How Britain’s Imperial “Modernization” Shaped the American Revolution

Adel:
Dr. Pincus, it’s a pleasure to have you in our program’s special series. Thank you for taking the time for this conversation with me about the American Revolution. So let’s start with a basic question, the answer to which I bet won’t be so basic.

And the question is this. What is a revolution?

Dr. Pincus:
Yeah, no, I mean, I think it’s absolutely important to think about revolutions as a because scholars and, you know, popular commentators frequently use the word revolution.

Adel:
Yeah.

Dr. Pincus:
It’s an important event. Yeah. What do we mean?

What do we mean by a revolution? Well, a revolution is a relatively rapid transformation of the fundamental institutions, fundamental institutions in a society. So a revolution is much more than just a change of government.

Right. I mean, a revolution is not, you know, an election where we in common terms, one referred to the election of eighteen hundred in the United States as a revolution. Well, that’s absolutely not a revolution.

It’s true that Thomas Jefferson was elected and he had a different point of view from John Adams, but it didn’t change the fundamental institutions of American society. Right. Yeah.

So and a revolution is also not the same as a coup d’etat. Right. I mean, a coup d’etat happens when, you know, a small group of people decide to overthrow the person or persons in power.

The long term consequences might be to change institutions, et cetera. But the goal is not not changing institutions and changing society. It’s just simply getting rid of of of of a leadership group.

A revolution is also not the same as a rebellion or a revolt. A rebellion, a revolution might be a subset of the category of revolution, of rebellion or revolt. That is to say.

Revolutions do involve inevitably involve violence to some degree and rebellions or revolts involves violence. But rebellions or revolts can sometimes be about single issues. For example, one could one could talk about one.

I mean, just to give an example of a sort of narrow, single issue speaks about the peasants revolt in in in 1530s Germany, where basically, you know, a bunch of peasants in Germany wanted to get rid of a Catholic ruling class and replace them with a Protestant one. Right. So that was that was, I mean, a single issue.

They failed, which but it was they didn’t want to change the basic institutions of society in a basic way. They wanted to just change the religion of the rulers. So a revolution, strikes me, has broader aims than a revolt or rebellion.

A revolt or rebellion can be driven by a single issue. It can be driven by a single person. That is to say, there could be discontent about a single person or a single group of people, people in power.

But the rebellions don’t always want to change the fundamental institutions of a society. But but I will say so, I mean, you can follow up. I mean, I’ll let you ask the follow up question.

Adel:
Yeah. The follow up question. First of all, you’re welcome to add.

But what I wanted to ask, I wanted to follow up on a word that you said. You were talking about the 1530s or rebellion by the peasants in Germany and you said, but it failed. A revolution doesn’t need to succeed for it to be called a revolution.

You could have a revolution that ultimately fails, but it’s still called a revolution.

Dr. Pincus:
Well, it yes and no. A revolution has to I mean, look, I mean, we can debate this. But clearly the Russian Revolution in 1917, we talk about it as a revolution from the perspective of the 21st century.

While it changed, you know, fundamental institutions in Russian society, you know, some scholars have claimed, well, actually, Putin’s government looks a lot like a Russian empire that existed before the revolution. Right. But I still think it’s a Russian revolution because it changed.

It was a revolution because it changed the fundamental institutions of society, even if not for all time. Right. So so and, you know, revolutions do need to to change the fundamental institutions of society.

So they do need to have some modicum of success. Exactly. Permanence.

They need that permanence.

Adel:
Not chief permanence. That’s that’s the reason I ask, because for change, for that change, a fundamental change to occur to systems and societies, some level of success is needed. You know, before we started, I told you I’ve had other scholars to talk in a more limited sense about revolution.

And I’ve also studied revolutionism sort of in my own time, in my own right. What if I told you this, Dr. Pincus, that I think two common elements of a revolution is a growing middle class and a relative increase in freedom of expression. I know those sound like counterintuitive.

It almost sounds like the society is not desperate. But that’s what I’ve seen in many revolutions. Does that sound foreign to you?

Does it sound crazy to you?

Dr. Pincus:
Not crazy, but insufficient. So let me let me let me I mean, I have, you know, written a bunch about comparative revolutions. And my notion of what what the commonality of revolutions is that the old regime, the previous regime, I mean, I use the word old regime, but I don’t want to sort of limit it to thinking about, you know, 18th century France or something like that.

The previous government has to have come to a prior decision that they need that there needs to have state modernization. And usually the reason why the the the old regime had came to this conclusion is because of perceived perception that they’re falling behind their peers, either socially and economically economically or geopolitically. So perceptions of geopolitical weakness sometimes lead lead states to modernize perceptions of economic backwardness sometimes leads to perception by the people or the government, by the government, by the government, by the old by the state, the old state.

And they sort of announced a program, a program of state modernization. So I mean, just to give you give you a sense of this, right. I mean, before the French Revolution, Louis XVI decided that he needed to modernize the collection of the nature of the national debt in France.

And he hired, you know, had an innovative financiers and wanted the state, I mean, basically explicitly wanted to model the state on what he understood to be going on, what he thought a modern state was in Britain. You know, the before the Russian Revolution, right. I mean, the the czars abolished serfdom.

They called it Duma. They wanted to look much more like what they perceived to be the more modern states of Western Europe. I mean, there’s a sense in which one could say, I mean, you know, I’m something you’re probably much more familiar with than I am.

Right. In the Iranian Revolution. Right.

I mean, the Shah wanted to create a modern regime, a modern regime. And so the sort of commitment to modernization was is always a prerequisite to revolution. And that commitment to modernization happens, you know, as I said, because of perceptions of geopolitical backwardness, economic backwardness, social backwardness, for whatever reason, the state does that.

And the reason why that’s a prerequisite to revolution is because because it does two things. It’s structurally changed. It destabilizes society in structural ways and it destabilizes support for the regime in ideological ways.

So structurally modernizing the regime means extending the tendrils of the state into areas of society and culture and and the economy that it wasn’t involved in before. Right. So people have more contact with the state, the state than they ever had before.

So there’s a you know, people are forced to kind of confront the state and think about the state in ways that they didn’t necessarily before. Ideologically, because it cuts the ground from under conservatives. Right.

My own sense is, I mean, conservatives and here I mean this with a small c, not any relationship to any notion of what we might think of conservatism is a small c people who just like the way things that they are and don’t want change because what what the regime does by modernizing is it says, OK, the way things we’ve been doing these things for decades or centuries or millennia doesn’t work anymore. So it it it eliminates any kind of conservative space.

And then it sort of initiates a debate about, OK, the way things we’ve been doing things doesn’t doesn’t work. But that creates it. And then they offer an alternative.

This is the new way to do things. But that creates a huge amount of space for its critics to say, OK, we agree change needs to happen. The way you’re proposing change is bad and we’re going to offer an alternative model.

Adel:
This is fascinating. So here is the regime itself wanting to institute some reforms. And by doing that, it jolts society.

And equally important, it takes off a bunch of its supporters, conservatives with a small c that for have decades benefited culturally or even financially from the regime. Exactly. Oh, that is fascinating.

This is a fresh perspective. I haven’t heard that before. Um, so based on what you just shared with me, was the American Revolution 1775 or 1776, however you want to have the start date to 1783.

Was that a revolution or was that a war of independence, in your opinion? Yeah.

Dr. Pincus:
So so so I’m going to give I’m going to try to have my cake and eat it, too. I think it was a revolution, but only a revolution if one realizes that it’s part of it formed part of an imperial civil war in which the American aspect of it was the most successful. So let me let me sort of cash this out a little bit and explain what I mean.

Adel:
So I don’t have an imperial like a global imperial civil war. Yeah, OK, OK.

Dr. Pincus:
So let me cast this out for you. So after 17, 1763, so George III becomes king of of of England, Great Britain in 1760 in 1763. He played a well, a significant role in getting rid of what had been a very popular ministry that had fought the so-called Seven Years’ War, French and Indian War, the ministry run by, well, the Whig and Patriot, William Pitt the Elder in combination with the Duke, the Duke of Newcastle.

He replaces that with a new ministry, which scholars, some scholars are now calling a sort of a new Tory ministry. And basically from 1763 until the outbreak, you know, until 1775, until the Battle of Lexington and Concord. There were a succession of new Tory governments with one brief interlude between 1765 and 1766.

And that government decided that because of the sort of massive debt, which Britain, in part because of the massive debt which Britain had incurred in the in the French and Indian War, the Seven Years’ War, in part because of the rapid transformation of British society, it was sort of very quickly commercializing. It was becoming I mean, popular involvement in government had grown dramatically over the course of the of the period between 1688 and the 1760s. They wanted to develop a kind of they wanted to modernize and they use the word modern, modernize the nature of the British state.

So one of the things I mean, there were a whole bunch of things, a whole bunch of elements to this. One of these was to decrease the involvement everywhere of the people in politics. They argued that because of rapid commercialization, etc., the people in the British Empire in general had become licentious. That was their favorite term.

Adel:
Licentious.

Dr. Pincus:
Licentious was a big term. So that was that element. But there was also a kind of central political economic element to it.

Their argument was that Britain’s national debt had grown dramatically. The consequence of the national debt was social transformation, that the traditional landed classes were losing power in favor of a new commercial society, including people who were merchants, people involved in trade, people who were involved in stocks, in money in one way or another. And the manufacturing sector was becoming increasingly important.

Adel:
So this is like the nobility, the rich people with big states and lands that didn’t really work are all of a sudden losing to entrepreneurs and business people.

Dr. Pincus:
Yeah, I mean, yeah, I mean, it’s I mean, yes, I mean, if I said that to one of my colleagues in British history, they said, well, that’s a cartoon picture and it is a cartoon picture. But that’s broadly what what what was happening. But so what so so a series of of Tory governments adopted a policy saying, OK, how do we stop this from happening?

Well, the first thing we need to do is we need to lower the tax rates on the landed classes broadly in Britain. Now, how do we do that? Well, we have this, you know, global empire that we have.

So it’s important to realize that, you know, after 1763, after the end of the Seven Years War, the French and Indian War, whatever name you want to call it, Britain had not only the 13 colonies that we know of in North America. They had other colonies like Nova Scotia, Canada, but also colonies in the West Indies in the Atlantic world. But more importantly, or equally importantly, they also had massive new territories in the Indian subcontinent.

Right. There had always been there had been since the 17th century a British or an English and then British presence in in in South Asia. But it was only really in 1763.

Well, after 1757, because of victories in 1757. But in 1763, the Britain basically got control of the entirety of Bengal, which was, you know, I mean, where Calcutta is and was able to to sort of coordinate that with its holding in holdings in Madras, modern Chennai, and its holding in Bombay, modern Mumbai, and its holdings in Indonesia, as well as in Bengkulan. So for the first time in 1763, Britain had this territorial, massive territorial empire in South Asia.

Now, the idea of these kind of new Tories was to shift the tax burden from the English landed classes to the colonies, not just the North American colonies. In fact, the North American colonies turn out to pay to provide a relatively small amount of these new resources. So to give you an idea, at the height of British taxation of North America, I mean, there’s some dispute, people dispute the figures, but let’s say between 60 and 70 million pounds per year were coming in from North America at the height of or, you know, one year coming in from India was well over a million pounds.

Right. I mean, so we’re talking about orders of magnitude different, which is why we need to think about this globally. But the strategy of the Tories, of this kind of Tory regime, was to tax the colonies, lower the taxes on the English landed classes, and use the revenue coming in from the colonies to pay down the massive national debt, because they saw the growth of the national debt as leading to social transformation in Britain.

Adel:
So all of- Dr. Pincus, I just want to get the numbers, make sure I heard it correctly, and you shared it with us correctly. You said at the height of the receipt of tax from the American colonies, it would be 60 to 70 million pounds a year. And that’s a generous estimate.

That’s generous. And then you said you compared it to what they received from the subcontinent of India. What was that number?

Dr. Pincus:
So the estimates were that the subcontinent of India would generate 2.5 million pounds a year. They never actually generated that much, at least in the later 17th century, I mean, later 18th century. But it was of that scale, of that order of magnitude.

So which means that the American colonies were giving more taxes to the British. No, no, no, no, no. 60, sorry, sorry, I got the numbers, I got the numbers wrong there, right?

It’s on the order of 56 to 60,000 pounds per year.

Adel:
There you go.

Dr. Pincus:
There you go.

Adel:
That follows. 50 to 60,000 pounds from the American colonies, and that’s a generous estimate at the height versus anywhere from a million to two and a half million pounds from the subcontinent of India, meaning that the subcontinent of India was a much more profitable and precious colony for the British. Those numbers make sense to me.

I just want to make sure I’m following. I misspoke. Not a big deal at all, sir.

Go ahead. Let’s continue with this global perspective of the American Revolution.

Dr. Pincus:
So the governments that were in power were therefore wanting to transform the state, and they did. I mean, I should say, I mean, I didn’t talk about this because it actually doesn’t end up to being that significant in terms of revenue, but part of this program was also to make taxation more efficient, right? They had various ways of kind of professionalizing tax collectors, which came in in the 1760s as well, associated with Bramgill’s government, and to sort of grow the revenue-related forms of the state, which involved not only expanding the number of tax collectors, which absolutely happened, but also expanding the reach of courts that would enforce tax collection.

And in North America, it famously involves admiralty courts. In India, it involved creating the Supreme Court of Bengal. So these courts were there to sort of facilitate revenue collection.

Anyway, the bottom line is, between 1763 and 1775, there was a transformation of the imperial state, that the imperial state was now expanded and developed in a way that it had never been done before. Now, in an older literature associated with Charles McLean Andrews and a kind of older literature about the American Revolution, this point was made, but the argument was made that, oh, after 1760, what really happens is, for the first time, Britain develops an imperial state before there was something called salutary neglect. Now, that’s a myth.

There was a very powerful British imperial state, which we now know certainly developed dramatically from the 1680s onwards, especially after the Revolution of 1688. It’s just that that imperial state had a different set of priorities, or mostly a different set of priorities. And it used different means to sort of govern.

But what happened post-1760 was a transformation or modernization of the imperial state. So you can sort of see how this sort of fits the broader model of what I was talking about, that revolutions happen because states decide that they need to modernize. They need to transform, right?

And the sort of the litany of British repressive acts, which all American schoolchildren used to be taught in secondary school, that is, the passage of the Currency Act, the passage of the Sugar Act, the passage of the Stamp Act in 1765, the passage of the Townshend Duties, the Boston Port Act, the various of the Intolerable Acts, all of those form a subset of the kinds of legislation which the British imperial parliament was passing under the leadership of these kind of Tory governments, from George Grenville to Lord North, that they were trying to transform and modernize the British imperial state. But they did the same thing in India, right? I mean, so in India, in 1773, I mean, 1773, a date which doesn’t figure largely in American history, but it’s absolutely essential, they passed the Regulating Act for India.

And what the Regulating Act for India was to create a single governor general to govern over all of British India. So you can sort of think that as kind of the equivalent of the appointment of General Gage in North America, who had both, you know, who had military and administrative control. They created a new council and a new Supreme Court in India, which was meant to enforce the collection of revenue.

All of this was driven to sort of maximize the collection of revenue in India. And the new governor general, by the name of Warren Hastings, sought to pursue and expand revenue in India. In the event, he got involved in a whole bunch of wars, which we could or could not talk about later.

But my point is not, is just to say that it’s important to realize that what was going on in North America was part of a global imperial strategy to modernize the imperial state. And there were parallels. So what happened in North America had parallels of what was going on in South Asia.

And it also had parallels. I mean, the Stamp Act, for example, which was passed, and we know about the Stamp Act revolts in North America, Stamp Act also applied to the West Indian colonies.

Adel:
Yeah. You know, what’s really fascinating, you mentioned secondary school, when we went to middle school and high school, what we learned as far as taxation, one of the reasons, or let me rephrase that, Dr. Pincus, the reason that we learned, the reason was that the British increased taxes so that the American colonies would pay for the money the British spent on fighting the Seven Years’ War, which I think is called the French and Indian War.

Yeah. But in your explanation, this is a bigger thing. You started with sort of the landed aristocracy, modernization.

So you’re not saying that an attempt to make the American colonies pay for the war debt is not part of the story. It’s part of the story, but the picture is just a wider lens.

Dr. Pincus:
That’s exactly right. And so that’s one of the central claims that I want to make. The second claim, and I think it’s really important, is that strategy, that strategy which involved taxation without representation, to use the sort of, also involved a particular vision of political economy, right?

So the argument that these guys who were in power in the 1760s and 1770s made was that, look, the value of colonies is the revenue that they’re able to generate and transport home. That revenue in turn was based on the product of the land. That is to say, I mean, you sort of think about it, what was generating the revenue?

What was allowing them possibly to pay taxes? Well, it was growing tobacco in the middle colonies, growing rice in South Carolina, growing sugar in the West Indies. And so the value was based on, so you needed territory and land to create value.

Britain, being a small island, doesn’t have a lot of land and territory, so Britain needs to have an empire to generate that revenue through landed production, right? That was the model that sort of underwrote the thinking of people like George Grenville, who was prime minister, Lord North, who was prime minister, and many other people who were sort of their political allies. I mean, I’m people who wrote sophisticated political economic texts defending this position.

Now, their critics argued that, no, that’s a completely misguided notion of political economy. Actually, what generates wealth is labor, is human endeavor, either intellectual labor or work. And what makes colonies particularly valuable in an age of protectionism, right?

And one has to realize that we’re living in a world where the French have tariff barriers, the Spanish won’t allow Britain to export anything directly to the Spanish-American colonies. In a world of tariff barriers, what makes colonies extremely valuable is not what they produce from the land, but the fact that colonies involve a dynamic set of consumers, right, consumers of British manufactured goods, right? And this was especially true in North America, where Benjamin Franklin said the population was doubling every 20 years.

They’re very dynamic. And why is that certainly important? Because England, or Britain in general, is manufacturing all sorts of things, like textiles.

I mean, there’s a huge increase in the production of textiles. There’s production of metal goods, nails, et cetera, from places like Birmingham, swords and other.

Adel:
So we would send them raw materials and they would ship back highly valued products and they’re making money off of it.

Dr. Pincus:
Exactly, right, right. So individuals are making money, but from the perspective of the state, right, the argument of the critics of these stories was, you don’t want to tax these people directly. You don’t want to have stamp taxes.

You don’t want to have currency acts. You don’t want to have sugar acts. What you want to do is tax them indirectly through customs.

In other words, that people will pay, you know, there’ll be a little bit of money that they’ll pay for every time they buy, you know, a suit of clothing, right, because there’s virtually no manufacturing of clothing in North America. They’re importing it all from, you know, Lancashire. Every time they buy that, they spend a little increment, a little increment of their tax.

So they’re being taxed indirectly rather than directly. So it’s not decreasing their buying power. And this was the argument.

So this is the argument made over and over again by the so-called patriots. And this was, you know, patriots are not people who lived in North America, who took up arms against the regime. Patriots was a political party that spanned the entire, patriotism was a political party that spanned the empire.

So there are patriots in Ireland, there are patriots in England, there are patriots in India. They argued that it was colonial consumption which made the empire valuable. So they had a completely different vision of political economy and central to their notion, right, if it’s consumers that matter.

First of all, you don’t want any tariff barriers. You don’t want any prohibitions of trade. You want to be able to trade widely.

And they also wanted to be able to export goods.

Adel:
Also trade with other empires like the Spanish empire and the French. Oh, wow.

Dr. Pincus:
So they were kind of globalists in that. That’s absolutely right. They wanted free movement of people, right, because, you know, they wanted colonial consumers to be, I mean, they wanted consumption in the colonies to be dynamic.

So, you know, there are two ways you can make that dynamic. One is to make them richer and the other is to have more of them, right? I mean, so they wanted to increase the population of colonies.

They didn’t want any restrictions on migration. So it’s a, you know, a fairly, you know, raw vision. And they also wanted more popular participation in government.

Why? Because they thought that people were likely to, in part, that people were likely to consume more if they were able to express their preferences, their political and social preferences in representative assemblies.

Adel:
Can I ask three follow-up questions, doctor? Absolutely. Okay.

I’m a little hesitant to ask this question because it may just turn out to be a big question. In the political economy that you just discussed, this last point, do Adam Smith, a name that we’re familiar with, and Edmund Burke, do they play a role in all these discussions? Because I know Edmund Burke wrote a lot against taxing and repressing the American colonists and then, of course, Adam Smith, the wealth of nations.

Yeah, yeah.

Dr. Pincus:
So, yes, yes. I mean, so let me talk, they take, so both Adam Smith and Edmund Burke were very critical of the policies of the Tory government, right? I mean, it’s not.

Adel:
They were, huh? Okay.

Dr. Pincus:
And it’s not a coincidence that Adam Smith published the wealth of nations in 1776, right? That’s not a coincidence, right? I mean, you know, he was very critical in the section on colonies in the wealth of nations of the way Britain was governing the empire.

I mean, he’s also extremely critical of the way they’re governing India, right? I mean, he’s very critical of the East India Company. So Smith absolutely, I mean, he was on board with most of this radical critique.

In fact, we know for a long time he was a regular correspondent of the Earl of Shelburne, I mean, from the 1760s, who was one, who was, you know, an outspoken critic of these sort of various forms of Tory government and who eventually becomes prime minister right before the end. I mean, he’s the one who concedes American independence in 1782-83, right? So we know that Smith is very closely associated with these people.

Burke was as well. He, so he went so far and no farther with this critique. So he was very critical of the policies pursued by the Tory government.

He wrote famously, you know, famously spoke against this. One of the things which he didn’t fully agree with, so one of the arguments of those who were in favor of colonial consumption, they had a broader critique of social inequality, so they argued, look, the way you create a prosperous society is by the dynamic interplay between consumers and producers, right? You know, you want to have a, you know, a manufacturing base, but you need to have dynamic consumers.

You need to have markets to sell these goods. And if the consumer base is growing, right, you’re going to be able to produce more manufactured goods, right? And that’s going to lead to sort of unlimited growth, right?

Um, and these guys therefore said, you want more and more people to be consumers. You don’t want people living in poverty. Social and social inequality is bad for this dynamic because obviously if you’re starving, you’re not going to be buying a new set of clothes every once in a while, right?

So they had a kind of profound critique about social inequality and they thought that, you know, and this was sort of central to some of these people like Charles James Fox was constantly critical, criticizing, I mean, even though he came from a, you know, aristocratic family, he was always criticizing social inequality. Burke, however, unlike somebody like Fox thought that social inequality was kind of natural. Um, and so he didn’t, and so he didn’t, um, he didn’t, he wouldn’t go that far.

He didn’t think that the state should be involved, uh, um, in getting in an active way and getting people out of poverty. But he shared with Adam Smith and all of these kind of patriots, the critique of, you know, trying to, you know, squeeze the colonies to, uh, to pay down the, the, the British national debt. That was a horrible idea.

And he was very outspoken about that. Got it.

Adel:
Um, I said three questions. So the second question is really not a question. It’s more like a confirmation.

You know how you told us how that this modernization grand modernization of the British empire global span of that modernization guys, news alert. It wasn’t just for the 13 colonies. They were doing similar things, taxation and everything in India and the Indian subcontinent.

And I just wanted to point out, um, sort of for your confirmation. I know this could be like two podcasts on its own. There were revolts happening, major reports in India and Cornwallis ends up actually going there after Hastings to try to put it out.

I mean, it’s not like Indian said, Oh, great. Like, you know, we accept all of this.

Dr. Pincus:
No, no, absolutely. There was so, so in fact the period, I mean, right. I mean, that’s, I mean, I’m glad you sort of brought this up.

Right. I mean, the period when Hastings is governor general, Britain gets involved in, well, three major military conflicts in India have as a result of, as a result of these policies. Um, uh, one, which I won’t say very much about was sort of known as the Rahila war.

Um, uh, the second was a war against the Marathas in, in largely in the, in the West of India. So who were the Marathas? The Marathas are kind of a Confederacy of, of, you know, of Hindu, uh, largely Hindu, uh, um, uh, princes and leaders very heavily militarized.

And for various reasons, uh, Hastings was sort of taking, trying to seize control of parts, parts of their territory to generate more revenue for, for the British state. Um, uh, and, and more importantly, and there’s a, and, and Britain is a result of this suffers its first kind of major military defeat, uh, in India, uh, in, in 1778 in, in fighting the Marathas. Um, but far more important, uh, far more significant for, for the American story anyway, is, um, Britain gets involved, uh, in fighting Haider Ali, who was, uh, uh, a Mysore prince of Mysore, um, and, uh, in the South, in the, uh, in, in the Carnatic.

Um, and, uh, uh, Haider Ali, uh, basically created a multi-confessional Confederacy. So Haider Ali is himself a Muslim, uh, a Muslim prince, uh, but he creates a sort of multi-confessional Confederacy, um, uh, to combat the British on the grounds that, look, it’s clear that, that Britain is just going to try to seize more and more Indian territory to try to pay. I mean, he didn’t understand.

I mean, he did ultimately, we think he did understand that the motivation of this was, was fiscal. Um, um, but in any event, he creates this multi-confessional Confederacy. He himself was a very successful military leader.

He was actually possibly trained initially, uh, by, by the British, certainly by the French. Uh, but he also, I mean, he was just a sort of very charismatic and, and, and brilliant military leader, even though he was probably illiterate. Um, he, um, uh, he creates this kind of Confederacy, um, and in 1780, um, he leads this very successful military campaign, uh, uh, in the Carnatic, um, which, uh, and, and his army gets within, you know, a few miles of, of the walls of Madras, of, of Chennai, which is, you know, one of the three, uh, biggest, uh, well, most important, uh, uh, uh, British centers in India.

Um, and he absolutely, uh, demolishes a British army, uh, at the battle of Palalur, um, in, in September, 1780. Now, why is this so important? Yeah.

Why is that so important? Yeah. Yeah.

So the reason why it’s so important is because… I mean, it’s important to the American Revolution story. Yeah, yeah, no, no, no.

Yeah, yeah.

Adel:
But that’s what I want to do is to explain why. Yeah, exactly.

Dr. Pincus:
So this happens in September, 1780. Immediately, all over India, uh, British administrators, et cetera, are panicked. They think that the British empire in India is about to disintegrate.

It’s about to, in the face of, you know, this Confederate alliance in the Carnatic, the power of the Marathas, uh, in the West, uh, West of India, and, you know, discontent, uh, within Bengal. And they write these letters back to Britain describing the scale of the defeat. I mean, the scale of the defeat, it’s of an order of magnitude bigger than the surrender of Cornwallis at Yorktown in the following year, right?

And Lord North gets the news, well, Lord North and the government gets the news, and they immediately say, okay, this is a disaster. We need to save India. Remember, the revenue in India is massive, right?

Adel:
It’s orders of magnitude more than America.

Dr. Pincus:
So immediately he sends half of the fleet, uh, the British fleet, which was stationed in the Atlantic to the Indian Ocean, right? So he diverts half of the fleet, uh, from the Indian Ocean and he takes 8,000 men, uh, 8,000 troops who were being trained in Ireland to go to North America. And instead of sending them to North America, he sends them to India, uh, to defend, uh, to defend Madras.

Uh.

Adel:
Talk about bad timing of Haider Ali for the British, right?

Dr. Pincus:
No, exactly. So, so it’s- Fascinating. So, I mean, so the immediate and the necessary prelude to the French and American defeat of, uh, the British at Yorktown was the victory at sea by the French Navy over the British Navy, uh, uh, led, uh, the French Navy led by the Conte Casse in, on the Atlantic seaboard.

And the reason why they gained the victory is that they had numerical superiority, right? And why did they have numerical superiority? Because half of the fleet was in the Indian Ocean.

Adel:
And, and I think, uh, just to set the record, the French were also involved in helping Haider Ali to some extent. I don’t know for how long.

Dr. Pincus:
That’s right.

Adel:
That’s right.

Dr. Pincus:
Yeah. That’s right. I mean, so, so, I mean, so, uh, I mean, I haven’t sort of completely pieced this out.

I mean, certainly the British were, were very worried that Haider Ali was going to lead, allow the French to sort of re recapture their position in India, which they’d lost in the seven years war. Um, um, uh, it strikes me that, um, that this was true. And there’s no question that the French were involved in supporting, uh, uh, and supporting Haider Ali.

And it’s also true that we know from, uh, from recent work on the French in India, um, that the French absolutely thought that, that the victory of, uh, uh, Polylure by Haider Ali would allow for the, for the French to regain their position. Um, so, so this is, I mean, absolutely the French that there’s a sort of real chance of French, the French regaining their position in, uh, in, in South Asia as a result of this.

Adel:
The more, the more you and I talk, the more global the story of the American revolution becomes here. Um, so the third question I had about what you had said is this, you said the patriots, not the American patriots, the British patriots, the sort of imperial patriots, um, they were globalists, uh, they wanted to see, have a dynamic, uh, society within the empire in many different ways. And one of the things you said that really, um, surprised me is that they wanted more popular participation in government.

Yeah. Now, how would that work if the 13 colonies actually elected their own members of parliament back home in Britain? If they actually started war, that would wash out almost different.

I mean, not immediately, but over time, wash out the vote of the English and the Scots and the Welsh. Yeah. Yeah.

Dr. Pincus:
That was like a suicide. Yeah. Yeah.

So, right. I mean, so there are two, uh, uh, so here, here, it’s sort of interesting to think about Adam Smith, um, but also think about other, other ways of thinking about it. So Adam Smith, what he says in the wealth of nation is, well, logically over time, because of this notion that there should be political participation, the imperial parliament will inevitably move from London to somewhere in North America, right?

Because of the growth dynamic that this will happen over time. So Adam Smith says this in the wealth of nations. Oh, he predicted that?

That’s what he predicted. Yes. Oh, wow.

Um, um, but, but, um, I don’t think that would, would have actually happened. And the reason why I don’t think it’s the actual, the actual plan that most of these patriots had was not, uh, not to sort of shift the capital of the empire, not to have, you know, Americans and West Indians vote for members of the imperial parliament, but to have a much more confederal empire. That the idea would be, I mean, so, so the plan, the plan was to sort of imagine the empire as a big confederation, um, uh, where, um, you know, you have, uh, you know, people just as they already were elected, you know, people in New York electing members of their own local assembly.

And that then for each of these sort of colonial governments would send a member to some kind of imperial council, um, um, uh, uh, uh, that would govern the empire. So that there would be what, what it would, what it would mean is that the parliament in Westminster, would it be a parliament that just governed Britain? That is to say England, Scotland, and Wales.

Um, uh, um, but that it wouldn’t have, couldn’t legislate for the empire as a whole. There would be this kind of confederal council, um, that would legislate for the empire as a whole. And, uh, uh, and so this, I mean, it turns out that we know from, you know, that actually a bunch of people in North America and in Ireland, uh, uh, the West Indies and even India thought this was a particularly good idea because they were worried that if they, if they just get, if, if the British just gave say people in Massachusetts, the right to elect a representative to the imperial parliament that, uh, in Westminster that, you members from Massachusetts would show up in Westminster and they would be vastly outnumbered by, you know, the, the, you know, the 13 people sitting in parliament from, uh, uh, from the County of Somerset. Right. I mean, so that wouldn’t work.

Um, but this idea of a Confederate empire, uh, was, um, was well discussed by, uh, by these Patriots. Now you might say this sounds kind of pie in the sky, um, uh, but we know that this was actually being discussed, um, before the outbreak of the seven years war that there were problems that, that the British government itself was discussing some sort of notion of creating a Confederate empire during the war. It went all into abeyance, but these ideas reemerged, um, uh, uh, in, in the face of, of what ended up happening in Ireland.

Well, you know, most, most Americans don’t know that at the same time as the American revolution, there was a massive amount of discontent in Ireland. And in, uh, 1778, over a hundred thousand people took up arms in Ireland complaining about, uh, surprise, surprise, uh, unjust British taxation of the, of, of Irish, of the Irish. Right.

Um, and this group was called the sort of volunteer movement. Uh, and a bunch of these people, um, uh, so the volunteers, so as I said, they sort of become powerful in 1778, um, in 17 by 1780, uh, they force, uh, Lord North to concede, uh, commercial autonomy, uh, to Ireland. Uh, they also eventually get, uh, uh, agreement that, uh, uh, uh, of judicial autonomy to Ireland.

So before, uh, before, uh, 17, uh, before, uh, the 17 days before 1782, um, it was possible if you didn’t like the outcome of a, of a court proceeding in Ireland, you could appeal it to, uh, the court of King’s bench in England or, uh, uh, right. Which meant that, you know, cases, Irish cases were being decided by English judges, uh, and English, English juries, which of course offended some level of, I mean, you know, uh, Irish, uh, uh, sensibility. And there was also lack of legislative autonomy.

So Ireland, Ireland had its own parliament, um, um, just like, you know, New York had its own assembly or Jamaica had its own assembly. Um, and they had, you know, local elections, but up until this period, um, um, legislation had to be approved by the British prime minister before it could be put, uh, well by the ministry, not necessarily by the prime minister itself, before it could be sort of, uh, a bill could be put to the Irish parliament. Right.

So that comes to an end during this period. Um, and the reason why these confessions, so these concessions are sort of made, um, and it’s important that the sort of key concessions were made after the Tory government falls. Right.

I mean, they sort of agreed to this, uh, in the moment called the, uh, Henry Grattan’s parliament because Henry Grattan was the most important of the Irish patriots in, in the Irish parliament at the time. So in 1782, after Lord Norris government fall, all of these things, judicial independence, uh, uh, uh, commercial autonomy, judicial independence are sort of conceded, uh, uh, conceded to Ireland, but then became this question, right? So there’s still an, you know, uh, a British viceroy in Ireland or Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, and the question then became that was raised by the then, uh, Lord Lieutenant of Ireland.

It said, okay, fine. So we have all of these things in Ireland, the Duke of Portland who said this, he said, okay, but we need to sort of realize we’re going to have all this. How, how are we going to judge if, if, if Ireland says, um, you know, we’re going to prohibit the importation of manufactured goods from Lancashire, right?

The British parliament isn’t going to like that. How do we resolve these disputes? Um, and he said, well, the only way to do this is to create some kind of imperial council.

So he was writing rules for the creation of the, of this imperial council in correspondence with the then, uh, prime minister, the Marquess of Rockingham. So after, after Lord Norris government falls, you get a patriot prime minister, uh, the Marquess of Rockingham. Now, unfortunately through all of this on, so, uh, Rockingham becomes prime minister in March of 1782, on July 1st, 1782, he died of the flu.

Um, so the government, the government falls, um, but we know that there were serious conversations as a result of what was going on in Ireland to re-imagine or re-create an imperial constitution that was going to be confederal. That would have been interesting.

Adel:
Really, really fascinating. Um, let’s take a break here. Stay with me as Dr. and stay with me and Dr. Pincus as we get into the perspective. So Dr. Pincus, um, in the last segment, we discussed the global nature of the American revolution and you shared this fascinating development, uh, in the British empire, the whole idea of a sort of a confederal empire, if you will. Um, I want to take us back again to the more sort of narrow and immediate discussion of the American revolution. In the last segment, I asked you whether or not the American revolution was really a revolution and then, uh, or was it a war of independence and you went to explain the global aspect.

This is a reason why I asked that specific question. I want to share because I think it’s, it’s interesting for this conversation. Revolutions based on what you shared with us, change systems, change societies, um, change institutions.

And to a great extent, the American revolution did that. So for all intents and purposes, it is a revolution. I’ve never thought otherwise.

The only reason that sometimes I think about this is this, the elite of the American colonies stayed on. They continued to be part of what occurred later in most revolutions that I have read the elite of the previous establishment slash regime are gone toppled. Most of them anyway, is that, have you, is that something that resonates with sort of your scholarship?

Dr. Pincus:
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, so I think, I think what’s, I mean, so, so there’s a couple of things.

One is that, um, despite the rhetoric in most revolutions, um, what really happens is that the elite splits, right? Um, in most revolutions, some of the elite, you know, uh, become revolutionaries and they make allies with other people, maybe who were not members of the elite. Um, um, uh, but, but the elite splits, right?

And so, so, so to think about this, I mean, if you look, if you think about sort of the French revolution, sort of, uh, uh, uh, narrowly conceived people sitting in the French national assembly in 1792, the majority of these people would have, would have fit the description of being members of the French elite in the 70s. Right. Yeah.

Now, admittedly, and I think it’s really important that there were a whole bunch of people who were prescribed, uh, people who were called royalists. Right. So that, and they, they were also elite.

Right. So what actually happens is that the elite splits, um, right. And, and, you know, and half of the elite are ruled, you know, out of, you know, they’re deprived in many cases, deprived of their estates, deprived of their property, in some cases deprived of their lives.

Right. Um, um, and that’s basically what happened in the American case. There were these groups of, there were American elites who we, we, you know, history has called loyalists.

Right. But they were people who were very important in the American colonies, um, uh, before the revolution. And they’re no longer, you know, they’re no longer, I mean, their place in American society, with a few exceptions, I mean, some of them creep back in, but most of them are gone.

Right. I mean, most of them migrate to Britain, migrate to Canada, migrate to the West Indies. Some of them migrate to India.

Um, so, so in the American revolution, like in most revolutions, the elite split. And of course I, I will be the first to say, um, that, uh, that the, the elite, the revolutionary elite, you know, bring along with them other people who were not necessarily part of the elite before. But that I think is what happens in all revolutions.

Right. Yeah. Yeah.

So, so I think, I mean, so the rhetoric, the revolutionaries frequently have a rhetoric about totally cleaning house, um, and that there are new people coming into power, but we can think, I mean, even, I mean, the Cuban revolution, which I think more than other revolutions got rid of, you know, a huge, uh, elite. Right. But it’s important to realize that Fidel Castro himself came from a, you know, he came from a middle-class family.

Right. I mean, he was, you know, he came from, uh, uh, you know, came from a family, you know, which involves, uh, highly educated people. Um, right.

I mean, so, you know, who completely, you know, completely rejected the political economic and social policies of Batista, but, but nevertheless, he wasn’t, you know, he was a member, I mean, by some, most measures, he was a member of the Cuban elite before the revolution.

Adel:
Yeah. Yeah. That’s interesting.

You’re right. Um, um, the American loyalists were part of the elite that, uh, essentially were kicked out, even though some eventually do come back. Um, here’s another question.

How do I ask it? So I don’t come across as being too simplistic or, uh, it’s this, do you think some revolutions or some of the important revolutions that, you know, perhaps even the American revolution are eventually betrayed? So for example, let me, let me, if I may just share my thoughts on the American revolution, I don’t mean betrayed as in a bad thing happens at the end, but, uh, like Patrick Henry, he ends up not signing the constitution.

You see what I mean? This is not what we wanted. I don’t mean betray in a, uh, sort of terrible, evil way, uh, or, you know, people that coalesce for the immediate purpose of a revolution after the revolution have other ideas.

They want their own idea to flourish. And all of a sudden you have this sort of wide spectrum that needs to be implemented. And by design it cannot.

Dr. Pincus:
Yeah. So, right. No, no, no.

I think that’s absolutely right. And, and, and I think the explanation for that is, comes back to my sort of theory about why revolutions begin. So what, what happens is you get a modernizing state and it leads to a coalescence of a whole bunch of people saying, okay, we agree we need modernization, but not that way.

Right. So, so all, so the initial coalescence of the revolutionaries is simply around a negative program, right? Not that way of modernizing.

Um, and so frequently what ends up happening, I mean, most revolutionaries are, you know, I mean, revolutionaries, it strikes me are almost invariably very ideologically committed people, right? And they’re putting their lives on the line. They’ve got to be committed to set of principles.

Um, but, uh, but they don’t always agree on the exact same set of principles, right? They agree that the government, which they’re in the process of overthrowing is bad and something else needs to be put in place. But then when it comes to actually forming the post-revolutionary regime, then a lot of differences emerge, right?

We don’t want that one, but we don’t know what we want going forward yet. Exactly. Yeah.

Or different groups want different things. As a whole, we don’t know what we want yet. So I think that’s why inevitably you, we end, you end up seeing it, I think in all revolutions, um, a kind of split, uh, you know, differences, disagreements, and some people who took up arms at the beginning of the revolution, you know, become opposed to the new regime.

Adel:
Interesting. Um, based on what you just said.

Dr. Pincus:
And just to give you kind of the crudest, I mean, the sort of most, you know, well-known example of this, right? I mean, in the French revolution, right? The revolutionary split between the Girondins and the Jacobins, right?

I mean, the people who want, some people, I mean, I, you know, I’m not, I’m not a French historian and I’m not going to take, I mean, I went to school in France, but I’m not a French historian. Uh, uh, uh, you know, I don’t, you know, but, but, uh, you know, I’m not here to decide whether the Girondins program or the Jacobin program was a better program or not. All I know is that they disagreed fundamentally on what the state should look like, right?

And they split, right? But they all agreed that, that Louis XVI’s regime, or at least the regime that he was, you know, uh, running in, in 17, uh, you know, in, in 1788, 1789 was a bad government. That modernization program was a bad program.

So, so that’s just a sort of, you know, extremely well-known example of the revolutionary splitting.

Adel:
Based on what, I’m going to ask a hard question now, Dr. Pincus. Based on what you just explained, do you think the American revolution succeeded in the aspect that, in a very, very, this is a very specific question that like, had you talked to them on July 2nd, 1776, that’s when they voted for, for, for the declaration of independence, July 2nd, 1776. Had you talked to them and showed them, this is the constitution in 1789, would they say that’s a success?

Did that, did that, did that, did they see this path?

Dr. Pincus:
Yeah. So look, I mean, my view is that some, some would have, and some wouldn’t, right? That, you know, I think John Adams, you know, one of the committee of five who wrote the, who wrote the declaration of independence, I would have thought he would have said, you know, this is, this constitution is a really good idea, right?

And, you know, and we know, we know that, you know, a number, I mean, the people who wrote the Federalist believe that they were, that there was a huge consistency that you could draw a line from, from the declaration to the constitution and thought it was a good thing.

Adel:
Consistency.

Dr. Pincus:
Yeah. That there was a consistent line. I mean, obviously, you know, and, you know, and Abraham Lincoln, you know, absolutely insisted that America’s first constitutional document, the document that he felt most committed to was the declaration of independence, right?

I mean, so, so, so we know that there were a lot of people who absolutely believe that. Now we also know that there were a number of people who supported the declaration of independence who felt that, you know, the constitution had created too much of a centralized state.

Adel:
Yeah.

Dr. Pincus:
Strong of a state. And, you know, so those lines, I mean, those divisions, but I think those divisions were already there. You know, we know that these debates emerged even over the articles of confederation, right?

Even over the articles of confederation, which obviously, you know, George Washington claim was an imbecilic document later on, right?

Adel:
And as a result, the 13 states were very weak.

Dr. Pincus:
Yeah, exactly.

Adel:
They couldn’t even put that, put out the Shays’ Rebellion.

Dr. Pincus:
No, no, no, absolutely. But even then, right, one of the, one of the members of the second continental Congress from, from, from North Carolina said, oh, this is a disastrous document. It’s created too strong of a central state.

Oh, you’re kidding. Wow. So we know, so, so these divisions were already there, but that just, I mean, so in other in 1775, in July of 1776, that the British imperial government needed, they needed to get rid of it.

They needed to overthrow it. They could all agree, or at least they would, they agreed to sign the Declaration of Independence. They certainly thought it was, thought it was a good thing.

They thought the complaints about what George III had done, they could sort of largely agree upon, but they didn’t necessarily agree about what the positive government, what the nature of the Republic that they were going to create was going to look like.

Adel:
I’m, I’m very surprised that some, some people such as in North Carolina thought that the Articles of Confederacy were just too strong.

Dr. Pincus:
I mean, it’s, it’s, it’s remarkable.

Adel:
I mean, but it is remarkable. If you wanted our audience to remember just one point about the American Revolution, just one point, what would that be, Dr. Pincus?

Dr. Pincus:
Yeah, it was, I mean, it’s a sort of, the point is, is that it was part of a moment of a global moment of imperial crisis, and that the American patriots wanted to create a government in favor of, and you said, you used the word sort of globalization, but a government that was in favor of, you know, freer trade, freer migration, and more popular involvement in politics, just like the people in Ireland did, just like some of the people in India did, that this was part of a global, global movement.

Adel:
That’s wonderful. Dr. Pincus, thank you so much for educating me and our audience about the American Revolution, and to our audience, if you know of any history that could provide more perspective about the American Revolution, please share it with us and tell us what’s your perspective. Thank you so very much, Dr. Pincus. Oh, thank you, it’s a pleasure chatting with you. Same here.