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Presidential Address Britain and the World in the Eighteenth Century: II, Britons And Americans

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 February 2009

P. J. Marshall
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Extract

In my address last year I tried to offer some explanations for the great change of direction in Britain's territorial empire in the second half of the eighteenth century: the failure of empire over much of North America coinciding with the beginnings of great acquisitions in India. I would like now to look more closely at the American débâcle. In trying to account for it, I stressed the yawning gap between British ambitions as they developed from mid-century and any capacity to realise them in the colonies, where, in the absence of a strong imperial presence or adequate machinery to enforce metropolitan wishes, the effective working of the empire depended on the willingness of local populations to co-operate. In the 1760s the majority of the colonial elites refused to co-operate with what they regarded as new departures from the long-established constitutional conventions of the empire. British attempts to resolve the ensuing crisis by armed coercion were to be frustrated in seven years of unsuccessful war.

Type
Research Article
Information
Transactions of the Royal Historical Society , Volume 9 , December 1999 , pp. 1 - 16
Copyright
Copyright © Royal Historical Society 1999

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