalness’, classical rhetoric both reinforced notions of white male superiority and (through its own universalist claims) opened a way for women and people of colour to claim roles in civic life. In concluding, it argues that, like the imperfect or suicidal heroes dear to colonial and revolutionary Americans, rhetoric's status as an ethically and epistemologically suspect discourse reveals the dissonances and compromises resting at the heart of republican culture.

This case study on German subsidy troops fighting in the American War of Independence understands surrender as a ritual performance, turning defeated soldiers into symbolic capital. If the ritual was staged as a rite of passage, as at Saratoga in 1777 and Yorktown in 1781, it provided the vanquished with a safe and respectable transition from the state of armed soldiers to that of unarmed prisoners of war. The victors, in turn, gained an opportunity to demonstrate and communicate their success within their own ranks and a wider public. The observance of rigidly structured rituals guaranteed that the surrender, this dangerous bargain between victors and vanquished, actually succeeded. When rites of passage were missing, as happened at Trenton and many other battles and skirmishes, defeated soldiers were nervous about their future in enemy hands and violence toward prisoners became a distinct possibility.

How they treated indigenous peoples was a matter for recrimination between Britons and Americans. During the war Native Americans generally sided with the British as did escaped slaves, some of whom the British shipped as free people to their colonies. After the war, American land hunger led to Indian wars and dispossession, whereas the British in Canada posed less of a threat to Native peoples. Trading in slaves was condemned widely on both sides of the Atlantic, but the British continued to export huge numbers of Africans, some going to the southernmost American states, where slavery flourished as it did in the British West Indies. Americans denounced British rule in India as rooted in oppression. Many British people had once thought so too, but after the war British opinion increasingly claimed that their Indian empire was based on benevolence.

After explaining how the book is divided into sections, one dealing with continuing political hostility and the other with the resumption of transatlantic links, which amounted to the restoration of a British Atlantic world, the Introduction sets the scene on the British side. It describes the attitudes during the war of those who had been hostile or friendly to the American cause. It shows how many who had supported the war were ultimately willing to accept that American independence would not necessarily do irrecoverable damage to British interests, although they still remained hostile to a new America after the war. This hostility was to be enduring, while wartime professions of friendship by those who had supported the American cause had little effect on post‐war British policies towards the United States.

The manner in which the war came to an end had very important consequences both for the future of Anglo‐American relations and for the impact which the loss of America would have on Britain and its empire. After the loss of an army at Yorktown, British political opinion was no longer supported a war to conquer America. This did not, however, mean that the war as a whole was thought to have ended in total defeat. In fighting against other European powers Britain had begun to hold her own, while America appeared to be in a parlous state close to disintegration. Generous concessions made to the Americans in the peace were therefore widely resented and in retrospect the war came to be seen as much as a triumph of British endurance as a disaster calling for sweeping reforms at home and in the rest of the empire.

Despite its iconic status, Necker's Compte-rendu au roi is one of the most debated but least understood historical documents of the Ancien Regime. This chapter challenges the assumption that the Compte-rendu was the first of its kind to be published and shows how it fitted within an established administrative tradition. It also rejects the classic interpretation according to which publication of the Compte-rendu was part of Necker's attempt at deceiving the public and justifying his popular but unsustainable policy of funding the American war without taxes. It is shown that the Compte-rendu's main objective, which drew heavily on the British fiscal system described by Necker as best practice, was to justify the necessity of additional fiscal resources — and fiscal transparency — for raising new loans to pay for the war. Rejection by Louis XVI of tax increase for fear of parlementaire opposition partly explains Necker's resignation.

This chapter reconsiders David Hume’s thinking on the fate of the British Empire and the future of established religion. It provides a detailed reconstruction of the development of his views on Britain’s successive attempts to impose or regain its authority over its North American colonies and compares these views with the stance taken during the American crisis by Adam Smith and Josiah Tucker. Fresh light is shed on this area of Hume’s later political thought by a new letter, appended to the essay, which at the same time provides an illuminating glimpse of his abiding preoccupation with the future of established religion. It is argued that this evidence of Hume’s privately held views belies the notion that his thinking on political and religious matters was fundamentally opposed to that of his friends among the philosophes. It is consequently misleading to regard Hume as an opponent of the more radical wing of the Enlightenment.

The impact of the war varied in severity throughout America, generally leaving the bitterest legacy in the south. After the war Britain was widely conceived still to be hostile to America, trying to curb her maritime commerce, to detach the new western settlements and even to subvert American morals by exporting luxury goods. Americans resented the slighting way in which their society and institutions were generally portrayed in the British press. Assessments of Britain varied from those like Thomas Jefferson, who saw her as irredeemably corrupted and bent on the overthrow of American republicanism, to Alexander Hamilton, for whom the power of the British state and Britain’s recent economic development were models for America to emulate.

Although Melville may have witnessed the American Independence Day in England in the year 1839, he was only able to experience real independence when he realized the how the docks of Liverpool, when he was still a seaman, exuded something that differed greatly from his concept of conventional morality and veered away from what he was used to growing up in provincial America. As he observed the prostitutes, the poor, and how the people adapted to the situation of the slave trade, Melville experienced the way social hierarchy and slavery were still strictly observed, and how this brought about a great divide among Americans. This chapter illustrates Melville's experiences concerning transnational capitalism and how people with varied cultures and social classes have coexisted within that period.

This chapter examines early Italian writings on the history of the American War of Independence, including Carlo Botta's History of the War of Independence of the United States of America (1809), Carlo Giuseppe Londonio's three-volume Storia delle colonie inglesi (1812–1813), and Giuseppe Compagnoni's twenty-nine-volume Storia dell'America (1829). The chapter compares the context in which these works were created to the changing responses they generated during the later course of the Risorgimento. It also draws on these writings to discuss historiography as political thought, arguing that most Italian historians writing about the American Revolution presented the United States as a political reality far removed from European experiences. Even 500 years after the American Declaration of Independence, Italian references to the United States did not necessarily mean an open endorsement of popular sovereignty.

This chapter explains the similarities and likeness of tragedies and executions as agents and catalysts of moral reformation. The chapter also discusses the 1774 Continental Congress' step to create an intercolonial morality which would draw the colonies together in resisting British rule. While tragedies conform in so many ways to the rites of execution, the tragedies make the audience relate to the characters on the stage and not to each other. Unlike in executions, people who witness such events identify with each other as people who abided laws and he, the condemned one, as a defiant member of the society. Executions are affirmation of the community while plays are breeding ground for private emotions and perceptions. Driven by political needs and the political events in 1774, Congress banned plays and turned executions and the imposition of moral conducts from which all members of the society could identify into a political scheme. In addition, Congress also banned antisocial activities that isolated people in their personal emotions and perceptions. Instead, Congress devised a program which could be used politically to draw people together and give them identity as people. Congress implicitly banned private morality and opted for public morality that applied to everyone. This austere morality, oriented towards abnegation and insulation from heroism created a corporate and anonymous resistance which gave birth to a republican ideology. The chapter also discusses the plight and the manner with which the three stalwarts of republican ideology had to face after the granting of American Independence. It talks about the constraints placed by republican ideology on the leadership of George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, and John Adams.

This chapter looks at how the old world ended through a sequence of republican revolutions. The Anglo-Dutch revolution of 1649–1702 was part of a broader process of Anglo-Dutch-American state-making spanning two centuries. Across the Atlantic, between the Dutch Revolt and the American War of Independence, a series of states emerged which were new not only in fact, but in nature. These were products of an Atlantic Age of Revolution which is sometimes located only in the eighteenth century, but which had clear origins in the sixteenth. Although the new states in question were three in number, the ‘Age of Revolution’ involved four political and military upheavals of global importance.