From Fellow-Nationals to Foreigners: British Perceptions of the Americans, circa 1739–1783

Stephen Conway

A CONSIDERABLE body of scholarship has established that most of the colonists in British North America continued to see themselves as Britons, or even as part of the English nation, right until the eve of Independence. In the last decade or so of the colonial period, the Americans, far from growing away from the mother country, seem to have been more keen to assert their British-ness, prompting some historians to interpret the American Revolution as a crisis of integration rather than disintegration.1 The colonists embraced a new identity--that of Americans--only reluctantly and in response to the refusal of successive British governments after 1763 to recognize and accommodate their desire for what they saw as the full rights of Britons. But if changes on the American side have been well charted, British attitudes have been less thoroughly explored. True, there is no shortage of studies of British views on the justice and propriety of the war against the colonies; the background and thinking of those Britons who sympathized with the Americans have attracted particular attention. Only recently, however, have changing British ideas on the status of the Americans begun to interest historians.2	1
When did the British come to regard Americans as foreigners? There are many difficulties involved in trying to answer this question. Perhaps most obvious, there was no single British perspective; at any given time there was a multiplicity of opinions, and gauging which views were general and which were idiosyncratic is by no means easy. It can readily be imagined that merchants who traded with the colonies probably had little difficulty in conceiving of their inhabitants as part of the British nation. After all, such merchants were accustomed to thinking in terms of a transatlantic whole: John Wright, in the preface to his account of the currencies of the colonies, explained that his work was intended "for the general Use of all His Britannic Majesty's Subjects, whether residing in Europe or America."3 By the same reasoning, it can be seen why Britons who lived more insular or locally oriented lives were less likely to be so inclusive. Indeed, it must be conceded that many Britons almost certainly thought of the colonies rarely, if at all, and therefore had no formed view of whether the Americans should be seen as fellow-nationals. Even in 1776, when relations with the Americans were distinctly topical so far as the press and politicians were concerned, a visitor to Wales noted that the people he met "know as little as they care."4	2
Nor was there a single defining moment when the general view--insofar as we can discern it--was transformed; but rather a long drawn-out process of change. This process, moreover, should not be seen as one of linear progression. There was no smooth and uninterrupted transition in the way in which Britons in Britain looked on Americans; a jagged, broken and faltering movement--like a drunkard lurching forward and then tottering back--is a more appropriate image. There seem to have been times when most of the British chose to be inclusive and times when they were more parochial. Wartime crises and triumphs tended to bring these shifts into sharp relief.	. . .