What Sort of Revolution?: British and American Political Culture and Constitutionalism in the Revolutionary Age

This paper seeks to explore the growing constitutional schism that arose between Britain and its thirteen American colonies in the years leading up to the American Revolution. What were the principal factors that contributed to that schism? What sort of political rupture was the American Revolution? Was it, as some scholars have suggested, a revolution of ideas, an outgrowth of the European Enlightenment and thus exceptional? Or was the cause of the colonies' break with the "mother country" a result of the influence of entrenched economic and religious interests on a continent situated thousands of miles from the imperial center and therefore necessarily vested with a large degree of autonomy? Was it, in other words, a social revolution? What was the status of the British Parliament in the colonies, especially in relation to colonial assemblies? What did the colonists—and Britons—expect Parliament to do in the colonies, and just as importantly, not do? And what did the English—British, after 1707— constitution have to say about the trans-Atlantic relationship as the Empire saw vast territorial and population growth in its second century of existence? Indeed, what was the constitution that provided the framework of British political life and served as its centerpiece? What was the colonists' relationship to it? After considering the colonial reaction to the Stamp Act of 1765 and the various parliamentary acts directed at colonial political and economic activity that followed it, this thesis suggests that the American colonists saw themselves—at least initially—as English as their counterparts from whom they were separated by an ocean.