‘Arbitress of the Universe’

Abstract

This chapter looks at the theories of geopolitics, political economy, and constitutional order that accompanied post-war visions of British hegemony, and how the patriot movement came to repurpose these ideas as an argument for American independence. Throughout the imperial crisis, colonists discussed imperial commercial policy in the context of geopolitics, and these discussions bore fruit in the conception of an empire not as a proto-federation but as an unequal league, in which trade and diplomacy were governed from the metropole. The leading voices of the patriot movement would endorse this vision of British power until—and in some cases beyond—the threshold of armed conflict. When the turn to revolution and secession finally came, it too was mediated by ideas about the balance of power, the geopolitics of empire, and the future shape of the international system that lay deep in the colonial past.