For many decades, studies on imperial history have helped to shape our understanding of how colonies operated in the British Atlantic world. In recent years, studies by Steve Pincus, Nuala Zahedieh, Nicholas Canny, David Veevers, William Pettigrew, Margot Finn, and Misha Ewen have uncovered the economic communication networks between Britain and its overseas dominions, as well as charted how trade in domestic and luxury goods trickled into British society. These works, alongside others, have enabled us to comprehend how the colonies functioned across the Americas, the Caribbean, and settlers’ interactions with Amerindians, amid the context of the Irish diaspora and the migration of various ethnic and religious groups across the Atlantic Ocean.
Gabriel Glickman's Making the Imperial Nation: Colonization, Politics, and English Identity, 1660–1700 offers a fresh study on imperial history by focusing on how political, religious, and moral debates, which took place across later seventeenth century Britain, permeated into colonial settlements from the frontiers of Maine to Tangier in the Mediterranean. Making the Imperial Nation focuses on how Britain's imperial nation expanded, declined, and evolved in the later seventeenth century, and charts the religious and cultural impact its overseas colonies had upon domestic politics. Using an extensive range of archival sources, including correspondence and colonial office records, alongside a vast array of contemporary literature and pamphlets, Glickman provides a window into what was at stake for people at different levels of society.
Glickman narrates that upon the accession of Charles II in 1660, England's imperial ambitions were haphazard and dependent upon the endeavors of pioneers to set their mark in these overseas territories. Glickman reveals that expansion of colonial settlements after the Restoration was often thwarted with problems and hesitancy, with the acquirement of Jamaica and the sale of Dunkirk acting as “a lightning rod for many longstanding objections toward expansion” (35). He explains how politicians endeavored to provide a professional framework to run trading affairs efficiently across its overseas dominions, including the Council of Trade, which was continuously refashioned under successive monarchs as Glickman outlines in his later chapters. Throughout Making the Imperial Nation, Glickman stresses the importance of the 1661 Anglo-Portuguese treaty in our understanding of Britain's imperial designs, observing that Charles II's marriage to the Portuguese infanta, Catherine of Braganza, confirmed Britain's access to the territories of Tangier and Bombay, and influenced how Britain forged themselves as an “empire of the seas” (48). Glickman exposes how this image differed from reality, discussing how commentators in the later 1670s linked the ills and failures in the Tangier colony with corruption in the Stuart court, while also observing that despite Tangier's position in the Mediterranean, it held less favorable trading terms with England and its American colonies, forcing it to utilize trading connections closer to home with Spain and Portugal. In later chapters, which deal with England's relationship with Scotland and Ireland, Glickman examines the uneasy relationship between these states with England, noting in particular Scotland's Darien Scheme in which Scottish settlers in Panama struggled to realize its own expansion goals and which ended in dramatic failure.
Glickman reflects that across the later seventeenth century, the moral image of empire influenced a subtle shift in attitude toward how the overseas colonies were viewed and how trade with these colonies permanently changed consumer habits. Glickman points out that despite the public drive in Britain towards a positive image of overseas trade, the importation of luxury goods, including food items, clothing, and furniture at times provoked hostility, with sanctions imposed to protect domestic goods and produce, while Britons were encouraged to import linen from the colonies to protect the domestic wool industry. This, within the context of Britain's confrontations with the Spanish and the Dutch, who also sought to cement their territorial gains in the Atlantic, often put them at odds with the ambitions of American settlers, who sought some political autonomy from the mother kingdom to run their own trade and business affairs.
Religion features prominently throughout Making the Imperial Nation. Glickman argues that questions over the religion of its people in the dominions “were umbilically bound to controversies impinging on the mother kingdom” (152), and that contemporaries were acutely aware of the pockets of religious radicals who were thriving in the colonies, including Puritans, Quakers, and Catholics. He notes that while successive Stuart monarchs, privy councilors, governors, and politicians sought to create some religious uniformity across both sides of the Atlantic, many religious disputes remained unresolved after the Restoration, with commentators remarking that the religious policies enacted in the overseas territories were remarkably different than those enacted in Britain. Glickman suggests that tensions continued to intensify throughout the later seventeenth century, of note James II's religious, political, and economic policies on the eve of the Glorious Revolution, and the purging of Irish Catholic planters from public office in the Caribbean after the accession of William III.
Making the Imperial Nation is a substantial text providing readers with a broad awareness of the different factors at play in later seventeenth century Britain and its imperial ambitions in its overseas territories. Glickman's book not only contributes to the existing historiography on early modern imperial history, but he also offers a novel approach to how we can understand a crucial period of the late seventeenth century, in which Stuart Britain and its colonial settlements in the Americas and in Tangier witnessed unprecedented religious and political upheavals upon the economic fortunes of its settler communities. Making the Imperial Nation will be of valuable interest to those interested in studying early modern British imperial history as well as those attracted to religious, political, social, and cultural history.
