When Words Fail: William Pitt, Benjamin Franklin and the Imperial Crisis of 1766

Passage of an American stamp tax in 1765 produced a sharp political backlash before the year was out. That new tax was part of a larger programme of imperial reform championed by the Grenville ministry. Now out of power, Grenville and his supporters resisted the growing desire in both houses of parliament to end the imperial crisis by repealing the new tax. During debates that began in early 1766 there were those few, most notably William Pitt, who wanted to discuss constitutional ultimates as part of the move toward repeal. Pitt contended that parliament did not have the authority to tax the colonies directly. Grenville disagreed and warned that if parliament accepted any limit to its supremacy the colonists would eventually claim legislative autonomy. When debating the distinction – if indeed any such distinction existed – between taxation and legislation, and between internal and external taxes, Pitt, Grenville and their parliamentary contemporaries raised questions about authority and power that they could not answer. There were no words to describe perfectly the imperial relationship, a relationship that, as Benjamin Franklin hinted in his testimony to the Commons, was always subject to change anyway. Avoiding constitutional questions had not seemed to work; trying to answer them did not work any better, at least in the contentious atmosphere of that moment.     

In Search of ‘Affectionate Regard’: American Merchant Lobbies and the State during the Atlantic Imperial Crisis*

This article revisits the politics of British merchants trading to North America in the period between 1763 and 1783. Their political success and failure in this critical period have been examined primarily in terms of their impact on the escalation of imperial crisis, with the day‐to‐day operation of merchant politics rarely taken into full account. This article takes an alternative approach of studying the political influence of merchants trading to North America within the context of their interaction with the state. By looking into the organisation, the process of lobbying, and the arguments that the merchants adopted, the article highlights how, in response to many sources of tension and uncertainty inherent within their relationship with the state, they demarcated their own areas of contribution to the shaping of commercial and colonial policy. Through the case study of merchants trading to North America, this article sheds further light on the necessity to understand the evolution of such modern political institutions as commercial lobbies in their specific economic and political contexts.     

THE SURVIVAL of ROMAN SETTLEMENT ALONG the MIDDLE DANUBE: PANNONIA FROM the FOURTH to the TENTH CENTURY AD

Summary: As guardian of the long and important Middle Danubian limes, Roman Pannonia protected the central provinces of the Empire. Despite a mass of defensive structures, the limes was progressively overrun from the later 4th century and Pannonia was eventually ceded to the Huns in 430. Subsequently the region fell victim to Germans and eastern nomads and stability of a sort was only restored with the establishment of the Hungarian State in the late 10th century. This paper examines the question of settlement change between the 4th and 10th centuries, viewing the degree to which the various invaders maintained, ignored or replaced the network of Roman structures. It is argued that only with difficulty can physical continuity be securely traced and in these instances the character of settlement changes greatly over time.