Virtual History: Alternatives and Counterfactuals (69 page)

113
Russell, ‘Parliamentary History in Perspective’, p. 9. 114. For the impact of taxation during the 1640s and 1650s, see Ann Hughes,
Politics, Society, and Civil War in Warwickshire, 1620-60
(Cambridge, 1987), pp. 262-6, 280-2; John Morrill,
Cheshire
,
1630-60: County Government and Society during the English Revolution
(Oxford, 1974), p. 107.

115
Aylmer,
Rebellion or Revolution
?, p. 172; and see his ‘Attempts at Administrative Reform, 1625-40’, English Historical Review, 72 (1957), pp. 232-3. Of course, it may be objected that this was in the aftermath of a civil war; but, as recent studies have stressed, these were taxes collected by local men, not extracted by the army at the point of the sword: see Hughes,
Warwickshire
, ch. 5.

116
Richard Tuck, ‘“The Ancient Law of Freedom”: John Selden and the English Civil War‘, in John Morrill (ed.),
Reactions to the English Civil War, 1642-49
(London, 1982), pp. 137-61.

117
Russell,
Fall of the British Monarchies
, p. 227.

118
I am grateful to Professor Olivier Chaline, of L’Ecole Normale Supérieure, for a discussion of this point.

119
For the limitations on French government in the later seventeenth century: Roger Mettam, ‘Power, Status, and Precedence: Rivalries among the Provincial Elites in Louis XIV’s France’, in
Transactions of the Royal Historical Society
, 38 (1988), pp. 43-82; and
idem
,
Power and Faction in Louis XIV’s France
(Oxford, 1988); see also Jeroen Duindam,
Myths of Power: Norbert Elias and the Early Modern European Court
(Amsterdam, 1995), pp. 43-56.

120
Clark Memorial Library, Los Angeles, MS W765M1/E56/ c. 1645/Bound, John Windover, ‘Encomion Heroicon ... The States Champions in honor of ... Sr Thomas Fairfax’ [c. 1646];
The Great Champions of England
(1646), BL, 669, fo. 10/69.

1
In John C. Fitzpatrick (ed.),
The Writings of George Washington
, 39 vols (Washington, 1931-44), vol. III, pp. 244-7.

2
A handful have posed the question, but not seriously. See Roger Thompson, ‘If I Had Been the Earl of Shelburne in 1762-5’, in Daniel Snowman (ed.),
If I Had Been ...
(London, 1979), pp. 11-29, and Esmond Wright, ‘If I Had Been Benjamin Franklin in the early 1770s’, in
ibid
., pp. 33-54.

3
Geoffrey Parker, ‘If the Armada Had Landed’,
History
, 61 (1976), pp. 358-68.

4
Conrad Russell, ‘The Catholic Wind’, reprinted in
idem
,
Unrevolutionary England
,
1603-1642
(London, 1990), pp. 305-8.

5
‘But from the moment of using the conditional tense, we have begun to consider counter-factuals. There are obvious objections to doing so. History entails an infinite number of contingent variables, and for this reason our selection of counter-suppositions is necessarily undisciplined. But counter-history is not the study of what would have happened, so much as of what might have happened; and the case for considering outcomes which did not occur, but which those engaged in the happenings knew might occur - or we with the benefit of hindsight see might have occurred - is that it enables us to understand better the problematics in which the actors were entangled. Any event in history is both what did occur and the non-occurrence of what might have happened; nobody knows this better than we who spend our lives within the thinking distance of unthinkable possibilities, some of which happen from time to time’: J. G. A. Pocock, ‘The Fourth English Civil War: Dissolution, Desertion and Alternative Histories in the Glorious Revolution’,
Government and Opposition
, 23 (1988), pp. 151-66, esp. p. 157.

6
Robert C. Ritchie,
The Duke’s Province: A Study of New York Politics and Society, 1664-1691
(Chapel Hill, 1977).

7
Viola Florence Barnes,
The Dominion of New England: A Study in British Colonial Policy
(New Haven, 1923), pp. 35-6, 44.

8
David Lovejoy,
The Glorious Revolution in America
(2nd edn, Middletown, Conn., 1987).

9
The option of an America in which military governors and bureaucrats rather than representative assemblies were central is reconstructed in the works of Stephen Saunders Webb,
The Governors-General: The English Army and the Definition of the Empire, 1569-1681
(Chapel Hill, 1979);
idem
,
1676: The End of American Independence
(New York, 1984);
idem
,
Charles Churchill
(New York, 1996). This thesis runs counter to prevailing assumptions and has not received its due.

10
Geoffrey Holmes and Daniel Szechi,
The Age of Oligarchy: Pre-industrial Britain 1722-1783
(London, 1993), p. 97.

11
E.g. ‘His Majestie’s Most Gracious Declaration to all his Loving Subjects’, 17 April 1693, in Daniel Szechi,
The Jacobites: Britain and Europe 1688-1788
(Manchester, 1994), pp. 143-5.

12
Belatedly, Charles Edward Stuart’s note of points to be included in his next declaration, of 1753, included: ‘7th. An union between the three kingdoms to be proposed to a free Parliament’: Szechi,
Jacobites
, pp. 150-1. But this was an unrealistic counterfactual, and French plans for the invasion attempt of 1759 still envisaged a dissolution of the Union of 1707: Claude Nordmann, ‘Choiseul and the Last Jacobite Attempt of 1759’, in Eveline Cruickshanks (ed.),
Ideology and Conspiracy: Aspects of Jacobitism, 1689-1759
(Edinburgh, 1982), pp. 201-17.

13
Richard Price,
Observations on the Nature of Civil Liberty, the Principles of Government, and the Justice and Policy of the War with America
(London, 1776), p. 28: ’An
Empire
is a collection of states or communities united by some common bond or tye. If these states have each of them free constitutions of government, and, with respect to taxation and internal legislation, are independent of the other states, but united by compacts, or alliances, or subjection to a Great
Council
, representing the whole, or to one monarch entrusted with the supreme executive power: In these circumstances, the Empire will be an Empire of Freemen.’

14
John Adams, 6 February 1775, in John Adams and Jonathan Sewall [sc. Daniel Leonard],
Novanglus and Massachusettensis; or Political Essays, published in the Years 1774 and 1775, on the Principal Points of Controversy, between Great Britain and her Colonies
(Boston, 1819), p. 30.

15
Gaillard Hunt (ed.),
The Writings of James Madison
, 9 vols (New York, 1900-10), vol. VI, p. 373.

16
James Otis,
The Rights of the British Colonies Asserted and Proved
(Boston, 1764), p. 23.

17
Richard Bland,
An Enquiry into the Rights of the British Colonies; intended as an Answer to ‘The Regulations lately made concerning the Colonies, and the Taxes imposed upon them considered.’ In a Letter addressed to the Author of that Pamphlet
(Williamsburg, 1766; reprinted London, 1769), p. 12.

18
Even Thomas Jefferson’s
A Summary View of the Rights of British America
(Williamsburg, 1774), which echoed Bland’s and Otis’s doctrine on people’s right to establish new societies (p. 6), was expressed in the old idiom of petitioning the crown for a redress of grievances as well as the new idiom of natural rights.

19
Barnes,
Dominion of New England
, p. 178; Charles M. Andrews,
The Colonial Period of American History
, 4 vols (New York, 1934-8), vol. I, p. 86n.

20
[Franklin], ‘On the Tenure of the Manor of East Greenwich’,
Gazetteer
, 11 January 1766, in Leonard W. Labaree et al. (eds),
The Papers of Benjamin Franklin
(New Haven, 1959-), vol. XIII, pp. 18-22.

21
Novanglus and Massachusettensis
, p. 94.

22
[William Cobbett and T. C. Hansard],
The Parliamentary History of England from the Earliest Period to the Year 1803
, 36 vols (London, 1806-20), vol. XVIII, cols 957-8.

23
For recent versions of the claim that the causes of the Revolution were essentially internal to the colonies, see Gordon Wood,
The Radicalism of the American Revolution
(New York, 1992); J. C. D. Clark,
The Language of Liberty 1660-1832: Political Discourse and Social Dynamics in the Anglo-American World
(Cambridge, 1993).

24
Drew R. McCoy,
The Elusive Republic: Political Economy in Jeffersonian America
(Chapel Hill, 1980); Doron S. Ben-Atar,
The Origins of Jeffersonian Commercial Policy and Diplomacy
(London, 1993).

25
Carl Bridenbaugh,
Mitre and Sceptre: Transatlantic Faiths, Ideas, Personalities, and Politics, 1689-1775
(New York, 1962); William H. Nelson,
The American Tory
(Oxford, 1961).

26
T. H. Breen, ‘An Empire of Goods: The Anglicization of Colonial America, 1690-1776’,
Journal of British Studies
, 25 (1986), pp. 467-99; ‘“Baubles of Britain”: The American and Consumer Revolutions of the Eighteenth Century’,
Past and Present
, 119 (1988), pp. 73-104.

27
Durand Echeverria,
Mirage in the West: A History of the French Image of American Society to 1815
(Princeton, 1957); François Furet, ‘De l’homme sauvage à l‘homme historique: l’expérience américaine dans la culture française‘, in
La Révolution americaine et l’Europe
(Colloques Internationaux du Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Paris, 1979), pp. 91-105.

28
J. Hector St John de Crèvecoeur,
Letters from an American Farmer
(London, 1782); trans., Paris, 1787; Leipzig, 1788-9.

29
In Franklin,
Papers
, vol. XIII, pp. 124-59, at p. 135.

30
[Thomas Pownall],
The Administration of the Colonies
(London, 1764), p. 25.

31
Thomas Pownall,
The Administration of the Colonies
(2nd edn., London, 1765), Dedication, sigs A2v-A3r.

32
MS history of Virginia, Virginia Historical Society, quoted in Kate Mason Rowland,
The Life of George Mason 1725-1792
, 2 vols (New York, 1892), vol. I, pp. 123-4.

33
[Joseph Galloway],
Letters to a Nobleman, on the Conduct of the War in the Middle Colonies
(London, 1779), pp. 8-10.

34
Douglass Adair and John A. Schutz (eds),
Peter Oliver’s Origin & Progress of the American Rebellion: A Tory View
(San Marino, 1961), pp. 3, 145.

35
Edward H. Tatum Jr (ed.),
The American Journal of Ambrose Serle, Secretary to Lord Howe 1776-1778
(San Marino, 1940), pp. 46-7.

36
[Daniel Leonard],
The Origin of the American Contest with Great-Britain
,
or The present political State of the Massachusetts-Bay, in general, and The Town of Boston in particular
(New York, 1775), p. 12; for these sources see Gordon S. Wood,
The Creation of the American Republic 1776-1787
(Chapel Hill, 1969), esp. pp. 3-4 for the ‘strangely unaccountable’ causality of the Revolution.

37
Within this older agenda, doubts began to be cast on the inevitability of a breakdown in such works as Ian R. Christie and Benjamin W. Labaree,
Empire or Independence 1760-1776
(Oxford, 1976). Still within this agenda, a powerful counterfactual analysis was provided by Robert W. Tucker and David C. Hendrickson,
The Fall of the First British Empire: Origins of the War of American Independence
(Baltimore, 1982), a work which nevertheless often came to the conclusion that British policy could hardly have been other than it was.

38
The myth was most recently restated as an historical explanation by Jack P. Greene, ‘Why Did the Colonists Rebel?’,
Times Literary Supplement
, 10 June 1994.

39
An early attempt was made to diversify the secular litany of ’ostensible causes’ of the Revolution by framing arguments about the effect of the Great Awakening in political mobilisation; but this was denied by a counterfactual claim that without the Awakening, ‘colonial resistance would have taken very much the same forms it did and within the same chronology’: John M. Murrin, ‘No Awakening, No Revolution ? More Counterfactual Speculations’,
Reviews in American History
, 11 (1983), pp. 161-71, at p. 164.

40
Especially Bernard Bailyn,
The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution
(Cambridge, Mass., 1967) and
The Origins of American Politics
(New York, 1968).

41
Especially Jack P. Greene,
Peripheries and Center: Constitutional Development in the Extended Polities of the British Empire and the United States
,
1607-1788
(New York, 1986), but anticipated in many of Greene’s writings since the 1960s.

42
Tucker and Hendrickson,
Fall of the First British Empire
, p. 71.

43
Christie and Labaree,
Empire or Independence
, pp. 277-8.

44
John Shy, ‘Thomas Pownall, Henry Ellis, and the Spectrum of Possibilities, 1763-1775’, in Alison Gilbert Olson and Richard Maxwell Brown (eds),
Anglo-American Political Relations
,
1675-1775
(New Brunswick, 1970), pp. 155-86.

45
This interpretation was stressed by Jack P. Greene, ‘The Seven Years’ War and the American Revolution: The Causal Relationship Reconsidered‘,
Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History
, 8 (1980), pp. 85-105.

46
For a bibliography of the pamphlets, see Clarence W. Alvord,
The Mississippi Valley in British Politics
, 2 vols (Cleveland, 1917), vol. II, pp. 253-64; for the debate, William L. Grant, ‘Canada versus Guadeloupe, an Episode of the Seven Years’ War’,
American Historical Review,
17 (1911-12), pp. 735-53.