THE COLONIAL PAST IN THE IMPERIAL CRISIS

Abstract

This chapter examines the explosion of historical writing that took place in the political literature of the imperial crisis. In their political rhetoric, patriots began creating a newly shared colonial past, particularly by forging a new historical memory of their colonial origins. This newly shared past contributed to both colonists’ sense of themselves as part of a community with their fellow colonies and their sense of cultural difference with Britain. It then shows how colonists’ cultural reverence for the authority of the past shaped the ways in which they understood the actions of Parliament and the rhetoric of its supporters, whereas British actions and rhetoric were based largely on the exigencies of the present. These different conceptions of the relationship between the past and present, I argue, contributed greatly to the intractability of the debate and colonists’ emerging sense of cultural difference with Britain.