Scottish historical discourse and arguments for metropolitan authority in the eighteenth-century British Atlantic Empire

This dissertation demonstrates the importance of major Scottish considerations of societal development and political economy for the course of imperial conceptions in the eighteenth century. A prominent Scottish contribution to the colonial-metropolitan debate over the governance of the British Atlantic Empire advocated centralized authority based upon the security of stable government in the metropole as the key guarantor of freedom and opportunity for all subjects of the empire. This stance was articulated through detailed consideration of the historical development of metropolitan and colonial societies shaped by the techniques and concerns of the Scottish Enlightenment. Appreciation of this sophisticated historically framed discourse deployed by Scottish proponents of metropolitan sovereignty and authority in the colonies enriches our understanding of the clash of perspectives that eventually produced the American Revolution and thus shaped the course of empire and the major political, economic, and cultural influence of Britain, particularly in North America.; Engagement with Scottish Enlightenment preoccupations and modes of analysis is especially evident in the arguments in defense of British governance made by influential Scottish authors in the decades before, during, and after the American Revolution. These commentators echoed the embrace of commercial modernity as the foundation of a superior modern liberty by leading Scottish thinkers such as David Hume and Adam Smith. Unlike Smith and Hume, however, they emphasized that public credit and the revenue-extracting and war-fighting apparatus of the modern state was crucial to government and thus to the freedom of the population at large due to the inevitable clashes produced by a competitive international state system. They sought to review the lessons of early modern British unification, the integration of Scotland and England in particular, imperial development, and the recent histories of other leading nations in order to rebut the critique of the fiscal-military state, of which Great Britain was the especially threatening embodiment to radicals on both sides of the Atlantic. Attention to this Scottish analysis of the complex and contested processes of state-formation and imperial development contributes to the linking of early American and early modern British historiography in exploring the opportunities and tensions of the Atlantic world.