Book Review

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Book Review | The Journal of American History, 86.3 | The History Cooperative

The Oxford History of the British Empire. Vol. 2: The Eighteenth Century. Ed. by P. J. Marshall. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. xxii, 639 pp. $45.00, isbn 0-19-820563-5.)

This Oxford history represents a remarkable achievement. P. J. Marshall, known principally for his work on India, invited some two dozen leading scholars of the eighteenth century to summarize the interpretive literature of their various subfields. Their chapters examine topics such as the development of British trade in Asia and the mapping of the Pacific islands, West Indian sugar production and the enslavement of several million black Africans. 1

Although the contributions have an encyclopedic character, sometimes making it hard for the general reader to distinguish trees from forest, the collection as a whole advances a compelling case for an empire quite unlike that described long ago by Charles M. Andrews. The so-called "imperial school" imagined the British Empire to have been a complex institutional and regulatory structure, designed primarily to promote commercial prosperity. Andrews believed the Glorious Revolution secured a common political heritage that extolled the balanced constitution, the liberty of freeborn Englishmen, and the Protestant faith. Moreover, in this account, imperial officials seldom intervened in eighteenth-century American affairs, preferring a policy that Edmund Burke famously labeled "benign neglect." . . .

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