Fit Instruments in a Howling Wilderness
Colonists, Indians, and the Origins of the American Revolution
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 3290657 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Samuel Fisher, Samuel H Fisher (corresponding author), Samuel Fisher Samuel Fisher |
| Year | 2016 |
| Volume | 73 |
| Issue | 4 |
| Pages | 647 |
| Publication date | 2016-01-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | The William and Mary Quarterly (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0043-5597 • E-ISSN: 1933-7698 |
| Publisher | Project MUSE (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.5309/willmaryquar.73.4.0647 |
| OpenAlex | W2536340661 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 3 |
| References cited | 27 |
This article explores American colonists’ understanding of the role of native people in the British Empire during the years of the revolutionary crisis, years in which imperial officials sought to centralize “Indian affairs” and win native people as allies. Americans responded by turning George III’s Indian policy against him, claiming he was a tyrant because he preferred Indians to colonists and saw natives as fit instruments to chastise freedom-loving Britons. In making this case, colonists drew on seventeenth-century precedents: the accusation had first been leveled against the Stuarts, and not only in America but in Ireland and Scotland too. The long transatlantic roots of this “fit instruments” argument demonstrate that revolutionary Americans were not inventing new forms of exclusion but rather clinging to old ones. By the time of the imperial crisis, other places in the empire were moving beyond this exclusionary understanding of empire, but Americans embraced it. Acknowledging the Atlantic genealogy of this argument as well as its centrality to the colonists’ case recasts the American Revolution as one outcome of a wider imperial struggle over managing diversity that fundamentally shaped the paths of Ireland, Scotland, and America
Ancient history · Argument (complex analysis · British Empire · Diversity (politics · Economic history · Empire · Ethnology · Imperial unit system · Political science · Wilderness · American Constitutional Law and Politics · American History and Culture · History · Law · Scottish History and National Identity
The Name of War
The American Revolution in Indian Country
The Paxton Papers
Irish Politics and Social Conflict in the Age of the American Revolution
The Ideological Origins of the British Empire
The British Empire before the American Revolution
The Colonial Background of the American Revolution
Whitehall and the Wilderness
Mariland's Grevances Wiy the Have Taken Op Arms
The King's Three Faces
John Stuart and the Struggle for Empire on the Southern Frontier
Reducing That Barbarous Country
No King, No Popery
James VII's Multiconfessional Experiment and the Scottish Revolution of 1688–1690
Gaelic Antiquity and National Identity in Enlightenment Ireland and Scotland
Empires in World History
The Misfortunes of Lord Bute
Presbyterianism, Secularization, and Scottish Politics After the Revolution of 1688–1690
North Britishness and the nature of eighteenth-century British patriotisms
The People with No Name
Red Dreams, White Nightmares
The People Above
Ideology and Nationalism on the Eve of the American Revolution
From Resistance to Revolution
The Language of Liberty, 1660-1832
The Ideology of English Colonization
| Unique citing works | 3 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0,5 |
| Citation span | 2020 - 2023 (4) |
| Citation velocity | historical |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 3 |