Bute’s Empire: Reform, Reaction, and the Roots of Imperial Crisis

The consequences of the Seven Years’ War (1756–1763) prompted a series of changes for the governance of Britain’s North American and Caribbean colonies. Territorial expansion added the French and Native peoples of Canada and eastern Louisiana to the British Empire. New stipulations on settlement and trade intended to regulate activities of British subjects in these newly acquired territories, and a standing army of British troops remained on the frontier. Britain expected the colonies to contribute to these expenses as they matured in their relationship with the metropole. In these new developments existed the proximate pressures that erupted in the American Revolution. Despite the narrative of British tyranny that Revolutionaries developed, complexities and even contradictions defined metropolitan policy-making of this era. This project investigates the interplay between metropolitan intentions for reform and colonial reactions to those policies as tensions mounted between the imperial center and peripheries.

Imperial reformers did not simply press for greater American standardization and subordination to parliamentary authority. John Stuart, the 3^rd Earl of Bute, who served as the First Lord of the Treasury from 1762 to 1763, advocated an approach that was distinctive from other politicians of his era. His sober-minded attitude toward post-war imperial policy emphasized security, from both external threats and internal instability, as the foundation for long-term colonial growth and development. In effect, this approach amounted to a sort of enlightened absolutism that imagined diverse colonies could be incorporated into the British Empire by investment and locally-attuned policies, so that they eventually would contribute to the defense and trade of the whole. However these lofty goals required strict control over defense and policymaking, thereby limiting self-governance. Bute’s successor, George Grenville, soon promoted policies constructed in contradistinction to the approach of Bute and his likeminded appointees. Ironically, as tensions between the center and peripheries rose in the 1760s, colonials saw Bute’s and Grenville’s imperial policies as one in the same, focusing only on the despotic half of Bute’s legacy. This selective remembrance produced colonial misunderstandings that went into the making of the imperial crisis.