This book contributes to a small but growing genre: studies of the history of transatlantic links. It is drawn to adopt this transatlantic perspective by the realisation that many problems in the domestic histories of both America and Britain are more accessible when so addressed. The transatlantic dimension provided a screen on to which the tightly-knit problems of its constituent societies were projected, a screen on which inconclusive local processes can be observed unfolding to a conclusion often absent in some parochial setting. The object of this book is not to provide a comprehensive or even an outline history of domestic events on either side of the Atlantic; it is, rather, to attempt a selective and thematic enquiry into the nature of transatlantic ties and the inner causes of their dissolution. It takes its standpoint on territory bounded by the historical disciplines of political theory, law and religion; it examines the aspirations for civil and religious liberty, legal government and moral regeneration that were expressed and pursued within the boundaries of those bodies of ideas. Its ambition is to add some insights drawn from colonial history to the history of Britain, and to contribute some insights from British scholarship to the history of America.

British and American history was long explained chiefly through the eyes of rival elites – the Founding Fathers and their aristocratic British opponents.

LAW, NATIONALITY AND NATIONALISM: MONARCHICAL ALLEGIANCE AND IDENTITY

Whatever the causes of the successive breakdowns in governments on both sides of the Atlantic between 1660 and 1832 examined in this book, it is important to establish from the outset that nationalism was not among them; and the evidence for this hypothesis throws much light on those real causes which will be discussed below. Early-modern societies sustained a variety of forms of collective self-consciousness, but these turned only to a small degree on the later preoccupations of ethnicity and language; here as elsewhere, a new term in the early nineteenth century accompanied a new phenomenon. Nationalism was a mentality which postdated, and (it will be argued) necessarily postdated, the profound redefinitions compelled by the events of 1776 and 1789. Its histories appropriately begin with the French Revolution and the Romantic reaction to it, less appropriately finding in early-modern states only ‘protonationalism’: ‘roots’ or obscurely-expressed ‘origins’ of what is wrongly assumed to be a single phenomenon, that nationalism which came to ‘maturity’ in the nineteenth century.

National identity in the ‘old society’ was indeed a very different matter from its later forms, and the early phenomena were in no strong sense the ‘origins’ of the later ones.

THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION AS A CIVIL WAR

The passionate commitments on both sides of the Atlantic which made armed conflict unavoidable, and the loyalties in America and Britain which the conflict promoted, obscured in retrospect an important truth: in functional terms, the American Revolution shared most of the characteristics of a civil war. One such characteristic was the way in which both sides seemed to appeal to a common tradition. In 1774 a loyalist addressed the Congress: ‘You may still profess yourselves to be his Majesty's most dutiful and loyal subjects, as you did in your late RESOLVES, and as the leaders in the grand rebellion of 1641 did, in their messages to the King immediately after the battle of Edge Hill, where they had fought against him in person’; but this would not save America from the ‘desolation and slaughter’ of a civil war. Between Washington's assuming command of the Continental Army in July 1775 and the Declaration of Independence on 4 July 1776, he and his officers professed their continuing allegiance to George III in a way which indeed recalled the rhetoric of Parliamentary forces in the 1640s.

For similar reasons many English officers refused to accept a command in America, like General Lord Frederick Cavendish and Admiral Keppel, or spoke against the war in Parliament, like General Henry Seymour Conway; few of those in the field had much stomach for the conflict.

REBELLIONS AND THEIR ANALYSIS IN THE ANGLO-AMERICAN TRADITION

If law and religion followed the patterns already outlined, it remains to trace their impact in the daily political events of the English-speaking world and, especially, in those crises on both sides of the Atlantic which saw the established order repeatedly, and sometimes successfully, challenged. Yet acts of resistance to constituted authority within the hegemonic political and ecclesiastical order described in this book pose a special problem for historical analysis, since modern historiography has until recently marginalised those very features of the social order which were the targets of resistance and defined its nature. Moreover, the main category of explanation has itself been reified: ‘revolution’ has been turned from an explanation into a thing to be explained, and ‘rebellion’ reduced to a pejorative and diminutive term. Consequently, revolutions are conventionally explained by reference to a timeless model of what revolutions are or should be; rebellions are dismissed as minor challenges to governments, unsuccessful because not equipped with the appropriate ideological charge. It is assumed here, by contrast, that a series of contingent features, especially political and military contingencies, ensured that episodes like 1660, 1688 and 1776 should succeed while those of 1685, 1715, 1744 and 1798 did not: a revolution is not essentially different from a successful rebellion, and no explanation is or can be offered of the nature of revolutions ‘as such’.

The nature of those contingencies is at the centre of this study; yet the histories of western societies after the French Revolution have masked some of the early-modern characteristics of political mobilisation.

BEFORE REDEFINITION: POLITICS AND RELIGION IN THE OLD SOCIETY

If national identity in early-modern societies was determined by the modes of discourse hegemonic within them, eighteenth-century England had few powerful alternatives to its Anglican, monarchical self-image. It has rightly been observed that ‘there existed from before 1662 until sometime after 1800 a coherent and widely accepted body of establishment social theory rooted in catholic ecclesiology, ultimately biblical in origin, transmitted unimpaired to the post-Reformation Church of England, and expressed most authoritatively in the Book of Common Prayer’. The centrality of the hierarchical and hereditary ethos and of the Anglican clergy have led historians to characterise eighteenth-century England as an ‘ancien régime’ and ‘a confessional state’. It was a social formation which proved consistent with, indeed was reinforced by, growing agrarian and commercial prosperity, a proliferating print culture, the development of state bureaucracies and military power; but in respect of political languages, few inconsistent alternatives to this hegemonic discourse of the Anglican, monarchical, hereditary order were available.

The discourse of commercial prosperity did not originate or proliferate in the 1760s. It was already an old one, and had proved remarkably consistent with other discourses: the merchant community was royalist and republican, Christian and Jew, Anglican and Dissenter, English, Dutch and Huguenot. The discourses of ancient constitutionalism and natural rights were similarly employed by every interest group, though used in different ways by each: all sides successfully sought to use the catch-words of the day. The discourses which proved most resistant to this appropriation by established authority were, of course, denominational; and in that respect colonial societies differed most profoundly both from each other and from their mother country.

British and American society retained much in common in the centuries after 1783: more, indeed, than they were now concerned to assert or willing to admit. Both explored models of democratic politics, were swept by evangelicalism and unbelief, were dominated by the urban-industrial experience. Yet, inexorably, the two societies' self-images and interpretations of their histories drew apart in fundamental ways, so that the demonstration of a ‘special relationship’ required a reinterpretation of the perceived past as much as an evocation of it. Law and religion continued to shape this process by which both America and Britain devised partly-incompatible theories of their own exceptionalism. American understandings of the purpose of the Revolution quickly came after 1776 to turn on religious liberty as the antithesis of tyranny, and on law as the guarantor and definition of liberty; yet, paradoxically, the conflict of denominations steadily increased the authority of the group over the conscience of the individual, and the reconstruction of American law led the courts of the new Republic to develop a far more interventionist and innovatory attitude to their role. Common lawyers in England, in the same half-century after American independence, were increasingly bound by the doctrine of strict construction: Benthamite utilitarianism, not Jeffersonian natural rights, came to describe the truths the English saw as self-evident.

The military outcome of the American Revolution had a profound impact on its interpretation.

LAW, RELIGION AND SOVEREIGNTY

By the mid-eighteenth century, Englishmen on both sides of the Atlantic proclaimed their faith in liberty: they appealed to a common constitutional tradition even as they disputed its ownership and its application. They claimed the ‘rights of Englishmen’ and revered the texts in which they believed them to be embodied, like Magna Garta and the Bill of Rights. They commemorated a similar Protestant calendar of momentous anniversaries, including the Spanish Armada, the Gunpowder Plot, the execution of Charles I, and the birthday of the reigning monarch. They celebrated, and suspected a minority who were ambiguous about, the Restoration, the Glorious Revolution, the Act of Settlement, and the accession of the House of Hanover. They structured the political lives of their communities around representative institutions, and had the Westminster Parliament in mind as a model. As the Scots and Irish in the New World and the Old were progressively caught up in this hegemonic English myth, they too were drawn to subscribe to it and loudly profess it in order to exploit its libertarian implications: they were implications to which their very different sectarian and political traditions also pointed. Law and religion dominated men's understanding of the public realm.

Englishmen on both sides of the Atlantic received, and idealised, the common law. Law was, nevertheless, an area in which transatlantic discourse broke down, and this book explores, on a theoretical level, one of the pathways along which this process developed. On a practical level, much more might be said.