FORUM: 1776. Views from the British World. Beyond Patriots and Loyalists: Cross-Colonial Elites in the Revolutionary British Atlantic World

Abstract

Timed to coincide with the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence that launched a revolution that created the United States of America, this series of articles complicates traditional narratives of this transformative event by situating it in a larger British world context. The American Revolution transformed the political landscape of the British Atlantic far more rapidly than it transformed the social world that had long bound the empire’s regions together. Before 1776, merchants, planters, and imperial officials had built enduring ties of commerce, kinship, and property spanning North America, the Caribbean, and Britain. Drawing on the lives and correspondence of Gouverneur Morris, the Manning-Vaughan-Laurens family, and Richard Oswald, this article argues that inherited patterns of social life and interpersonal ties remained integral to the experience of cross-colonial elites, despite the constitutional rupture of independence.