The Glorious Cause: The American Revolution, 1763-1789 by Robert Middlekauff Read Free Book Online

with one another. A well-conceived structure staffed by enlightened and well-informed personnel could prevent mistakes policyrnakers might make and could assist in the drafting of successful policy.
    The makers of colonial policy included Parliament, though important aspects of its relations with and authority over the colonies were unclear in the eighteenth century. Parliament had of course defined the economic relations of England to the colonies in a series of statutes, most passed in the seventeenth century. Acts of navigation and trade had confined colonial trade to ships owned and sailed by British and colonial subjects, and they had regulated colonial trade in other ways largely to the benefit of British merchants. In the eighteenth century, before the revolutionary crisis began, Parliament had also attempted unsuccessfully to stop the importation of foreign-produced molasses into the colonies, and it had placed limits on the production of woolens, hats, and iron. Yet despite these statutes, the extent of Parliament's authority to legislate for the colonies had not been closely examined by anyone. When it was, it became a center of controversy.
    The common presumption in England, wholly unexamined, was that all was clear in the colonial relation. The colonies were colonies, after
    all, and as such they were "dependencies," plants set out by superiors, the "children" of the "mother country," and "our subjects." The language used to describe the colonies and their subordination expressed certain realities.The colonial economy had long been made to respond to English requirements; the subordination in economic life was real, though not absolute. Moreover, there was a theoretical basis for the subordination: several generations of writers had analyzed mercantilism, a theory which described state power in terms of the economic relations of the imperial center to its colonial wings. Mercantilism had evolved over the years from "bullionism," which had defined power largely in terms of gold, to a sophisticated set of propositions about exchange, balance of trade, manufacturing, and raw materials. Whatever the emphasis, the versions current in England in the middle of the eighteenth century prescribed a distinctly secondary position for colonies on any scale of importance. 17
     
    Although political thought offered much less on the colonies, the political realities seemed as clear as the economic. The mother country sent out governors who acted in the king's name; Parliament legislated for the colonies; the Privy Council reviewed the statutes passed by their assemblies, and the Crown retained a veto. In America the law was English and so were most political institutions.
     
    The sense of superiority and the snobbery that underlay all the theory were far more important than any of the formal statements of mercantile or political thought. For this sense permeated, or seemed to, all ranks of Englishmen conscious of American existence. And it may be that the colonials in America, in the peculiar way of colonials, accepted both the truth of the explicit propositions and the unconscious assumption that they somehow were unequal to the English across the sea. Certain it is that the most sophisticated among them yearned to be cosmopolites, followed London's fashions, and aped the English style. If this imitation did nothing else, it confirmed the prevailing feeling in Britain that the lines of colonial subordination were right and should remain unchanged.
     
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17
Andrews, Colonial Period , IV, esp. chap. 10.

2
The Children of the Twice-Born
    English rigidities in government and in political imagination did not cramp the eighteenth-century American colonies. The colonies owed allegiance, and paid it, to the same king as England itself, but because their experience was different from the parent country's, this connection and those to imperial agencies of government did not restrict them. Distance from England and