This book provides an excellent series of essays about the centrality of claims to and denials of “liberty” in British overseas expansion in America, the West Indies, Ireland, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, and India between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries. While each essay is focused on an individual country and expertly analyzes a variety of claims about liberty, many linked themes emerge, and a superb introduction by Jack Greene sets the scene brilliantly. Focusing especially on the forms of liberty associated, on the one hand, with self-government, particularly the right to consent to legislation and taxation, and, on the other hand, with the rule of law, particularly the protection of property, habeas corpus, and trial by jury, the essays repeatedly demonstrate the significance of claims that English settlers had “carried with them” overseas many of the “liberties” possessed by Englishmen in the metropole and were imitating English institutions. They also simultaneously demonstrate the very significant limits inherent in such “liberties” as claimed especially by and for independent, propertied, white male English settlers, and for much of the period associated with support for a mixed constitution and for many forms of hierarchy and oligarchy in opposition to egalitarian “vile democracy” and to “republicans and levellers.”

Jack Greene powerfully excavates the relationships between the claims of English settlers in the West Indies to self-government and the “liberties” of English subjects and their ownership of slaves, emphasizing that protecting their “liberty” very often meant protecting especially their rights to property in slaves. Three excellent essays by Elizabeth Mancke, Eliga Gould, and Peter Onuf carefully chart the trajectory of claims to “liberties” and “liberty” in America from the colonial period to the early national period. Inter alia, Mancke and Gould document the extensiveness of the commitment of settlers to various English liberties as “carried with them” overseas and the initial reluctance of many American colonists, including James Otis and Benjamin Franklin, to challenge the overall imperial authority of the English Parliament and the “natural and equitable right” to collect tolls on goods, as opposition began to mount to the imperial imposition of taxes to support a standing army in America, crystallizing opposition to English “tyranny” and perception of the need for American independence. Onuf emphasizes that as the legitimating premise of the American Revolution against the “royal brute” George III, popular sovereignty subsumed class differences among white males and involved the invention of “sovereign state-republics,” inextricably linking democracy and federalism in such a way that by “defending the corporate rights of provincial and local governments, patriots sought to defend the liberty and property of all Anglo-Americans, including their property in slaves” (154). Christopher Saunders shows that in South Africa the view that people should have the right to rule themselves involved the rule of illiberal minorities and the exclusion from rights of the majority of noncitizens. James Belich stresses the importance and proliferation of representative government and common-law practices in New Zealand, noting various significant exclusions of Maori. Richard Waterhouse shows the urgency in Australia of demand for “Constitutional representative forms of Government, all epitomes of the parliament of England” and the inextricable linking of liberty, property, and citizenship (227). He highlights condemnation of “vile democracy” by those who held that “Reason and England will prevail against Democracy and America” in the generations before Australia developed its own more democratic constitution (234). And he stresses that even when it did thus come to amalgamate democratic American and English constitutional principles, Australia, influenced by racist and social Darwinist thought, in many ways restricted the entitlement of liberty exclusively “to Australians of European descent” (245). Philip Girard traces various and sometimes conflicting claims to English liberties in Canada, including claims to representative government and to trial by jury as “the impenetrable shield of the British law” (179). He stresses appropriately that Canada provided a “bastion of liberty” for fugitive slaves in the mid-nineteenth century and notes that Abraham Shadd was the first black to hold political office in North America. But he also notes racial prejudice and social discrimination and shows that in the same period Indians in Canada faced many restrictions and were viewed as “currently unfit for liberty” (185). James Kelly shows that in the name of preserving their liberty and property against “Popery, slavery, arbitrary power, brass money and wooden shoes” (85), the Protestant settler elite in Ireland supported a host of discriminatory restrictions on the Irish Catholic majority and then, facing claims in the late eighteenth century for democracy and equality, opposed allowing “the rabble to dictate to all the property of the nation,” declared that they defended “real liberty” against “republicans and levellers,” and ultimately ceded the right to their own legislature entirely (104). Robert Travers illuminates both the extent to which British theorists and officials explicitly supported despotism in India as rule over a “barbarous or semi-barbarous people” (196) and the various contested and at times competing claims to the liberties of British settlers, the corporate liberties of the East India Company, the system of liberty enshrined in the British constitution, and the rights of Indians. And he offers particularly fascinating insights into the arguments of Ghulam Husain Khan Tabatabai and Raja Rammohan Roy.

It would have been valuable if this volume could have included a chapter devoted to consideration of the exclusionary metropole, while more might have been said about the extent to which the extensiveness of royal or English parliamentary authority was at times responsible for expansion of liberties or protection of rights of minorities in the empire. More might have been said about intersections between campaigns for liberty in the metropolis and empire. And more might have been said about resistance to English rule and about claims of liberty by subaltern peoples. Nonetheless, this is an excellent, fascinating, and very important collection of essays.