Sir William Keith, James Thomson and Scoto-British Views of the British Empire, its History and Imperial Policy, 1728-40

Recent scholarship has asserted the presence of a ‘Patriot Party’ in the 1730s that took a pan-Atlantic approach to reforming the British empire along egalitarian lines. Two Scots, Sir William Keith and James Thomson, have been suggested as part of the patriot movement. This article argues that Keith and Thomson shared a Scoto-British view of the British empire that did not urge an egalitarian empire or neatly conform to a coherent patriot programme. Instead of being influenced by a radical movement for imperial change in the 1730s, they were more concerned with preserving the 1688/9 Revolution Settlement, defending the creation of the British state in 1707 and extending the British constitutional establishment of parliamentary sovereignty into the Atlantic colonies. Keith and Thomson shared a view of the Empire that was increasingly common with contemporary Scottish colonial administrators, who were concerned that the colonies were poorly governed, neglected and corrupt. They innovated, however, by offering works that depicted the history of Britain as one of union and empire, thus writing some of the British empire’s first imperial histories, and Keith proposed policies intended to subjugate the colonies to crown authority that became influential in the 1760s.