Constitutional Sense, Revolutionary Sensibility: Political Cultures in the Making and Breaking of British Virginia, 1707--177

"Constitutional Sense, Revolutionary Sensibility: Political Cultures in the Making and Breaking of British Virginia, 1707-1776" traces the history of a powerful transatlantic persuasion that shaped political perceptions in eighteenth-century Virginia and was in turn shaped by the social and economic processes that changed what it meant to be British in Colonial America. The transatlantic tobacco political economy fixed a large number of Virginians firmly in the political culture of Augustan England, sharing that culture's alertness to the terrors of recent English history and plunging them into an intellectual engagement with strategies for securing stability. Inspired by leading exponents of Augustan constitutional sense, such as Joseph Addison, the figures in my history can be discovered in a discourse characterized by moderation, a prescription for political health which called for a commitment to the mixed constitution that emerged from the Revolution of 1688, intense distrust of feeling as a partner with reason in the pursuit of truth, and a fundamental willingness to accommodate political differences. Virginia was remarkable for possessing the largest and least homogenous society in the British Atlantic as well as for the dynamism of its transatlantic outlook and connections, factors which led to periodic moments of crisis that transformed constitutional sense into a vigorous group bias. Whereas other interpretations of British America have tended to emphasize particular aspects of life there--viewing it almost exclusively through the lens of ideology or class or gender or race--my interpretation is grounded in a more holistic understanding of contemporary attitudes and perceptions. The result is a new approach to understanding what it meant to be British in Colonial America and what happened when powerful, ultimately irreconcilable persuasions of Britishness collided, an approach that calls into question the extent to which there was such a thing as the American Revolution in the British world in 1776, rather than a British revolution in America.