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Page 1 of 2

  • 1 - Introduction:
  • Edited by H. V. Bowen, Swansea University, Elizabeth Mancke, University of Akron, Ohio, John G. Reid, Saint Mary's University, Nova Scotia
  • Book: Britain's Oceanic Empire
  • Published online: 05 June 2012
  • Print publication: 31 May 2012, pp 1-12
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Britain's Oceanic Empire
  • Britain's Oceanic Empire
  • Atlantic and Indian Ocean Worlds, c.1550–1850
  • Edited by H. V. Bowen, Elizabeth Mancke, John G. Reid
  • Published online: 05 June 2012
  • Print publication: 31 May 2012
  • View description
    This pioneering comparative study of British imperialism in the Atlantic and Indian Ocean worlds draws on the perspectives of British newcomers overseas and their native hosts, metropolitan officials and corporate enterprises, migrants and settlers. Leading scholars examine the divergences and commonalities in the legal and economic regimes that allowed Britain to project imperium across the globe. They explore the nature of sovereignty and law, governance and regulation, diplomacy, military relations and commerce, shedding new light on the processes of expansion that influenced the making of empire. While acknowledging the distinctions and divergences in imperial endeavours in Asia and the Americas - not least in terms of the size of indigenous populations, technical and cultural differences, and approaches to indigenous polities - this book argues that these differences must be seen in the context of what Britons overseas shared, including constitutional principles, claims of sovereignty, disciplinary regimes and military attitudes.
  • 1 - The Languages of Liberty in British North America, 1607–1776
  • Edited by Jack P. Greene, The Johns Hopkins University
  • Book: Exclusionary Empire
  • Published online: 05 June 2012
  • Print publication: 12 October 2009, pp 25-49
  • View extract

    Summary

    In the seventeenth century, beginning with the settlement of Jamestown, Virginia, in 1607, English subjects of middling and poor circumstances settled in the temperate zones of North America, often under the auspices of companies or proprietors. All participants in planting these colonies soon realized that their greatest assets were labor, land, and their identity as natural-born English subjects, and that returns on investments would be slow to achieve. For settlers, these three assets reinforced one another in dialectical complementarity: Labor invested in land created wealth and legitimated a claim; ownership of land gave them the right to participate in government and the exercise of traditional English liberties, such as trial by jury, deliberative assemblies, and local government; and self-government could protect their land and labor. While charters acknowledged that overseas English subjects were entitled to traditional English legal and political protections, they did not spell out what institutional forms the protections of English rights and liberties should take. Thus, in addition to establishing farms and families, colonists from New England to the Carolinas established the institutions of self-government, with a particular emphasis on their rights to assemblies and rule by law. This chapter seeks to position British American expressions of traditional English liberties within a broader transatlantic context in which claims to liberty were frequently deployed in the struggle to define the nature and character of overseas expansion.

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