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.