Americomania and the French Revolution Debate in Britain, 1789–1802

This book explores the evolution of British identity and participatory politics in the 1790s.

Wil Verhoeven (Author)

9781107040199, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 12 November 2013

397 pages, 21 b/w illus. 7 colour illus. 6 maps
23.5 x 15.8 x 2.6 cm, 0.66 kg

'Wil Verhoeven argues that participants in the 1790s debates between the so-called Jacobins and anti-Jacobins in Britain, triggered by the French Revolution, employed the issue of emigration to America as a vehicle to promote their political ideologies - the former to campaign for reforms and the latter to preserve the status quo. In the process, the Jacobin-leaning authors, including some land speculators, sponsored transatlantic settlements, while Tory-inclined ones warned of the dangers of laborer emigration, and invoked earlier sentiments hostile to the American Revolutionary republicanism. This is an innovative and worthy approach, and Verhoeven's analysis of emigration and anti-emigration literature reveals many new angles in the political and cultural history of this era. It also throws fresh light on the impact of the American Revolution on this debate. Verhoeven's work offers a significant contribution to scholarship.' Michal Jan Rozbicki, Saint Louis University

This book explores the evolution of British identity and participatory politics in the 1790s. Wil Verhoeven argues that in the course of the French Revolution debate in Britain, the idea of 'America' came to represent for the British people the choice between two diametrically opposed models of social justice and political participation. Yet the American Revolution controversy in the 1790s was by no means an isolated phenomenon. The controversy began with the American crisis debate of the 1760s and 1770s, which overlapped with a wider Enlightenment debate about transatlantic utopianism. All of these debates were based in the material world on the availability of vast quantities of cheap American land. Verhoeven investigates the relation that existed throughout the eighteenth century between American soil and the discourse of transatlantic utopianism: between America as a physical, geographical space, and 'America' as a utopian/dystopian idea-image.

Introduction: utopianism in practice: the American front of the French Revolution in Britain, 1789–1802
1. 'The war of systems': print culture and the institutionalization of the political divide in the 1790s
2. 'Cultivators of the earth': the American crisis and the emergence of the freehold farmer, 1763–83
3. 'Rabies Agri': or, wilderness for sale
4. 'The calculated rise of the American empire': the radicalization of American utopianism
5. 'The mania of emigration': new philosophers in the wilderness
6. 'The precious pearl of liberty': from Newgate Prison to Ohiopiomingo
7. 'Come to these Arcadian regions where there is room for millions': politics for the people
8. 'Look before you leap': the demonization of Jacobin America
9. 'Parrying the enemy with their own weapons': dystopianism and the popular discourse of fear
Postscript. 'Mania reformation': the demise of transatlantic utopianism.

Subject Areas: Political science & theory [JPA], History of ideas [JFCX], British & Irish history [HBJD1]