Rule Britannia! The English Empire, 1660–1763

This is Unit Four, part two. Part one built the empire's legal machinery. This part is about what living inside that empire was like — and it ends on the victory that began to undo it. Hold one idea across the whole lecture. Everything here pulls the colonies closer to Britain: the goods they bought, the manners they copied, the books they read, and finally a war they won together. The crisis of the next unit has to overturn all of it. By the end you will be able to state what the New York conspiracy trials established against what the evidence supported. You will be able to account for why this century drew colonists closer to Britain. You will be able to distinguish New Light from Old Light and say what the Great Awakening ran against. You will be able to name the Enlightenment's four ideas and the experience they answer. And you will be able to state the paradox of the seventeen sixty-three victory.

Start with a trial, because the course does something here worth watching: it weighs the evidence and reports that there was not any.

What happened in New York in seventeen forty-one, and what the record supports.

USH1 0471 The New York Conspiracy Trials

One in five New Yorkers was enslaved and fears after Stono were fresh. Thirteen fires brought rumours of a massive revolt, and authorities arrested about two hundred people. Seventeen were executed, thirteen burned at the stake. The course states little evidence exists to prove such a conspiracy existed.

Now the ordinary texture of colonial life, and three entries that all point the same way — toward Britain, not away from it.

The goods, and what the course says they did.

USH1 0472 The Consumer Revolution

An increased supply of English goods created a consumer revolution whose products, the course says, linked the colonies to Great Britain in real and tangible ways. Tea became the drink of the Empire.

The manners that came with the goods, and one entry that complicates them.

USH1 0473 Gentility and William Byrd II

To be genteel meant to be refined, free of all rudeness, and the gentry modelled themselves on English aristocracy through elaborate mansions. William Byrd's diaries record reading Hebrew and Greek — and record his wife having a child named Jenny burned with a hot iron.

And the technology that tied the whole Atlantic together.

USH1 0474 Print Culture

Before sixteen eighty no newspapers had been printed in colonial America, and the eighteenth century brought a flood of journals, books and pamphlets. Print linked members of the Empire by creating a community of shared tastes and ideas.

Four entries on a religious movement that cut across all of that — reaching the people the established churches had not, and splitting the clergy over it.

What the Awakening was, and the doctrine it worked against.

USH1 0475 The Great Awakening

An outburst of Protestant revivalism across the British Atlantic, rejecting sterile formal worship for a personal and experiential faith rising above mere book learning. It appealed especially to women, the young, and people at the lower end of the social spectrum, and ran against the predestination Luther and Calvin taught.

The two camps, and one moment where a revivalist overshot.

USH1 0476 New Lights and Old Lights

New Lights embraced the revivals and Old Lights opposed them, with elite ministers firmly Old Light, viewing the revivals as chaotic. James Davenport urged listeners to burn books, then their clothes, and threw his own trousers into the fire. A woman retrieved them and handed them back.

The most famous preacher of the American revival, and why he travelled further than he did.

USH1 0477 Jonathan Edwards

Jonathan Edwards had grown frustrated with the lack of religious emotion among practising Christians and used vivid depictions of the terrors of hell, describing a furnace now hot and ready to receive them. The sermon was reprinted often and distributed widely.

And the itinerant who electrified the colonies, seen two ways at once.

USH1 0478 George Whitefield

George Whitefield was an Anglican itinerant who travelled the countryside instead of holding his own congregation, and electrified colonial listeners in seventeen thirty-nine. A seventeen sixty-three cartoon shows him amid chaos with an angel and a devil above, against a calm portrait of the same man.

Running beside the revival, a movement of the opposite temper. Two entries, and the first one carries the four ideas worth memorising.

The four ideas, and what the course says they were a response to.

USH1 0479 The Enlightenment's Four Ideas

Rationalism holds that humans can use reason to gain knowledge; empiricism that knowledge comes from experience and observation; progressivism that humans can make unlimited linear progress; cosmopolitanism that thinkers are citizens of the world. The course reads progressivism as a response to the carnage of the English Civil Wars.

And the man the course calls its embodiment in British America.

USH1 0480 Franklin

Franklin learned to write by copying the Spectator and ran away at seventeen to Philadelphia, founding the Library Company, the American Philosophical Society, the University of Pennsylvania and Pennsylvania Hospital. He held deism, belief in a God who created but has no continuing involvement.

One more colony, founded last and on a stated principle — and useful for how quickly the principle gave way.

Why Georgia was founded, and what made it unlike every other colony.

USH1 0481 Georgia's Founding Vision

Oglethorpe, having witnessed the conditions of debtors' prison, petitioned George the Second, who understood the strategic advantage of a buffer between South Carolina and Spanish Florida. Parliament funded twenty-five hundred settlers, making Georgia the only government-funded colonial project.

The founding vision, and what happened to it.

USH1 0482 How Georgia Changed

Oglethorpe presented Georgia as a place for England's worthy poor, on an agrarian model sustaining egalitarian values holding all men as equal, and the vision called for alcohol and slavery to be banned. Colonists from South Carolina disregarded the prohibitions, and by the seventeen fifties Georgia produced rice grown by the enslaved.

Four entries to close the unit, on the wars that decided who would hold the continent — and on the bill that arrived afterwards.

The sequence of wars, and what soldiering in them was like.

USH1 0483 The Five Wars for Empire

Five wars ran from sixteen eighty-eight to seventeen sixty-three: King William's, Queen Anne's, Jenkins' Ear, King George's, and the French and Indian War. Warfare was seasonal, and the course says British soldiers often feared their officers more than the enemy.

How the last of them started, and who started it.

USH1 0484 Washington at Fort Necessity

George Washington, a twenty-two-year-old Virginian surveyor, ordered troops to fire on French soldiers in May seventeen fifty-four near Uniontown, Pennsylvania. Fort Necessity was hastily built, and he surrendered there the same year. Braddock was sent in fifty-five with fifteen hundred men and killed in an ambush.

Who fought on which side, and why that changed.

USH1 0485 Native Alliances That Moved

Catholic Mohawks and Abenaki joined the French in early raids, and Potawatomis, Ottawas, Shawnees and Delawares fought with the French at Braddock's defeat. At the Treaty of Easton in seventeen fifty-eight, Iroquois, Delaware and Shawnee shifted to Britain for land concessions.

And the victory itself, with the paradox the course states outright.

USH1 0486 Victory, and the Seeds of Trouble

Momentum shifted in fifty-eight under Pitt, Quebec fell in fifty-nine, Montreal in sixty, and the Treaty of Paris ended the French colonial presence. British regulars and Anglo-American militiamen had fought together, forging a greater sense of shared identity. And the war's debt drove the imperial reforms that threatened to tear the Empire apart.

Look at what you can now do. You can state what the New York trials of seventeen forty-one established — seventeen executions — against what the record supports, which the course says is little. You can account for a century pulling colonists toward Britain: English goods, English manners, and a print culture creating shared tastes across an ocean. You can distinguish New Light from Old Light, and say the Awakening ran against predestination. You can name the Enlightenment's four ideas — rationalism, empiricism, progressivism, cosmopolitanism — and read them as answers to a century of religious slaughter. And you can state the paradox: the colonies were never more British than in seventeen sixty-three, and the bill for that victory is what began to separate them.