Observations on the Nature of Civil Liberty, Part X: Illogical, Unthinking, Hypocritical Britain, contd.

            The rationale that Richard Price next sought to examine and deconstruct in the text of his Observations for the continued submission of the American colonies to the British government was somewhat more figurative than those he had theretofore addressed. Whereas the claims he had investigated up to that point sought to invoke – albeit somewhat vaguely – the facts and figures that set America and Britain apart, this next assertion attempted to substitute allegory for even the appearance of logic. “But we are the PARENT STATE,” Price quoted certain of his countrymen as having declared, as if that phrase obliterated all doubt as to proper roles to be assayed by Britain and America, respectively. The author of Observations would have none of this, of course, and proceeded to dismantle the “parent state” argument in both its literal and figurative sense.

By claiming for Great Britain the title of parent to America’s presumed role as child, the advocates of British supremacy that Price was evidently citing were doubtless attempting to imply that the American colonies owed their origin to Britain, that they had enjoyed British guidance and support in the formative years of their existence, and that they consequently owed the British government some degree of deference and fealty. It would be difficult to say to what extent this hypothetical obligation extended, though the context would seem to imply an indefinite degree of submission over an indefinite period of time. Understandably – given his aforementioned understanding of the nature and significance of sovereignty – this was not a state of affairs to which Price could comfortably resign himself. For one thing, it seemed to him that the implications of the doctrine – if taken to their logical conclusion – extended beyond just the relationship between Britain and America. “The English came from Germany [,]” Price thus pointedly observed. “Does this give the German states a right to tax us?”

            In point of fact, England had indeed been settled between approximately the 5^th and 7^th centuries by an assortment of Germanic tribes – among them, most famously, the Angles and the Saxons. These various continental peoples migrated into what was then post-Roman Britannia, either as invaders or by the invitation of its native Celtic inhabitants, and proceeded to completely transform the cultural and political makeup of the region by about the end of the 9^th century. This would not be the last time England would be invaded and settled on a large scale by an otherwise foreign people – the Norman conquest of 1066 having further redefined both the nature of English culture and its relationship to continental Europe – but it arguably represented the single most significant event by which a former province of the Roman Empire became a distinct socio-political entity.

            The purpose of Price’s question, therefore, was to draw a comparison between the settlement of America by various communities of English/British migrants over the course of the 17^th and 18^th centuries and the settlement of Britain by the Angles and Saxons over a millennium previous. Specifically, it was the implication of the “parent state” claim – i.e. that being the nominal originators of the American colonies gave Britain a claim to their continued obedience – that was being called to examination. If, Price was essentially asking, America ought continually to defer to Britain, submit to the authority of its government, and pay whatever taxes the legislature thereof assessed simply because the colonists and their ancestors originally came from Britain, did it not then follow that Britain should similarly submit itself to the governments then administering the lands from which their own ancestors migrated? This was, of course, a fairly ridiculous proposition. Not only were there far too many sovereign or semi-sovereign states then in existence in what is now Germany for it to be at all clear which one Britain owed its fealty, but a number of them were in fact its rivals for influence in the ongoing contest for regional dominance. Therein, however, lay the rhetorical strength of Price’s approach. Just as Benjamin Franklin had earlier satirized the “parent state” concept by writing a declaration ostensibly on behalf of the King of Prussia claiming his right to mastery over Britain – An Edict by the King of Prussia, publish September 22^nd, 1773 – Price was using the plainly evident illogic of one situation to expose the same quality in another.

            Britain naturally had no reason to surrender its sovereignty to the Prussian government, or indeed to any government of any German state, and was under no legal obligation to do so. Granted, the ancestors of the contemporary English people had originally migrated from lands now falling within one or more of these states, but a great deal – on the order of one thousand years of history – had transpired since then. To expect Parliament to give way to some foreign sovereign simply because that sovereign ruled over the ancestral homeland of Parliament’s ancient forefathers was therefore plainly absurd. And while it perhaps also warrants acknowledgement that far less time had passed between the settlement of British America between the 1610s and 1730s and the emergence of the Anglo-American crisis in the 1760s and 1770s, the principle which Price was evidently endeavoring to expose still applied. At some point between the time that Germanic peoples set foot in England in the 400s and the establishment of the first Anglo-Saxon kingdom in the 500s, some threshold had been crossed whereby the relevant migrant peoples and their descendants were no longer bound by whatever tribal authority they had recognized in their native Germany. Impossible though it may be to pinpoint when and how this occurred, clearly it did occur. In consequence, it may fairly be inferred that the same shift was bound to take place within the Anglo-American relationship.

            At some point, for some reason, the American colonies would reach a stage in their development after which they would no longer be required to acknowledge the authority of their British forebears. Either that, or Britain was in fact still bound to obey the dictates of the German authorities that the ancestors of its citizens had long since left behind. Doubtless neither of these eventualities would have seemed particularly desirable to those among Price’s countrymen who continued to insist that American owed its allegiance to Britain, but that was most certainly the point. Either nations were the prime source of sovereignty, or people were. Either a person could define their own citizenship, or they – and their children, and their children’s children – were bound for all time to the authority under which they were born. British history certainly seemed to bear out the truth of the former. When the ancient Angles and Saxons migrated to sub-Roman Britannia, they did not thereby extend the authority of the Germanic chieftains whose authority they had previously been given to acknowledge. Rather, they formed a series of unique polities – Kent, Mercia, Northumbria, etc. – wholly outside the sovereignty of their homelands and possessed of governments of their own derivation and authority.

            Just so, Price seemed to indicate, the original settlers of the Thirteen Colonies had left the authority of Parliament behind when they departed from British ports and set sail for America. Granted, most of the relevant colonial ventures were conducted under the auspices of royal charters. And it also bears acknowledging that the resulting colonial governments did tend to acknowledge the authority of Parliament in certain matters of policy. These were, however, often described by the colonists themselves as essentially voluntary measures. Rather than pay homage to the reigning British monarch out of obligation – which their forefathers had been made to do while still residing in Britain proper – they did so out of a sense of tradition and fellow-feeling. Rather than bow to the authority of Parliament in recognition of the domestic supremacy thereof, they gave way to the dictates of the British legislature only as pragmatism and courtesy deemed necessary. Far from being dispatched by their government with express instructions to establish the authority thereof in North America, these migrants – among them religious dissenters, debtors, criminals, and utopians – had left of their own accord, in large part at their own expense, and proceeded to build communities for themselves that suited their needs and conformed to their respective visions of socio-political harmony. The reigning British government in 1776 could accordingly no better claim them than indeed the Elector of Saxony could realistically demand that the descendants of his ancient subjects in Britain render unto him the homage he was due. The settlements of Britain and America were neither of them wholly state-directed affairs, and the resulting communities were accordingly responsible for determining to whom – if anyone – their fealty was owed and to what end – if any – their sovereign efforts were directed.

            Even, however, if one were to indulge the notion of Britain as the “parent state” of the American colonies – with the former explicitly guiding and supporting the efforts and development of the latter – Price maintained that the colonists were yet still in the right to find fault with the manner in which they had theretofore been treated. “Children,” he thus affirmed in Part II, Section I of Observations, “Having no property, and being incapable of guiding themselves, the author of nature has committed the care of them to their parents, and subjected them to their absolute authority.” Nothing could be more natural or more obvious. At the same time, Price continued, “There is [also] a period when, having acquired property, and a capacity of judging for themselves, [children] become independent agents; and when, for this reason, the authority of theirs parents ceases, and becomes nothing but the respect and influence due to benefactors.” This, too, was an eminently logical outcome of the parent/child dynamic. At some point, every child who survives infancy becomes an adult, takes full responsibility for themselves and their actions, and enters the world on equal standing with that enjoyed by their parents. Affection (ideally) still remains between parents and child, along with, as Price acknowledged, some degree of respect and trust built upon years of successful and loving guidance. But the adult offspring ought not to feel bound by the dictates of their parent as they did when still a child. Having come into their own, they alone must determine in all things the proper course of action. Just so, the loving parent should openly welcome this day, as they themselves were guided to it by their own progenitors, and encourage their children to embrace the independence for which they have been prepared.

            Applying this same logic to the relationship between the Thirteen Colonies and Great Britain, however – in light of the aforementioned characterizations of Britain as the “parent state” of the colonies – produced a somewhat less rosy outcome. Whereas, Price explained, successive British governments should accordingly have been lessening the extent to which Parliament exerted its authority over the colonies in anticipation of the day when they became wholly independent states, quite the opposite had been allowed to transpire. “Like mad parents,” Price asserted, “At the very time when out authority should have been most relaxed, we have carried it to the greatest extent, and exercised it with the greatest rigour.” Not only did this course of action – i.e. taxing residents of the colonies without their consent, garrisoning troops among them, restricting their commerce, abrogating their governments, etc. – represent an injustice in itself for the flagrant manner in which it violated the civil rights of the effected colonist, but it directly contradicted the notion that Britain ought to have been regarded as though it was the parent of the Thirteen Colonies. Having established themselves upon a firm basis of government, affirmed the rule of law within their borders, and taken to sustaining themselves via a robust commercial intercourse with Britain proper, the colonies of British America were clearly no longer in need of the kind of guidance and discipline that a child requires. It should therefore have followed that the colonies could not be considered children any longer, and that the government of Great Britain was obligated to release its accustomed hold upon American affairs and allow the inhabitant thereof to chart whatever course they desired. If this was not the case, of course – that is to say, if Britain refused to acknowledge that the time had passed when its authority was any longer required in America – then perhaps the colonies were not children, Britain was not their parent, and the entirely argument was well and truly moot.

            Such blatant inconsistencies between rhetoric and action were very much at the core of Price’s subsequent complaints. Proceeding in Part II, Section I of his Observations to interrogate the various explanations he had encountered in favor of Britain’s continued mastery over the American colonies, he thus hit upon – and wholly eviscerated – the question of financial investment. “But we have, it is said, protected them,” Price wrote, “And run deeply in debt on their account.” Vague though this claim may be, the thrust of it would seem obvious enough. From the beginning of the English colonial project in the late 16^th century to what was then the present day of the late 1770s, successive British governments had indeed spent a cumulatively impressive sum protecting and helping to expand the various settlements of British America. The British Navy had protected colonial shipping and ensured that American harbors were safe from foreign depredations, the British Army had lent invaluable assistance to local militias in holding back both indigenous threats and the aggressive ventures of rival European powers, and British negotiators had signed treaty after treaty with neighboring native peoples, thus greatly expanding the available territory into which it was possible to migrate. The benefits of these measures to the inhabitants of British America were exceedingly substantial, not at all unlike the cost of the same to the contemporary British Treasury. The Seven Years War (1754-1763), while bringing about the final elimination of France from the North American colonial contest, proved to be a particularly expensive endeavor, having exploded the British national debt from £75,000,000 before the war to £130,000,000 by the beginning of 1764. Bearing this all in mind, it would thus seem quite fair to grant that Great Britain had indeed invested a great deal in the continued prosperity of its American dependencies, to the point of taking on theretofore unimaginable financial obligations.

            Richard Price did not claim otherwise. The degree to which successive British governments confirmed their interest in the American colonial project via repeated financial commitments was doubtless as plain to him as to any modern observer. He did, however, question the rationale behind these repeated investments. “Will anyone say,” he thereby asked of his countrymen, “That all we have done for them has not been more on our own account, than on theirs?” It would seem a rather obvious line of inquiry – that is to say, it might fairly be taken as a given that Britain did not act as it did out of pure altruism. To those among his countrymen who were so capable of deluding themselves as to imagine that Britain’s interest in the American colonial project was wholly selfless and compassionate in nature, however, Price was endeavoring to illustrate the various benefits America provided to its supposed European benefactor. “Have they not helped us to pay our taxes,” he asked,

To support our poor, and to bear the burden of our debts, by taking from us, at our own price, all the commodities with which we can supply them?–Have they not, for our advantage, submitted to many restraints in acquiring property? […] Has not their exclusive trade with us been for many years one of the chief sources of our national wealth and power? […] In the last war particularly, it is well know, that they ran themselves deeply in debt; and that the parliament thought is necessary to grant them considerable sums annually as compensations for going beyond their abilities in assisting us. And in this course would they have continued for many future years; perhaps for ever.–In short, were an accurate account stated, it is by no means certain which side would appear to be most indebted.

These were significant claims on Price’s part, to be certain. Indeed, it would have been difficult to conclusively confirm or deny them without fairly intimate access to any number of public and private accounts. That being said, the conclusion which followed was almost certainly an apt one. At its heart – and despite appearances to the contrary – the Anglo-American relationship was essentially a reciprocal one.

            This should not be taken to mean that it was also an entirely equitable association, of course. The core principle of mercantilism – then the guiding economic philosophy of most every major European power – was that there was a finite amount of wealth in the world, and that it was the purpose of trade, and taxation, and war, and just about every other power possessed by government to ensure that the largest sum of resources possible was collected and concentrated in the coffers of the nation. It would therefore not have made sense philosophically for Britain to engage in anything like a fair and unstructured commercial intercourse with its various American dependencies. Indeed, from the perspective of Britain itself the colonies existed almost entirely for the purpose of harvesting, processing, and exporting the natural resources of the American continent and turning its own output of manufactured goods into valuable hard currency. Price had rightly pointed out as much in the passage cited above, and it would have been difficult indeed for any but the most obtuse of his countrymen to deny that the advantages they and their government had thereby accrued were sizeable indeed. And while the inhabitants of the colonies were not blessed in return with economic opportunities equal to those enjoyed by their British counterparts – their trade, manufacturing, financial policy, and even physical movement were all subject to restriction by British law – they at least received the benefit of the aforementioned military and diplomatic assistance.

            The point that Price was attempting to make in the quoted section of his Observations would thus seem to stand very much as he intended it. Within the context of the Anglo-American relationship, Britain and the relevant colonies were certainly not equals in terms of the privileges they enjoyed and the benefits they derived. But nor could it be honestly stated that either rendered up an advantage to the other without receiving something very valuable in return. Britain, in exchange for admittedly extensive military and financial aid, gained in America an exclusive source of raw materials like timber and produce, as well as sole access to an expanding market for its yearly increasing output of manufactured goods. At the same time, by allowing certain aspects of its economy to be restricted via taxes and regulations in whose formulation it had no part, America enjoyed the largely unquestioning protection of one of the most powerful nations on the planet and access to a voracious market for its own output of natural resources. Certainly it wasn’t a perfect arrangement. Doubtless the British government would have preferred to spend far less money defending colonial interests while also avoiding having to so frequently wrangle with willful colonial governments. Just so, the American colonists would surely rather have enjoyed access to British markets and manufactures without having to submit to the accompanying economic regulations. At the very least, however, it was a functional relationship, and one in which most costs were clearly accompanied by corresponding benefits. While it might narrowly have been conceivable to craft something better in its stead, it would have been all too easy to replace it with something worse.

            The notion that Britain’s financial investment in the American project should entitle the government thereof to unquestioned superiority over the administration of the Thirteen Colonies would therefore seem to ignore the essential nature of the Anglo-American relationship. For over a century as of 1776, Britain had protected America in exchange (essentially) for access to its markets. At the same time, America had surrendered market access in exchange for military protection. Terms and definitions had been debated, reforms had been proposed, implemented, sustained, or discarded, and force of arms had been resorted to more than once. But the essence of the thing – the fundamental give-and-take – had persisted throughout, perhaps because there was little confusion on either side of the Atlantic as to what, precisely, the relevant parties were attempting to achieve. For the hypothetical British resident to ask, as Price posits them asking, why Britain’s various expenditures on behalf of America did not equate to ownership over the same thus effectively embodies a kind of willful misunderstanding. There should have been no confusion on the part of the average late 18^th century Briton that their government’s protection of America entitled them to nothing more or less than a monopoly on American trade. Not a partial-monopoly, or preferential treatment, but complete and utter dominance in buying from and selling to the markets supported by the various American colonies. Likewise, it should have been absolutely clear that Britain had benefited tremendously from this privilege. America natural resources had fed a burgeoning British manufacturing sector, which in turn extracted even greater wealth from American consumers who had no choice – save resorting to smuggling and the black market – than to buy British products. That a given British government – as well as its various domestic supporters – should have expected more than this from the Anglo-American relationship should accordingly have been hard to fathom. Americans had made ample compensation for the protection they had received, Price accordingly affirmed. To ask any more of them would have been the essence of greed and a mockery of justice.

Observations on the Nature of Civil Liberty, Part IX: Illogical, Unthinking, Hypocritical Britain, contd.

A further reason Richard Price had heard advanced for the rightness of Britain’s dominance vis-à-vis the Thirteen Colonies, he next affirmed, was the apparent, “Superiority of the British State.” In response to such vague rationale, the author of Observations was quite reasonably given to ask, “What gives us our superiority?–Is it our Wealth? […] Is it the number of our people? […] Is it our knowledge and virtue?” To each of these he answered in the negative, thus dismissing “superiority” as a possible criterion for political domination as well as exposing some degree of his own and his countrymen’s cultural and philosophical biases. To the question of wealth, for instance, Price responded that, “This never confers real dignity. On the contrary: Its effect is always to debase, intoxicate, and corrupt.” It would not be difficult to imagine that many of Price’s countrymen indeed thought that wealth was a source of dignity, and that the tremendous wealth collectively possessed by the British people at the end of the 18^th century did rightly entitle them to claim a measure of functional superiority over their American counterparts. Given to exaggeration though the author of Observations might have been – especially when it came to the aspects of contemporary British society he found distasteful – banking, investing, stock-jobbing, and various other “new money” ventures really were in the midst of transforming the British state. As wealth became concentrated in the hands of those who in a previous era would not have possessed much, if any, social capital, values began to shift as money became revered nearly as much as landed title.

As Price noted, however, such vast accumulations of wealth were not solely a source of dignity and respect. Money makes people question their convictions, and in larger sums has an even greater effect. The wealth generated by Britain’s turn towards national banking, mercantilism, and territorial expansion was accordingly bound to have a proportionate effect on the integrity of that nation’s culture and institutions. Positions of power changed hands, favors were trades, bribes made and received. Such things seem to be inevitable in any sufficiently complex socio-political framework, and become more pronounced as more money and more power become available. Individuals have been known to resist, of course, and steps have certainly been taken historically by whole cultures and governments to negate the influence of excess wealth on the direction of public affairs. For this reason Price’s claim that the only effect of wealth “Is always to debase, intoxicate, and corrupt” represents something of an overstatement. That being said, it is very much in keeping with his aforementioned affinity for the reformist ideology of the Country Party and its successors. Having become convinced that any corruption represented an indelible stain on the national soul, and that what corruption Britain had theretofore experienced was the result of the conspiratorial machinations of a moneyed and connected elite, Price would naturally have been among the first to claim that wealth could never entitle a single person – let alone an entire nation – to unquestioned supremacy over their fellow man.

To the question of population, Price again answered in a way that perhaps implies more than it plainly states. “The Colonies,” he declared, “Will soon be equal to us in number.” While in retrospect it may seem a rather silly thing for one nation to claim a right of superiority over another based on a difference in population, the implication is perhaps not so difficult to grasp. One must assume, of course, that Price wasn’t misrepresenting his countrymen in thus describing their rationale. That he appeared not to question the premise of the question would seem to indicate that he was not. Bearing this in mind, it would appear likely that both Price and those of his fellow Britons he had set himself against were given to thinking of the relationship between different communities of people along roughly democratic lines. In Parliament, after all, MPs were elected to serve their constituents by a majority vote, and these representatives in turn approved legislation by the very same logic. While there existed in 1776 no assembly in which the combined representatives of Britain and America sat, it would nevertheless have been far from unnatural for a contemporary British citizen to envision the relationship between their own nation and its American dependencies according to much the same logic. If there were simply more people in Britain than America, why should not the intercourse between them proceed in the same manner as a debate in Parliament? Why shouldn’t Britain, representing the greater share of humanity, see its will triumphant over that of America? It was only logical, after all, whether a vote could actually be taken or not.

In truth, it’s rather curious that Price appeared to grant this premise at all. Sanguine though he appeared to be towards the principle of majority rule – there being no evidence to suggest that he was not – he had also made it fairly clear within the text of his Observations that he believed there was a crucial difference between the logic of relations among communities within a given state and the logic of relations among a group of separate states. The majority of the representatives sitting in a legislature – even if they represented only fifty-one percent of those present – had every right to determine which laws were to be put in place effecting one hundred percent of the population because every member of the society to be effected – in theory, at least – possessed some degree of input into the relevant process. Such a deliberative apparatus conversely did not exist between two sovereign, independent states. Within the context of the Anglo-America relationship, for example, power was the deciding factor in terms of which policies were enacted and which were not. Great Britain – circa 1776 – was militarily and economically more powerful than even a united America, thereby allowing it to effectively dictate what would and would not come to pass between them. That this power had nothing to do – or very little to do – with population should be exceptionally obvious. Certainly there were more people living in Britain at that time than lived in America, but that fact had no effect whatsoever upon how decisions were made. Parliament decided what was to become of America without paying any heed – or being legally obligated to pay any heed – to the stated desires of the inhabitants of British America. A sudden increase in the American population would accordingly have made no difference to this state of affairs. Inclined though certain British people made have been – quite possibly including Price himself – to think about public policy in terms of majority rule, therefore, the concept had no application whatsoever within the context of the Anglo-American relationship.

All the same – and for whatever reason – Price did engage with the idea. And his contention, as cited above, was that, “The Colonies will soon be equal to us in number.” Bearing in mind that the word “soon” can be variously interpreted to mean anything between “any minute now” and “within the next century,” Price might fairly be said to have been right. At the time of its first official census in 1800, the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland contained something on the order of fifteen million people. The United States of America, in that same year conducting its second decennial census, was conversely home to slightly less than five and a half million. Twenty-five years, it would seem, was not enough time for Price’s prediction to come true. If one were to press forward, however, though the 1810s, 20s, 30, 40s, and 50s, the corresponding population data for 1860 appears to bear out its validity. At that point the population of the United Kingdom had reached a figure just shy of twenty-nine million. The United States, by comparison, was sitting at a total of thirty-one million. Without going into how this came to be – a discussion having to do mainly with the Industrial Revolution, the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars in Europe, and the resulting explosion of European migration to America – it will here accordingly suffice to observe that Price was ultimately proven correct within about ninety years of his having made the claim in question.

Whether this fact has very much at all to do with the argument he was attempting to advance within the text of his Observations – i.e. that Britain had no inherent right to declare itself the master of America – is eminently debatable. Again, mere population seemed to have very little connection to the fundamental point he was trying to make. That being said, Price’s claim was rhetorically an effective one. In answer to the hypothetical assertion that Britain deserved to dictate to America because the residents of the latter outnumbered those of the former, Price declared that this would soon no longer be the case. While he was proven right within the span of a century, there was naturally no way for him – or anyone else, for that matter – to confirm this fact. Then again, there was also no way for a prospective opponent to dismiss it. Therein, arguably, lay its genius. By offering an effectively un-confirmable counter to a claim with which he disagreed, Price essentially neutralized it. No one could confirm in 1776 that the American population would one day meet and eclipse that of Britain. Nor could they deny it, however, beyond the shadow of a doubt. That being the case, it would surely have seemed foolish to the supporter of British supremacy to base their claim upon such an uncertain principle. Consider, for example, the likely result of a sudden famine in Britain. Millions might have perished, and as many might have migrated to America. Within ten years, or twenty, or thirty, Britain might accordingly have no longer possessed the larger share of the empire’s population. And what then of British claims of superiority? How then could anyone justify a smaller nation holding authority over a larger one? Population, in short, could not be taken a basis of argument. It could change too suddenly, too quickly. It was not solid. It could not be depended on.

This may well have been exactly the point that Price was trying to make. Again, it’s not clear why he felt the need to engage with the notion of demographic superiority when his fundamental point had been and would be better made by other means. But so long as he did choose to address the argument that Britain somehow deserved to rule over America because there were more British people than there were Americans, the implications of his counterargument were nonetheless highly significant. Numbers, in the context of national sovereignty, made no difference to whether a nation could govern itself or not, or whether it could govern another nation or not. Self-government was not a prize a state only gained only after breaking a given demographic threshold, nor was it something that could be accumulated in excess and exerted by one state upon another. Sovereignty was inherent, fundamental, and immutable, having nothing to do with population, wealth, or power and everything to do with the humanity, liberty, and dignity of the individual. It could be delegated, channelled, and even constrained by mutual consent. But it could not be taken away from one nation because another claimed to have more of something than its counterpart.

Not only would it have been fundamentally inhuman to accordingly treat the right of self-government like some kind of reward, but it would very shortly prove a very foolish basis upon which to justify one’s authority. Because population, just like wealth, military power, and cultural distinction, ebbs and flows according to trends predictable and unpredictable, artificial and naturally occurring. Rooting the authority of one’s nation – particularly in terms of its right to hold sway over other nations – in the possession of an advantage in any of these categories would therefore inevitably open one up to being conquered, subsumed, or overawed whenever fate happened to dictate a sudden change in material circumstances. Not only would this seem to present an intolerable state of affairs – i.e. nations constantly shifting between ruling others and being ruled – but it would once again appear to wholly discount the fundamental value of the human spirit. People, Price had earlier affirmed in the text of his Observations, were not livestock to be manhandled as those who sought to benefit from their existence saw fit. On the contrary, they were thinking, feeling beings to whom a quantity of basic respect was owed and from whose consent all forms of government necessarily derived.

The supposed “knowledge and virtue” of the British people was likewise dismissed by Price as being for the most part illusory. Britain may well have been able to boast of the keen minds and noble hearts among its many millions, but this hardly made it exceptional among nations. Indeed, Price avowed, the inhabitants of America, “Are probably equally knowing, and more virtuous. There are names among them that will not stoop to any names among the philosophers and politicians of this island.” As with the issue of population cited above, a claim such as this could not easily be confirmed. Certainly there were a handful of prominent Americans whose efforts in their chosen fields had indeed made them famous beyond their native environs. There were painters, for example, like John Singleton Copley (1738-1815) and Benjamin West (1738-1820), both of whom migrated to Britain in the latter half of the 18^th century in pursuit of the kind of exposure and patronage the colonies simply could not supply. West in particular met with great success, his work garnering him the sobriquet of “the American Raphael” among the British public. He was later appointed president of the Royal Academy of Arts in 1792. Theologians were also among those Americans whose reputations managed the long Atlantic crossing. Jonathan Edwards (1703-1758) was undoubtedly the most prominent of these, being one of the principal contributors to the trans-Atlantic religious revival that swept across the British Empire in the 1730s, 40s, and 50s – the so-called “First Great Awakening” – an ardent ally of reformist English preachers like George Whitefield (1714-1770), and the author of numerous books, pamphlets, and sermons that are in some cases still read today by British and American Evangelical Christians.

Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790), of course, was without a doubt the most famous American of the pre-Revolutionary era, both among his countrymen in the colonies and the wider British public. A printer, writer, scientist, inventor, philosopher, and satirist, Franklin crossed the Atlantic numerous times over the course of his long life, becoming variously a public intellectual and man of letters in his adopted home city of Philadelphia, a diplomat and statesmen in the Court at Westminster, an early patron and member of the Royal Society of Arts in London, and pioneering natural philosopher with honorary doctorates from St. Andrews and Oxford universities. He was also a friend and contemporary of Price himself, alongside numerous other reformers, intellectuals, artists, scientists, and statesmen then living and working in late 18^th century Britain. In consequence of these many and varied accomplishments and connections, Franklin was for many contemporary British citizens the only American they could easily name. That he was also one of the most prominent public figures of the era – a kind of 18^th century celebrity, if you will – doubtless lends some credence to Price’s aforementioned claim. There may not have been very many Americans in the 1770s whose talents were being celebrated on both sides of the Atlantic, but those few who managed to achieve this pinnacle of success certainly spoke well of the abilities of their fellow countrymen. West, Edwards, and Franklin were among some of the most successful and most acclaimed in their respected fields, to the point that their parochial origins ceased to stand in the way of their being embraced by the mainstream of contemporary British society.

Whether this could be said to validate Price’s claim of Americans being “equally knowing” when compared to their British counterparts remains an open question, however. After all, how does one measure the relative possession of knowledge or skill? Great Britain – as mentioned at length above – possessed the larger population circa 1776, therefore almost certainly guaranteeing that the number of particularly intelligent, knowledgeable, or accomplished individuals living therein was bound to be greater than comparatively minuscule America could hope to boast. Did that mean that Britain was the more knowledgeable nation? Or were such things best measured on a per capita basis? That is to say, was it valid to claim – with the aforementioned American luminaries as examples – that the most intelligent Americans were the equals of the most intelligent Britons? There were not – perhaps could never be – easy answers to these questions. All the same, Price was at the very least correct in asserting that Americans, as a people, were not less intellectually capable, artistically inclined, or morally upstanding than their British equivalents.

This once again seemed not to be the point, however. Proud though contemporary Americans had every right to be of the accomplishments of their various prominent countrymen, these accomplishments bore no relationship at all to their possession of certain fundamental liberties. Rather, as Price himself asserted in his Observations, they derived their entitlement to free worship, free movement, free property, and free government simply from their status as members of the human race. Relative wealth did not affect this, any more than did physical power, fame, knowledge, or numbers. People were free, he affirmed, by nature, and when they formed communities, those communities were free. And then those communities sought to administer themselves, the resulting governments were free. All derived from the fundamental autonomy of the individual, and all ceased to function if that autonomy was curtailed. Not only was this fairer than assigning sovereignty only to those whose communities could boast the smartest, strongest, ablest members, but it was infinitely more sensible. Late 18^th century Britain had certainly given rise to more than its share of intellectual and artistic luminaries – to the point that it could fairly be said to dominate the Anglo-American public discourse – but there was simply no way to guarantee that this would always be the case. Consequent to any number of factors, America might suddenly experience a tremendous and unprecedented explosion of talent and expression in the arts, sciences, and humanities, thus drastically shifting the cultural balance in its favor vis-à-vis its nominal colonial master. What then? Should anyone living in the contemporary Anglo-American world thereafter expect Parliament to acquiesce to the dictates of the united colonies? Price’s answer – notwithstanding his evident willingness to engage with the basic premise – would almost certainly have been that such thinking was plainly ridiculous. The British and American peoples were each sovereign in and of themselves, regardless of how wealthy, or numerous, of intelligent they happened to be. This was only proper, only just, only right.  

Observations on the Nature of Civil Liberty, Part VIII: Illogical, Unthinking, Hypocritical Britain, contd.

Pursuant to his intention of deconstructing and refuting the logic of the contemporary British government’s ongoing campaign to quell the incipient American Revolution, Richard Price laid out a map of his planned critique in the introduction to Part II Observations. That segment of his treatise, he explained, would be divided into five sections, each dealing with a different dimension of the North Ministry’s approach to the aforesaid colonial revolt.

Section I, entitled “On the Justice of the War with America,” would seek to determine to what degree taking up arms against the restive colonies comported with contemporary Anglo-American notions of what was just, equitable, and reasonable within the context of the relationship between a people and their nominal government. Section II, called “Whether the War with America is justified by the Principles of the Constitution,” would endeavor to examine this same subject from the perspective of the principles, history, and traditions of the British Constitution. Section III, labelled “Of the Policy of the War with America,” would tend towards a somewhat more practical subject than the previous two, seeking to explore the degree to which the policy of successive British governments truly aligned with their stated objective to preserve law and order in America and promote closer ties between that realm and Britain proper. Section IV, entitled “Of the Honor of the Nation, as affected by the War with America,” would attempt to examine the way in which the dignity of the British government and people had supposedly become entwined with their ability to maintain the accustomed relationship between Britain and America. And Section V, named “Of the Probability of Succeeding in the War with America,” would seek to determine whether or not it was even possible for the policies then being advocated by the North Ministry to achieve anything like a status quo ante bellum within the context of the Anglo-American relationship. Under each heading, Price sought principally to counter common arguments made in favor of both America’s continued loyalty towards the British Empire and the war then being waged ostensibly to preserve the same. His tone, throughout, was decidedly skeptical; his aim, unmistakably, to debunk and disabuse.

In aid of this objective, Price also deployed a kind of admonition in the opening paragraphs of Part II which he believed his readers would have done well to consider. Endeavoring to push his audience away from either measuring the present dilemma against, “The practice of former times” or from considering the liberties claimed by the American colonies strictly within the context of their respective governing charters, Price explained that the reality of the present relationship between Britain and America was almost entirely without precedent in the history of human affairs. “The case of a free country branching itself out in the manner Britain has done,” he declared,

And sending to a distant world colonies which have there, from small beginnings, and under free legislatures of their own, increased, and formed a body of powerful states, likely soon to become superior to the parent state […] is a case which is new in the history of mankind; and it is extremely improper to judge of it by the rules of any narrow and partial policy; or to consider it on any other ground than the general one of reason and justice.

There was a fair bit of wisdom in this assertion. While the nucleus of the contemporary British state – i.e. England – had undergone a reasonably steady process of expansion and consolidation since at least the High Middles Ages, the stage of that progression which commenced with the beginnings of the English colonial project at the end of the 16^th century was practically and fundamentally different than those which preceded it.

Wales, for example, had been conquered by English armies in the 1280s and granted representation in Parliament via the Law in Wales Acts of 1535 and 1542. Scotland entered into a de facto partnership with England upon the ascension to the English throne of James I (1566-1625) in 1603 and was fully amalgamated with the same by the terms of the Act of Union in 1707. Ireland, meanwhile, was invaded by the Normans in the 1170s and by the 1290s was possessed of a Parliament of its own whose membership and jurisdiction was separate from that which sat in Westminster. In spite of periodic attempts to govern to the contrary, therefore, all of these regions could accordingly be said to have enjoyed a long history of political representation by the time of Price’s writing in the late 1770s. Granted, the Irish Parliament was inarguably subservient to its counterpart in Great Britain, and the period between the annexation of Wales to England and the recognition of Welsh political rights under English law did last for the better part of three centuries. All the same, by 1776 it could not be argued that any of these territories lacked legislative representation of some sort, or that their relationship to the government of Great Britain was little better than that of master and subject. The establishment of the Roanoke Colony in what is now Virginia in 1585 – while not itself a successful venture – represented the beginning of an enterprise whose nature and dynamics were, by comparison, less concerned with constitutional scruples and accordingly more prone to lingering questions about sovereignty, authority, and law.

Putting aside Scotland – which was peacefully merged with England to form the Kingdom of Great Britain – Wales and Ireland were both conquered by English armies and subject to occupation and annexation. In consequence, both of these territories represented prizes as much as constituent regions of an expanding English state. They and their inhabitants were thus not infrequently treated like property under the terms of English law. Distressing though this surely was, contemporary practice did not militate against it. By the standards of the era, the relevant English governments were under no formal obligation to recognize the civil liberties of either the Welsh or Irish peoples. When this recognition eventually came, however – via the incorporation of one into England proper and the establishment in the other of a parallel government – it was accomplished in a manner at least nominally consistent with contemporary constitutional norms. Rather than attempt to continue governing Wales and/or Ireland without seeing that their populations were represented on the same basis as that of England – an outcome which, it bears repeating, contemporary English law would not have scoffed at – the relevant governments took measures to ensure that English law applied consistently to all subjects of the Crown. The proximity of the regions in question to England doubtless made this easy enough, and the recurrence of civil unrest in the same surely made it a needful outcome as well. Thus was Wales incorporated into England proper – allowing its inhabitants access to the same legal protections and guarantees as their English counterparts – and a separate Parliament established for Ireland – which recognized the same rights and adhered to the same basic practices as its English equivalent. Conquest, it may therefore fairly be said, in due time gave way to the Constitution.  

England’s – and later Great Britain’s – colonization of America conversely involved a process of peaceful settlement whereby the inhabitants of the territories in question lived at a great distance from the center of power in London, were the descendants of English/British subjects or were subjects themselves, and were at no point the subjects of a campaign of invasion and conquest. The original inhabitants of colonial Jamestown, the Massachusetts Bay Colony, Pennsylvania, or the Plymouth Colony thus differed materially from their Irish and Welsh predecessors in that their relationship to the government and laws of England/Britain was not thrust upon them at the tip of a sword. They departed their homeland as subjects of the Crown in good standing – or near enough, depending on the faith they professed – erected new structures of government under the nominal auspices of this same central authority – via the issuance of colonial charters – and freely acknowledged the authority of the associated legislature – i.e. Parliament – within the realms of trade and defense. Far from foreigners who were brought into the imperial fold by force, they might thereby best be described as migrant-adventurers who aimed – among other things – to expand the reach of English/British culture into a region of the globe previously unknown to the same. This same migration, however, also removed them from even the possibility of representation in Parliament, thus creating a situation – as Price aptly observed – theretofore unseen in the history of the English/British Empire.

Neither a conquered people nor slaves, and yet also incapable of enjoying the same rights afforded to their British-resident counterparts, the inhabitants of British America existed in a legal and philosophical space that Britain proper did not recognize because it never had to previously. Non-citizen subject populations had always become citizens eventually, or else came to enjoy protection from authorities they could not acknowledge as their own. America was not fit for the one, while the other – i.e. a strict separation of the powers of Parliament and the Crown from those of the individual colonial governments – would function only to the extent that British authorities would allow. Such an ad-hoc arrangement certainly benefited the central government in question, permitting it the flexibility to interpret its relationship with the various colonial governments on the basis of what, at any given moment, it needed said relationship to be. There were customs, of course, and norms to which Parliament and the Crown commonly adhered in their dealings with Britain’s various American dependencies, but none of it was truly binding, or based on much more than what was momentarily expedient. Price thus rightly entreated his readers not to consider the conflict just then unfolding between Britain and the Thirteen Colonies, “On any other ground than the general one of reason and justice.” The few precedents that did exist within the history of the English/British Empire for the expansion of the same concerned situations too unlike Britain’s colonization of America to be of any relevance in 1776. And the decisions that had been made during the establishment and growth of Britain’s American dependencies vis-à-vis their relationship with Parliament and the Crown could hardly be considered precedents at all. What mattered, on the contrary, was whether or not Britain’s actions towards the Thirteen Colonies, in the lead up to hostilities and during their commencement, were consistent with the most basic measures of justice, integrity, humanity, and reason.

Price’s resulting attempt to systematically explore these same concepts as they related to the North Ministry’s efforts to quell the ongoing rebellion in America began simply enough. At the outset of the aforementioned Part II, Section I, he set the direction of what would follow by seeking to determine, as plainly as possible, what it was the British government was fighting to maintain. To that end, he hit upon a statement issued by said government which seemed to sum up the thrust of its position while leaving vague any supporting evidence. Quoting from the text of the American Colonies Act (1766) – perhaps more commonly known as the Declaratory Act – Price thus relayed that it was the evident conviction of the North Ministry, “That this kingdom has power, and of right ought to have power to make laws and statutes to bind the Colonies, and people of America, in all cases whatever.” After first admitting that most of his countrymen, “Will be for using milder language; and for saying no more than, that the united legislatures of England and Scotland have of right power to tax the Colonies, and a supremacy of legislation over America [,]” Price proceeded to marvel at the implications of such a doctrine of authority. “If it means any thing,” he thus affirmed,

It means, that the property, and the legislations of the Colonies, are subject to the absolute discretion of Great Britain, and ought of right to be so. The nature of the thing admits no limitation. The Colonies can never be admitted to be judges, how far the authority over them in these cases shall extend. This would be to destroy it entirely,–If any part of their property is subject to our discretion, the whole must be so […] It is self-evident, that this leaves them nothing they can call their own.

Forgoing any declaration on his part as to the justice of this arrangement – his readers might now have fairly guessed where it was he came down on the matter – Price proceeded to ask perhaps the most cogent question his government could conceivably have faced. “What is it that can give to any people such a supremacy over another people?” he inquired. Many answers had been offered, it seemed, and from many different quarters. Price thereafter proceeded to address them each in turn.

            Unity, Price avowed, embodied one such justification. The continued supremacy of Great Britain over the Thirteen Colonies was necessary, “In order to preserve the UNITY of the British Empire.” By Price’s reckoning, any claims of this sort were so ridiculous as to be almost wholly contradictory. Such pleas, he declared,

In all ages, [have] been used to justify tyranny.–They have in RELIGION given rise to numberless oppressive claims, and slavish Hierarchies. And in the Romish Communion particularly, it is well known, that the POPE claims the titles and powers of supreme head on earth of the Christian church, in order to preserve its UNITY.–With respect to the British Empire, nothing can be more preposterous than to endeavor to maintain its unity by setting up such a method of establishing unity, which, like the similar method in religion, can produce nothing but mischief.

It likely bears noting here that Price’s use of the hierarchical nature of the Roman Catholic Church as an example of unity run amok was almost certainly due more to his status as a Non-Conformist Protestant than any particular deficiency on the part of the so-called “Romish Communion.” Granting that the centralizing tendencies of the Roman Church did play a role in the doctrinal disagreements at the heart of the Protestant Reformation – and that this may indeed be what Price was referring to – the various incidents of disunity historically experienced by that confession had more complex and varied origins than could be accounted for by the claimed authority of the Pope alone. For that matter, while the existence of a singular religious “executive” may not be its cause, the Roman Catholic Church has historically been among the most unified congregations among contemporary Christian denominations, and likewise the most resistant to permanent schism.

Whether this was true or not matters but little, however, so long as Price believed it to be the case. To his thinking – regardless of how he got there – excessive centralization, whether in matters of faith or administration, inevitably led to a kind of countervailing disunity. People were not sheep, after all, and could not heed even a well-intentioned shepherd’s directions indefinitely without at some point happening upon a cause for disagreement. The organizational framework that could not peacefully channel the resulting tensions – by fostering constructive debate or allowing for variations in local practice – was accordingly doomed to failure. Price’s ideal conception of unity within the British Empire, therefore, took the form of, “A common relation to one supreme executive head; an exchange of kind offices; types of interest and affection, and compacts [.]” Thus bound to one another by ties of sentiment and economic interest rather than sovereignty or statute, America and Britain might each pursue the policies that best suited their needs without either coming to resent the overbearing influence of the other. Disputes could thereby be adjudicated rather than allowed to devolve into violent confrontation, each side being secure in the notion that, come what may, they did not stand to lose their liberties depending on the position they chose to support. The alternative, of course, was what America and Britain had thus far witnessed: rigidity, confrontation, escalation, and war. If this was the price to be paid for unity, Price avowed – “If, in order to preserve it Unity, one half of [the empire] must be enslaved to the other half, let it, in the name of God, want Unity.” 

Observations on the Nature of Civil Liberty, Part VII: Illogical, Unthinking, Hypocritical Britain, contd.

Pursuant to his evident aim of demonstrating the inherently illiberal nature of the contemporary British Empire, the author of Observations offered his own particularly incisive commentary upon a very common subject of study and discussion in the 17^th and 18^th century Anglo-American world. That subject, being the history, politics, and philosophy of the ancient Roman Republic, offered inspiration to traditionalists and radicals alike among the scholarly-minded inhabitants of the contemporary British Empire. From the ardent Tories who saw in Rome’s balance of domestic liberty and extraterritorial splendor a reflection of their native realm to the radical Whigs whose abhorrence of corruption and championing of virtue found validation in the orations of Cicero (106-43 BC) and Cato the Younger (95-46 BC) and was embodied in the social values of the Roman civilization, ancient Rome – at its best – represented a kind of cultural/political ideal with which Britons of all stripes increasingly identified as the intellectual currents of the Enlightenment brought forth a renewed interest in the literature and history of classical antiquity. Richard Price, while demonstrably fluent in the resulting socio-political vocabulary, was evidently among the minority of those who saw more to condemn than admire, however. Rome, he asserted near the end of Part I, Section III of Observations, was fundamentally founded and sustained upon a platform of conquest, whereby formerly independent peoples were made subjects of an empire in whose government they had no voice and under whose laws they enjoyed only limited rights. “The Roman Republic [,]” he thereby concluded, “Was nothing but a faction against the general liberties of the world; and had no more right to give law to the Provinces subject to it, than thieves have to the property they seize, or to the houses into which they break.”

The context for this declaration had to do with the supposed right of conquerors to impose their will upon their victims. Price’s identification of an argument to this end aimed at the American colonies with the example of ancient Rome would accordingly seem to indicate that he equated contemporary British attitudes towards the concept of empire as being to some extent in self-conscious emulation of the imagined glory – and virtue – of that selfsame ancient republic. Britons saw themselves, in short, as 18^th century Romans whose power and prestige was equaled only by the degree to which their government was built upon a foundation of integrity, justice, and discipline. Price, it seemed, disagreed on both counts. After first asserting, by way of comparison, that an empire in which a number of sovereign states are held together by a series of compacts, a common council, or a shared monarch is an “Empire of Freemen” while an empire in which every state is bound to an absolute monarch, “Whose will is their law [,]” is an “Empire of Slaves [,]” he went on to describe the ancient Roman – and, by extension, the contemporary British – polity as effectively combining the appearance of one with the function of the other. An empire, he accordingly declared, in which,

One of the states is free, but governs by its will all the other states; then is [that] Empire, like that of the Romans in the times of the republic, an Empire consisting of one state free, and the rest in slavery. Nor does it make more difference in this case, that the governing state is itself free, than it does in the case of a kingdom subject to a despot, that this despot is himself free.

Thus did Price attempt to disabuse his readers of the notion that the Britain they championed or the Rome they idolized were in either case anywhere near as free and virtuous as they preferred to believe.

Rome, even during the phase of its existence when it was governed as a republic, did justice mainly to those who lived in the city proper. Only these lucky few were in any practical way represented by the various tribal assembled, the Senate, and the magistrates, and could thus be fairly qualified as free. All other inhabitants of the extended – and extending – Roman world were mere subjects, sometimes called citizen but with no means of affirming it, more often called freeman possessed of hardly any rights at all. 18^th century Britain was effectively no different in its basic socio-political dynamics. Those among its inhabitants who lived in England, Scotland, or Wales truly were among the freest people in the contemporary world, being represented in Parliament as well as possessed of a number of fundamental civil rights. Those who lived in America, however, or India, or the Caribbean were nowhere near so fortunate. Even laying aside the millions of indigenous peoples whose legal rights within the British Empire were either exceedingly thin or non-existent, even the European settler populations in these regions were forced to function in a kind of legal gray zone in which their rights were formally acknowledged but they possessed no easily accessible means of asserting them. To be British in Jamaica, Bengal, or the Carolinas, in short, was certainly preferable by contemporary standards to being a native of any of these provinces, though it still would have paled in comparison to being British in London or Edinburgh. And yet, regrettable though authorities in Britain may well have admitted this situation was, they could no more honestly deny the degree to which they benefitted from the arrangement than their ancient Roman equivalents.

Price affirmed the veracity of this claim in the text of Observations by paraphrasing a passage of Montesquieu’s aforementioned Spirit of the Laws. “A great writer,” he asserted,

Observes of the Roman Empire, that while Liberty was at the center, tyranny prevailed in the distant provinces; that such as were free under it were extremely so, while those who were slaves groaned under the extremity of slavery; and that the same events that destroyed the liberty of the former, gave liberty to the latter.

In echoing these sentiments, Price plainly sought to draw the attention of his audience to the relationship between the center and the periphery that has so often sustained some of history’s most powerful empires. The extraordinary freedom enjoyed by the Roman citizen at the height of the republic thereof was unequivocally the product of that same entity’s persistent expansion into foreign territories and conquest of foreign states, tribes, and peoples. The grain subsidies, military pensions, abundance of trade goods, and splendid public amenities all owed their existence to the labor and the wealth of provinces wholly unable to assert their desires within the halls of power. Sometimes this one-sided transfer of resources came in the form of outright slavery, though as often it was facilitated by the much more seemly practice of taxation. In either case, however, the basic extant principle was that the provinces essentially belonged to Rome and that the government thereof could dispose of them as it wished.

            The same could arguably have been said of the 18^th century British Empire. The wealth that contemporary Britons enjoyed and the freedoms that they cherished were in no small part owed to the resources that were being yearly extracted from the far flung territories of their growing colonial empire. Access to Indian cotton, America tobacco, or Jamaican coffee kept prices for these commodities low in Britain, trade monopolies buttressed wages and promoted manufacturing, and the resulting economic growth and prosperity prevented successive governments from seeing any reason to tamp down on the civil liberties of a society that was generally fairly pleased with the way things were. There were, of course, any number of communities whose standards of living remained distressingly low – from coal miners, to textile workers, to the urban poor – but these groups were too disparate and often as not too invested in the status quo to represent anything like a threat to the reigning hierarchy. By the late 1770s, Great Britain had wholly ceased to be a feudal society in which a majority peasant population was only ever one bad harvest away from raising its pitchforks in riot and revolt. Economic diversification, spurred by access to raw materials and new markets, effectively ensured that the average citizen was prosperous enough to no longer represent a latent threat to the forces of social stability. Most of them were still being kept at arm’s length from active participation in public affairs by property restrictions on voting, but they could nonetheless safely enjoy a bevy of fairly substantial legal rights without in any undue way diminishing the powers of Parliament or the Crown.

Britain’s colonial periphery was absolutely instrumental to this state of affairs, both for the resources they provided and the degree to which their populations possessed no legal entitlement to administrative consultation. America, the Caribbean, and India supplied increasingly valuable raw materials for British merchants to resell at a profit, markets for goods manufactured in Britain, and even sources of tax revenue and billets for members of a sprawling military apparatus whose reduction was both politically and strategically undesirable. In spite of the immense value that these regions could accordingly be said to have contributed to the growth and prosperity of the empire as a whole, however, none of them enjoyed a consistent means of making themselves heard by and within its decision-making bodies. Granted, many of Britain’s American and Caribbean dependencies possessed representative governments of their own – with such regions of India as fell under British hegemony meanwhile being governed by the privately-owned East India Company – blessed with the power to levy taxes and formulate legislation as Parliament did for Britain proper. These colonial entities were not, therefore, quite as subservient in practice as the various provinces of republican Rome – all of which were administered by Senate-appointed governors – were to the government of that splendid city. That being said, Britain’s various 18^th century colonies shared with these provinces a fundamental legal inferiority to a central governing authority whose decisions were paramount and final and over which they possessed limited – if any – influence.

Accordingly, a sitting British government in the late 18^th century could decide to tax foreign molasses entering colonial ports in attempt to subsidize the product of its own Caribbean plantations – as occurred in 1733 – without any need to consult with the relevant populations. It could also attempt to limit the ability of colonial merchants to trade with the colonies of foreign powers – as happened numerous times between 1651 and 1696 – prevent the creation of complex ironworks or steel refineries in British America – as occurred in 1750 – or limit the ability of American colonial governments to issue paper currency for the payment of debts – as occurred in 1764 – all without being forced to wrangle with the potential public or popular displeasure of the affected communities. British troops could be deployed in Massachusetts, restrictions placed on imports to the Bahamas, and specific religions given official sanction in Quebec, each as the government and Parliament believed the results would benefit the empire over which it exercised unparalleled control. This state of affairs was exactly what Price observed of the Roman Republic, and which he attempted to call to the attention of all those who would idolize the same as a paragon of strength and liberty in equal measure. “The liberty of the Romans,” he thus asserted,

Was only an additional calamity to the provinces governed by them; and though it might have been said of the Citizens of Rome, that they were the “freest members of any civil society in the known world;” yet of the Subjects of Rome, it must be said, that they were the completest slaves in the known world.

This dichotomy was not coincidental. Rome was free and prosperous in proportion to the degree to which the provinces were not. Just so – as the examples cited above attest – Britain was free and prosperous in proportion to the degree to which its colonies were not.

Boosting the British economy and increasing the civil and economic freedoms of the British people meant necessarily curtailing these same liberties on the part of Britain’s colonial subjects. Cheap sugar in London, textile jobs in Lancashire, and respectable profits for merchants across the British Isles would simply have been impossible to achieve within the zero-sum thinking of mercantilist economics without successive governments being able to essentially force people in Pennsylvania to pay more for foreign sugar, require their neighbors in New York to buy only imported British textiles, and mandate that debtors across America pay off their obligations exclusively in expensive hard currency rather than depreciated paper bills. It was a decidedly one-sided relationship, and one which the British people had benefitted from for so long and so abundantly that by the end of the 18^th century they had come to take it almost entirely for granted. Price’s commentary upon this unthinking attitude was accordingly quite acute. “We have been so used to speaking of the Colonies as our Colonies,” he thus observed at the beginning of Part II of Observations, “And to think of them as in a state of subordination to us, and as holding their existence in America only for our use, that it is no wonder the prejudices of many are alarmed, when they find a different doctrine maintained.” A more cogent and succinct evaluation of contemporary mainstream British attitudes towards the American colonies entirely fails to come to mind.

It wasn’t that the British people sought to disenfranchise their American brethren out of a sense of malice, pique, or greed. They did not want to rob them of the liberties that they themselves held dear as punishment for some imagined crime. Nor even did they think of the inhabitants of America as being somehow fundamentally inferior to their British resident counterparts. The issue as hand was rather that they didn’t think about America or Americans at all, save to perhaps occasionally remind themselves of the glory and wealth that they represented for the empire. Even the lowliest of his fellow countrymen, Price accordingly observed, was given, “To look upon himself as having a body of subjects in America; and to be offended at the denial of his right to make laws for them, though perhaps he does not know what colour they are, or what language they talk.” This condition was both to some degree natural and capable of being remedied. The issue at hand was simply one of ignorance, and the best method for its alleviation that of education. Price thus determined to apply himself in the sections of Observations that followed to documenting, analyzing, and deconstructing some of the basic assumptions harbored by his fellow Britons as to the justice and necessity of making war on the Thirteen Colonies in order to retain their allegiance to the British Crown. In so doing, he hoped that, “More just sentiments [would] prevail” and the general happiness of the British Empire might fairly have been achieved.