Conclusion

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.

The First British Empire

As this chapter traces the development of Britain’s Atlantic Empire, it shows how the authority of what was originally an English state began to rely upon support from the ever-more diverse populations coming under British control. While Scots were the only ones to achieve equality with English people, initially in the Ulster Plantation and later, following the Act of Union of 1707, throughout Britain’s overseas empire, the chapter shows that many of the Protestant and Catholic populations of Ireland also prospered from, and served, the empire, and that many Native Americans and African American slaves were enlisted to serve its cause at moments of crisis. The chapter also addresses the extent to which the governance of the British state and empire was managed by people from military backgrounds, which is unsurprising given Britain’s successive military engagements in Ireland, in Continental Europe and, latterly, in defending its empire.