Reinterpreting the French Revolution: A global-historical perspective by BAILEY STONE Read Free Book Online Page A

crucial Cape of Good Hope at the
    southern tip of Africa and the superb harbor at Trincomalee on the north-
    eastern side of Ceylon, just off India, were the British not justified in feeling
    their sea links with India to be vulnerable and perhaps imperiled? Under the
    circumstances, Prime Minister Pitt’s gloss upon British–French trade talks
    was understandable: “Though in the commercial business I think there are
    reasons for believing the French may be sincere, I cannot listen without sus-
    picion to their professions of political friendship.”19 In the twilight of his
    life, the comte de Vergennes found the entire thrust of a century of French
    hostility toward British overseas interests – hostility, ironically, given new
    life by his own North American policy! – to be militating against his dream
    of a future Anglo-French rapprochement.
    Vergennes’s death early in 1787 was symbolically appropriate, coming
    as it did at the start of an epochal political crisis to which his own foreign
    policy had so powerfully contributed. But there is a larger point to make
    here. Vergennes’s policies – and, for that matter, those of all his eighteenth-
    century predecessors – were above all problematic because of their consis-
    tent failure to reckon adequately with the major changes in the European
    state system. That system had been transformed by the emergence on its
    outer flanks of Great Britain, Russia, and Prussia as major powers.
    Britain’s ability in the eighteenth century to carry out an international
    mission drawing general support from its affluent and articulate elites was
    rooted in the political revolutions of the preceding century. Those revolu-
    tions had beheaded one absolute Stuart monarch and chased another out
    of the land. It was particularly the second, or “Glorious,” revolution of
    1688 that proved decisive. It placed the profit-oriented agriculturalists of
    the peerage and gentry in a newly secure position of power. The English
    landlords, who wished to produce cereals and other crops for domestic
    and foreign markets and to purchase various colonial and domestically
    processed goods, plainly had much in common with English merchants
    whose livelihood consisted in the domestic and international exchange of
    such raw and finished commodities. Both groups perceived a compelling
    need for a diplomatic policy that ranked the acquisition and/or defense of
    colonies, trading posts, and commerce alongside dynastic and other purely
    19 Blanning, Origins , p. 46. The foreign secretary, Carmarthen, “suspected that Vergennes was plotting a sinister plan to ruin England.” Murphy, Charles Gravier, Comte de Vergennes , p. 436.
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    Reinterpreting the French Revolution
    “political” considerations. Beginning in 1689, these interests were ideally
    situated, through their influence in the central and local organs of govern-
    ment, to urge such a policy on successive monarchs. William III may in
    his own mind have accorded a higher priority to humbling his detested foe
    Louis XIV than to fostering English commerce, and the Georgian kings
    seemed at times to be obsessed with the need to protect their Hanoverian
    homeland from predators one and all on the Continent. Nonetheless, the
    logic of British politics guaranteed that the country’s foreign policy became
    almost as much a vehicle for upper- and middle-class economic interests
    as an expression of the general “patriotic” desire for British prominence in
    the world’s affairs.20
    Almost . . . bu t not qu ite. The bitter Anglo-French contest over colonies
    and commerce had for both powers a transcending geostrategic impor-
    tance. England and France were competing above all for security and
    prestige, whether calculated in quantifiable terms of relative economic
    advantage or in terms of their constitutional systems, their religious and
    cultural values, or (most directly) their military and diplomatic establish-
    ments. Accordingly, both