‘The Asylum of Liberty’

Abstract

This chapter shows how ideas about Britain’s unique destiny shaped shifting conceptions of American identity during the imperial crisis. The conflicts of the mid-eighteenth century bequeathed to colonists the hope of British hegemony in the European world. This hegemony was to be geopolitical, but also cultural, reflecting the triumph of a Shaftesburian Anglo-French Kulturkampf over the Berkeleian idea of Anglo-American translatio imperii and translatio studii. The sense of America’s contribution to this destiny acted as an important catalyst for the development of a discretely American sense of corporate honour. This process was intensified by the idea of British guardianship over an international order of free states, which allowed colonists to identify themselves with a brotherhood of free people as an alternative to the British imperial community, grounded in new understandings of history that undercut the traditional mores of Hanoverian loyalism.