To be Free and French: Citizenship in France's Atlantic Empire, by Lorelle Semley

This concluding chapter describes how, in Britain's postwar Atlantic empire, subjects in the four colonial port cities voiced a greater commitment to monarchical government, but they also expressed a more determined defense of the rights and liberties they enjoyed. When viewed through the wider lens of the British Atlantic, this renewed embrace of Britishness also sits in tension with a diversity of local political cultures that were defined, in part, by their resident's revolutionary experiences. Britons in these four communities often made sense of the debates surrounding this period, of questions of rights and liberties and what constituted tyranny, from distinct local perspectives. Of course, such differences did not originate in the 1760s and 1770s, nor were they previously incompatible with broader characterizations of British loyalty and loyalism. But the events of this period forced these disparities into the open in ways previously unknown. Ultimately, there was little that actually bound together Britain's Atlantic empire. The actions of rebellious Americans certainly confirmed this point, but it was just as true of loyal Britons.

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‘A greater revolution’

Negotiating Toleration ◽

10.1093/oso/9780198804222.003.0011 ◽

2019 ◽

pp. 213-230

Author(s):

David Parrish

Keyword(s):

New York ◽

South Carolina ◽

New England ◽

Political Culture ◽

Print Culture ◽

Cotton Mather ◽

High Church ◽

Atlantic Empire

Letters to and from prominent Dissenting leaders and their political allies such as Cotton Mather and Benjamin Colman in New England, Archibald Stobo in South Carolina, and Robert Hunter in New York make it abundantly clear that the High-Church Tory ascendency during the final years of Queen Anne’s reign was a fraught period for religious Dissenters living throughout Britain’s Atlantic empire. While Tories were implementing policies designed to inhibit the influence of Dissent, a transatlantic Tory political culture was becoming far more antagonistic to the Hanoverian Succession and was increasingly associated with Jacobitism. Consequently, anti-Jacobitism became a pillar of the transatlantic Dissenting and Whig political and print culture.

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