Metropole Matters

In probing the entanglements of empire and revolution, historians of British America have long looked to the scholarship on early modern British politics, culture, and society for guiding narratives, interpretive paradigms, and precedents on which to base their analyses. The mid-twentieth-century studies of the origins of the American Revolution that came to inspire generations of research all relied upon accounts of early modern British political history. The most analytically influential borrowing that historians of early America made from British historiography was surely the concept of republicanism, which scholars of the English Revolution had excavated as an anti-monarchical political language and historians of early America then proposed as a guiding ideological current of the mid-eighteenth-century colonial critique of crown and Parliament.1 Other terms that found powerful application in the scholarship on early modern British politics—such as Whig and mercantilism—have proved equally useful to making sense of the British Atlantic world.2 Yet historiographies are not static: scholarship that in