From empire to empire: The collapse of British America and the rise of imperial republicanism, 1773-1812

This project examines the idea of an American republican empire from the eve of the Revolution through the Louisiana Purchase. It is built predominantly around the actions of Congress, from its beginnings as an interprovincial summit of British colonies pushing for imperial reform to the federal legislature of an independent nation with oversight of the Republic’s territorial dependencies. Much of it also focusses on the language of empire; descriptions of the Republic as community of polities united under one head and the embrace of the terms ‘colony’ and ‘colonial’ to describe the relationship between the federal government and territorial dependencies. While many historians have written on Thomas Jefferson’s ‘Empire of Liberty’, my aim is to show that the conception of the United States as an empire goes well beyond Jefferson. The title, From Empire to Empire, alludes to the fact that the notion of a US empire has its roots in America’s membership in the British Empire and was built largely on British precedent but with republican innovation. The dissertation is divided into three sections: the first looking at empire and the Revolution; the second at empire in the Early Republic; and the third at empire and the Louisiana Purchase.
I reinterpret the Revolution within a greater British Atlantic frame. Often historians of the Revolution restrict their study to the thirteen colonies which become the United States, but Continental Congress sent invitations to and envisioned delegates from throughout the British Empire from the Kingdom of Ireland to Barbados. Congress’s original goal was ‘to preserve the freedom and happiness of the whole British empire’. Given that, as David Armitage has shown, the colonists were the first to conceive of the British Empire as an inclusive community linked by a common sovereign, political rights, religion, and identity it should not be surprising that Congress invoked Britishness and the Empire in its petitions, addresses, and debates. The first section looks at Congress as an imperial body. Using the changing American relationships with Ireland, Bermuda, and Québec between 1774 and 1783, it traces Congress’s development from a British interprovincial conference to an imperialising force of its own intent on annexing and absorbing many of Britain’s remaining New World colonies.
Although the United States failed to annex other British colonies during the War, the southern portion of Québec was ceded to the fledgling republic by the Treaty of Paris. The second section looks at congressional plans on how to govern this region, ultimately resulting in the Northwest Ordinance. Empire and colonialism permeate the Northwest Ordinance. The Ordinance closely followed the form of a British colonial charter; it established the relationship between imperial centre and colonial periphery; outlined the authority of the territorial government, asserted the supremacy of Congress and even emulated the Crown’s claim to a fifth of precious metals in seventeenth-century charters. The American ideology of republican empire was an outgrowth of an earlier British imperial identity. The Northwest Ordinance ultimately created the American territorial system and established what I argue is a two-tiered system of empire: the Union of States (a federal empire of equals) and the subordinate dependent territories.
The final section of this dissertation deals with the Louisiana Purchase and the statutes and policies surrounding the governance of the Orleans Territory. The Purchase has sometimes been seen as a break with the political tradition of the Founding. Legal scholar George Dargo, for example, characterised the US as becoming ‘a colonial power within a generation of its own anti-colonialist revolution’ because of the way the federal government governed the purchased lands. This thesis holds that the acquisition and governance of Orleans is better understood as a continuation of the ideas of empire permeating American political ideology and discourse since the Revolution. The Louisiana Purchase thus represents the affirmation of American imperial republican ideology rather than a shift towards a new system.
Overall, this dissertation challenges the notion that the Revolution was overtly anti-imperial and anti-colonial, instead arguing that empire had a great deal of political currency with American Patriot-Whigs going into 1776. With independence, the US sought to be an empire in Britain’s mould but purged of corruption and reformed to suit a republic. Imperial republicanism had colonial dependencies but guaranteed their eventual statehood. Furthermore, the imperial mindset of the Early Republic is not a Manifest Destiny-esque ideology, but one heavily orientated towards the Atlantic and one which continued past the admission of Orleans to the Union as the State of Louisiana in 1812.

Keywords: Louisiana Purchase
American Empire
Northwest Ordinance
Northwest Territory
American Revolution
Continental Congress
Early Republic
Advisor: Thompson, P