Going home: Americans in Britain, 1740-1776

"Going Home: Americans in Britain, 1740-1776" explores the consequences of the peripheral status of the colonists of British North America within the first British empire. Based on the letters, diaries, and memoirs of over one thousand colonists who traveled to Britain in the mid-eighteenth century, the work examines the colonists' expectations before they embarked for Britain, their actions and observations while they were there, and their experiences once they returned to the colonies.;The work demonstrates that, for the colonists, the connections between Britain and America were not merely administrative, commercial, or even cultural; the colonists saw their mother country as "home" whether they had been there or not. Those colonists who had reason to travel to Britain in the mid-eighteenth century, however, discovered that Britons did not share a reciprocal level of interest in or knowledge of the colonies. Americans in Britain in the generation before the American Revolution were socially isolated and unable to conduct their business. In their loneliness and frustration, the travelers turned to each other for companionship, advice, and succor. In doing so, they created a closely knit society of colonial expatriates that not only provided the camaraderie they craved so far away from home, but also fostered a sense of otherness that amplified their similarities with each other and their differences from the British.;The work concludes that traveling to Britain in the mid-eighteenth century heightened the colonists' sense of provincialism and reinforced many of their fears about the corruption, licentiousness, and greed of native Britons, which, in turn, were contributing factors in the formation of an American identity in the decades before the American Revolution and the colonists' willingness to declare their independence from the mother country.