The American Revolution as Part of the Enlightenment Crisis

British historian Richard Whatmore has a new book, The End of Enlightenment: Empire, Commerce, Crisis, and Ritchie Robertson reviewed it in the February 2 TLS. Reading this review reminded me of things about the American Revolution that I wish more Americans understood, especially the ones who seem to think it was just a power grab by devious slave owners.

While many Europeans were feeling both politically and culturally bullish in the mid 1700s, others were worried. People like David Hume feared what would happen when the soaring Enlightenment rhetoric about freedom and equality collided with aristocratic political systems and the realities of government. (Those who lived long enough saw these fears confirmed in the course of the French Revolution.) They were also worried about economic changes. The economies of Britain and France were growing because of global trade, and global trade was enmeshed in the colonial mercantile system and the brutialities of the slave plantations. This was, they thought, horribly corrupting, not to mention the exact opposite of Enlightenment calls for peace and human rights. The acts of the British East Indian company were denounced in the British Parliament, and outside the establishment more radical thinkers were even more hostile. Numerous books were written, and speeches given, calling for Britain and France to withdraw from "war and empire", embrace peace and free trade, give up trying to dominate foreign people, and focus on gradually improving conditions at home. Robertson:

One achievement of Whatmore's book is to document the actue sense of crisis that, as he says, inspired political observers with a variety of dire forebodings. Britain's wealth depended on colonies; these were enlarged and defended by wars, which demanded ever more taxation and indebtedness. Hume imagined several ways in which this cycle might be broken. One was national bankruptcy; another waas that the landed interest might accept defeat by France rather increase the national debit or that colonial revolts, combined with an economic crisis, might inspire riots at home, which would be quelled by official violence. In a letter of 1768, quoted by Whatmore, he indulged in a semi-serious flight of fancy:

Oh how I long to see America and the East Indies revolted totally & finally, the Revenue reduc'd to half, public Credit fully discredited by Bankruptcy, the third of London in ruins, and the rascally Mob subdu'd. I think I am not too old to despair of being Witness to all of these things.

Here Hume seems incongruously to join hands with Thomas Paine, who foretold the imminent collapse of funding by credit in 1796. . . . Others denounced reliance on colonies not only because it was exploitative, but because oppression overseas must rebound on the mother country. 

This is Catherian Macaulay, a radical historian who crossed swords with Hume:

The conquests of foreign nations are dangerous triumphs. . . . it never fails of subjecting the conquerors to the same measure of slavery which they have imposed on the conquered.

The American Revolution took place amidst this turmoil. American intellectuals like Jefferson and John Adams wanted to withdraw America from what they saw as a corrupt system of global exploitation. They very much feared that some British corporation would do to them what the East India Company had done in Bengal. They saw the mercantile system the way many people now see the military industrial complex, as a machine that ginned up wars for its own interest and cared not how many died or were oppressed so long as profits could be made.

Which is not to say that the American revolutionaries were pure and noble, only that they were responding to fears about global economic changes that parallel those of many contemporary leftists who think the revolution was a mistake.