|
|
|
Book Reviews
| The King's Three Faces: The Rise and Fall of Royal America, 1688–1776. By Brendan McConville. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006. ix, 322 pp. Illustrations, notes, index. $39.95.)
|
|
The King's Three Faces is an ambitious attempt to rethink important aspects of early American history. Challenging teleological narratives that view colonial politics as mere prologue to a democratic revolution, Brendan McConville argues that British Americans in fact embraced a deeply monarchical political culture. As he puts it, "Americans were not always engaged in somehow becoming what we are" (p. 192). |
1
|
|
Central to McConville's story is the period from the Glorious Revolution to the mid-eighteenth-century. These crucial decades saw a number of discrete provincial subcultures (Puritan, Quaker, Dutch Calvinist, and Cavalier) embrace a common allegiance to a Protestant monarch, in the process creating a pan-colonial royalist political culture. In elucidating the origins of "the empire's cult of monarchy" (p. 69), McConville is at his boldest and most innovative. Using a wide array of evidence, he reconstructs a provincial world full of Pope's Day processions, public celebrations of royal birthdays, the dissemination of royalist print culture, and the circulation of consumer goods emblazoned with the king's image. The proliferation of rites, print, and consumption inculcated a deeply personal, emotive love for the Hanoverians, understood as benevolent, liberty-loving Protestant kings. Taking seriously the antipopery of the eighteenth-century British world, McConville also argues that a pervasive fear of Catholics intensified allegiance to the sovereign as the protector of Protestantism. |
. . . |
There are about 608 more words in this article.
Please log in (or, if you are not yet an
authorized user, please go to the
User Setup page) to gain full access rights. Or if you're already logged in register your subscription.
|
