The British Empire was in crisis during the second half of the 1770s. From the American colonists’ uprising against British rule, to increasing controversy over the corrupting influence of the East India Company (EIC) on the imperial state, debate about empire was everywhere in British politics during this period. In the Thirteen Colonies, long-standing tension between the Americans and the British bubbled over into outright conflict in 1775. Rumbling disputes over the right of the British Parliament to tax the colonists led to the beginnings of armed rebellion against the state following the battles of Lexington and Concord in April 1775. As the East India Company became ever more powerful following its significant territorial expansion of the 1750s and 1760s, generating ‘a new tide of corruption’, in Edmund Burke's resonant phrase, EIC affairs became increasingly the concern of the British government and Parliament. Into this political tumult stepped James Macpherson.

As we have seen, Macpherson had been involved in political affairs ever since the publication of The Highlander (1758) at the height of the Scottish militia crisis and his subsequently attracting the patronage of the Earl of Bute in support of the publication of Fingal (1761/2) and Temora (1763). Such Prime Ministerial backing was then instrumental in Macpherson acquiring the post of Secretary to the Governor of West Florida, George Johnstone, in 1763. However, Macpherson's political ambitions and writing career intersected most clearly during the second half of the 1770s, when he combined the techniques of history writing, carefully honed earlier in the decade, with political polemic. Macpherson had begun his political writing career in 1766 soon after his short-lived sojourn in Florida as a colonial administrator. Writing first for Lord Shelburne, then Lord North, Macpherson was soon considered a key government political writer for the Earl of Chatham's administration. When Lord North became Prime Minister in 1770, Macpherson's responsibilities increased. As North wrote to George III, Macpherson was ‘a most laborious and able writer’ and was kept busy by the growing crises of empire during the 1770s.