Interest politics and the shaping of the British Empire, ca. 1720--1791.

摘要

This dissertation argues that British imperialism during the eighteenth century is better understood as imperialisms: differing models of profit, labour, taxation, and the role of government in regulating overseas expansion and economic interests. I contend that commercial and colonial policies were shaped by the mechanisms of "interest politics": public interest groups who held competing ideas not only about the minutiae of trade, but about the nature of economic growth itself, and the limits of state. These lobbyists---independent merchants, company traders, colonial agents, financiers, manufacturers, philanthropists, and scientists---exerted pressure on the state in a number of ways: through organized petition, individual pressure and publication, or as consultants and "experts" for departments like the Board of Trade. They identified themselves with party divisions in Parliament, and they shaped the official mind on controversial issues such as consumption, territorial expansion, and the influence monopoly trading corporations held over the government.;The practice of lobbying reinforced the legitimacy of Parliament by appealing to its legislative power. British empire-building during the first half of the eighteenth century has been divorced from the institutions of state and described within the informal economies and networks of an "Atlantic World," but lobbyists were willing participants in the state regulation of networks of commerce and information. Those who backed the establishment sought to minimize competition by creating captive labour and consumer markets in settler colonies. Another set of interest groups coalesced around opposition parties, rejecting the "supply-side" explanations of protectionism and focusing on demand. Their advocacy of freer trade and individual competition attacked the differential privileges of corporate trade and asserted that only a representative Parliament was authorized to manipulate the market. These basic political economic divisions persisted throughout the eighteenth century, continuing even after American independence---and formal territorial rule over Bengal---changed Britain's imperial landscape and provided a convenient historiographical marker for a "second" British empire.