Edmund Burke, the Imperatives of Empire and the American Revolution

Edmund Burke, the Imperatives of Empire and the American Revolution: An Interpretation His Thoughts on the Present Discontents, his writing and speeches on the conciliation of America, form the main and lasting armory of Liberal opinion throughout the Englishspeaking world. His Letters on a Regicide Peace and Reflections on the French Revolution, will continue to furnish Conservatives for all time with the most formidable array of opposing weapons. Winston Churchill, 1927. When any community is subordinately connected with another, the great danger of the connection is the extreme pride and self-complacency of the superior, which in all matters of controversy will probably decide in its own favor. It is a powerful corrective to such a very rational cause of fear, if the inferior body can be made to believe, that the party inclination or political views of several in the principal state, will induce them in some degree to counteract this blind and tyrannic partiality. There is no danger that anyone acquiring consideration or power in the presiding state should carry this leaning to the inferior too far. The fault of human nature is not of that sort. Power in whatever hands is rarely guilty of too strict limitations on itself. Edmund Burke, 1777. Governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. Thomas Jefferson 1776. EDMUND BURKE, THE IMPERATIVES OF EMPIRE AND THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION: AN INTERPRETATION Edited and Introduced By H.G. Callaway CONTENTS PREFACE …………………………………………………………….. ix INTRODUCTION: EDMUND BURKE, THE WHIG ASCENDANCY AND THE FATE OF EMPIRE ……………………………………….… xiii Edmund Burke THOUGHTS ON THE CAUSE OF THE PRESENT DISCONTENTS ……....… 1 SPEECH ON AMERICAN TAXATION ……………………………….… 85 SPEECH ON CONCILIATION WITH THE COLONIES ………………….. 143 LETTER TO THE SHERIFFS OF BRISTOL ON AMERICAN AFFAIRS …. . 211 Thomas Jefferson A SUMMARY VIEW OF THE RIGHTS OF BRITISH AMERICA …….…. 255 CHRONOLOGY : BURKE, AMERICA THE TIMES …………….…….... 275 BIBLIOGRAPHY …………………………………………………..... 283 INDEX ………………………………………………………………297 PREFACE This book is a focused study on the thought of Edmund Burke, the fate of commercial-military empire, the Whig ascendancy and the formative period of the modern Anglo-American world. Four classical texts from Burke, closely related to the American crisis of the late eighteenth century are included in the present volume: “Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents;” Burke’s “Speech on American Taxation;” his 1774 “Speech on Conciliation with the Colonies” and his “Letter to the Sheriffs of Bristol on American Affairs” which was written during the American War of Independence. The present texts are based on original printings. Useful contrast is provided by the inclusion of Thomas Jefferson’s 1774 pamphlet, “A Summary View of the Rights of British America.” The aim of the study is to understand the origin of the historical division of the Anglo-American world in terms of its own specific historical context and the dominant philosophical and political ideas and ideals of those times. Liberty and the development of America came to war with empire. Contrasting the quasi-rationalism of Jefferson’s universalist, enlightenment ideals with Burke’s political values and stance, one may also glimpse something of the more conservative, reformist character of the American “Whig” patriots who often became the Federalists of the early republic. The American founding chiefly lacked for European Tory values, since establishment aristocrats had little reason to leave old Europe. The British loyalists were chiefly driven out of the country by the American Revolution. Partly in consequence, American conservatives have emphasized national independence, the revolutionary commitment to liberty, the specifics of American history and the need of sufficient federal uniformity to facilitate changing, economic organization of so large a country. They have aimed for a large degree of freedom of action and enterprise, within religious organizations, in business and within institutions of civil society generally—wanting liberty, to prevent fuller national political consolidation on the model of the x Preface ethnically defined European nation-state. However, this “Whig” and reformist tradition stands in perpetual tension with the recent American embrace of our large-scale military establishment and the tendency toward national consolidation via the national and international financial and corporate system. Whether Edmund Burke will count as an appropriate “father” of contemporary American conservatism, largely turns on attitudes toward its own internal tensions.1 The value of the present historical reading is partly that it provides a philosophical lens contributing to our understanding of the tensions and conflicts of our contemporary, globalizing world and the role of commercial-military configurations within it. To invoke a well known phrase of Jefferson’s, the problem is the paradoxes of an “empire of liberty.” “Imperial over-reach” may threaten liberty both at home and abroad; and this is an effective constraint on the rationalistic tendency of any overall plan of global political and economic organization. Yet, lacking an overall plan or system of organization, how can large-scale politics and globalization be reasonably conducted? This problem is distantly mirrored in Burke’s thought and in Jefferson’s as well. The preservation of liberty and democracy are reasonable conditions on the scope, expansion and depth of interrelation of “empire,” or any similar, continental or globe-straddling political and economic system. Liberty, and national or local self-determination, i.e., our various particularisms, threaten globalization, just as rationalistic, uniformity of globalization, and large-scale militarization at home and abroad, represent a genuine threat to liberty and democracy. In the contemporary context, we will need to ask again about the meaning of “the consent of the governed” in the face of contemporary discontents. The present editions of the texts from Burke and Jefferson closely follow the originals. The chief difference in the present volume, beyond the specifics of the annotations and the provision of a common 1. Burke’s more conservative, as contrasted with his reformist side, teaches a “fear of man” and “a fear of power beyond the limits of human imagination” combined with “an unfathomable instinct for staying close to the source of the fear.” See David Bromwich 2000, “Introduction,” p. 3. Burke is a profound critic of excesses of empire, of rationalistic speculation and of political “innovations,” disconnecting norms of government from societal mores. Preface xi chronology, bibliography and an index, is that the eighteenth-century spellings have been modernized and Americanized throughout and contemporary standards of capitalization are introduced along with contemporary orthography. Beyond tracing ideas and connections of interest in the footnotes, definitions for words and concepts are supplied, which the reader may otherwise be inclined to pass over too quickly. This volume will serve many, it is hoped, as a reading and study edition of the texts; and the modernization of the prose spellings, together with the notes, index, and bibliography are designed to assist readers in a deeper understanding of Burke, especially in the context of the American crisis. The objectives of the volume are broader than merely understanding the thought of Edmund Burke within a specific historical context. The concern with Burke and the American crisis of the late eighteenth century extends beyond the crisis and beyond the history of ideas and the history of political philosophy. Burke is more than a critic of British policy in the American crisis. He is also a defender of English liberty, and an early critic of British colonial policy in India. He was an advocate of Catholic emancipation in Ireland, and he is a famous critic of the radicalism of the French Revolution. No treatment of Burke’s though can completely ignore these broader themes. Beyond understanding Burke in relation to the American crisis, we want to know the relevance of Burke and the American crisis to the wider themes of Burke’s thought and to our contemporary problems of a globalizing world in which extended commercial-military configurations and conflicts are a prominent feature. These questions and problems are posed and briefly addressed in my Introduction to the present volume. History, it is said, never repeats itself, exactly, though it tends to “rhyme.” In the end, drawing appropriate lessons of history for our own times will be chiefly left to the reader.2 2. Cf. Gordon Wood 2008, The Purpose of the Past, p. 71: “By showing that the best-laid plans of people usually go awry, the study of history tends to dampen youthful enthusiasm and to restrain the can-do, the conquer-the-future spirit that many people have. Historical knowledge takes people off a roller coaster of illusions and disillusions; it levels off emotions and gives people perspective on what is possible and, more often what is not possible.” xii Preface In exploring Burke’s references and authors, I have often found that brief suggestions from various articles in the Encyclopedia Britannica proved a useful starting place, and these notes have sometimes survived, as amended or elaborated in the annotations, usually by reformulation or abbreviated or as combined with other materials. The same work proved useful in hunting for Burke’s readings and the connected background literature, as detailed in the Bibliography; and this provided a partial check on the annotations. With some few exceptions, definitions have been adapted or checked against the Merriam Webster Collegiate Dictionary, eleventh edition, cross-checked and amended on the basis of similar sources. Notes to the text by Burke and Jefferson are identified as such, and all others are supplied by the editor. Cross-reference between annotated names and themes is provided for by the Index.