Owen STANWOOD. The Empire Reformed

Tim Harris, Edward Vallance, Steve Pincus, and others have recently resurrected 1688 as a far-reaching revolutionary, if not necessarily glorious, year. Historians of English (after 1707 British) America, while not always agreeing about its causes and effects, have never doubted its transatlantic nature. In a British historiographical context, Owen Stanwood has produced a timely intervention; in an Americanist one, a fresh interpretation of the Glorious Revolution. While Stanwood necessarily pays particular attention to New England, New York, Maryland, and island colonies where local coups occurred, he also explores revolutionary reverberations throughout the Atlantic empire. Stanwood ties the origins of individual colonies to an overarching anti-Catholic imperial theme, examining not only the Protestant zeal of New Englanders but also anti-Spanish and anti-French motivations of colonizers elsewhere—all linked, he argues, to a perceived anti-papist global struggle dating to the proto-imperial imaginings of Richard Hakluyt and others. Early chapters explore conflicts between what Stanwood calls the “royal” and “Protestant” parties (p. 26) over later Stuart attempts to centralize the empire—conflicts informed by each side's religious fears and conspiracy theories. Thus, contemporaries perceived the details of politics in places as diverse as New Hampshire, Bermuda, and Massachusetts in the context of apocalyptic crisis and struggle. That was especially so in Massachusetts, Maryland, and New York where, respectively, Metacom's War, the Catholic Calvert proprietors and large numbers of Jesuits, and governors Edmund Andros and Thomas Duggan as agents of James, first as duke of York and then as king, meant particular proximity to pagan and papist threats.

Ancient history · Archaeology · Context (archaeology) · Empire · English Revolution · Historiography · Imperial unit system · Interpretation (philosophy) · Political science · Politics · Protestantism · Theme (computing) · American Constitutional Law and Politics · Classics · History · Law · Philosophy