In the “Little Spheres” of the Empire: A Conceptual Analysis of Provincial Political Thought in the Print Culture of the American Revolution

• In Event: Emerging Scholars Lightning Round: Graduate Student Research: Contemporary Issues in US Politics: Identities, Technology, and Economic Policy

Abstract

I hope to present the research I have completed thus far for my doctoral dissertation. My dissertation conducts a conceptual analysis of political thought in the print culture of the American Revolution. It focuses on three critical moments during the imperial crisis: the Stamp Act Crisis, 1765-6; The Townshend Duties, 1766-7; and the Coercive Acts, 1773-4. I examine three colonies with strong printing cities: Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, and Virginia, and bring together Early American History, Intellectual History, and the Digital Humanities.

I challenge scholarly narratives of the American Revolution’s ‘Ideological Origins’, which have viewed the period as developing a comprehensive blend of coherent political ideas. Instead, I question whether the Revolution advanced a single, coherent ideological tradition, and whether this was developed into a comprehensive vision of political life which can be deemed ‘ideological’ at all.
My dissertation highlights the nuances of the Revolutionary period, questioning how individuals explored abstract political traditions, such as liberalism and republicanism, on the ground. To do so, I conduct a conceptual analysis, investigating how actors deployed political concepts, including liberty, property, and authority, and whether they defined these in similar ways. Hence, I part from the Cambridge School’s discourse approach, instead examining political concepts as organising tools for ideas, as actors used the abstract concepts available to them from a myriad of traditions, and infused them with different meanings as they engaged with their own contexts. This bridges the gap between the history of political thought and political history, examining the complex interplay between political ideologies and their reception on the ground.

I am situated within the Digital Humanities, as I use NVivo to conduct a mixed-methods content analysis. This offers a unique way of examining the intersection between the abstract and the local. Firstly, the quantitative analysis counts the number of times a concept appears across the period studied, and whether certain ideas spiked in specific times, places, or groups. My thematic analysis then questions such consistencies in political language, investigating whether definitions of political concepts were agreed-upon, or were instead interpreted and applied in different ways, as actors responded to local and imperial contexts. This facilitates greater understanding of the nuances of Revolutionary discourses, rather than assuming that political ideology was unified and constant.
Furthermore, I move beyond traditional reliance on pamphlets to include newspapers, broadsides, and sermons. This expands scholarly understandings of the term ‘political’, with a particular focus on newspapers as sites of political engagement. Such an approach reveals that these texts were key media through which political ideas were circulated and debated.

After discussing the background and methodology of my dissertation, I will present my initial results, and exemplify how the mixed-methods approach yields interesting data. I will begin with a slide on my quantitative results, presented through graphs. These will allow me to compare the use of concepts across different colonies, types of source, groups, and years during the Revolution, and whether some ideas were used more in certain spaces and places, or if political thought was largely consistent. My second slide will present a case study of my qualitative analysis. I will include some quotations from a newspaper article from Virginia, which combined the concepts of liberty, property, and patriotism, used across the colonies against the Stamp Act, to also critique a local breakdown of order in 1766. This exemplifies my working argument that, whilst in Boston, political concepts were used directly to respond to events of the Revolution, in Pennsylvania and Virginia, actors often worked the language of the imperial crisis to their own more immediate concerns on a colonial, or even township, level.

Finally, I will conclude by summarising my overarching argument that Revolutionary political thought was far more disunited and disjointed than has been recognised. Through a mixed-methods approach, we can trace the way that abstract political concepts were used continuously throughout the period, but not solely as a reflection of a comprehensive ideology that was subscribed to; instead, at times, language was used to create a community discourse though which actors could articulate their own individual grievances in language recognisable to a much broader audience. This created the appearance of unity, despite the breadth of different local, national, and imperial crises developing in this period. Thus, I suggest the notion of ‘non-ideological origins’: colonial actors were ‘political’, but did not hold a firm commitment to a specific strand of thought that would make them ‘ideological’.

Author

• Rebecca Palmer, University College London