A Constructed Protection Regime to Imperialist Ends: A Reading of James Anderson’s The Interest of Great Britain with Regard to her American Colonies

The most prosperous European states of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth centuries pursued their prosperity not just in competition with one another, but at war with one another. I offer a reading of James Anderson’s 1782 proposal for a new policy framework around the American Colonies as an effort to restructure this material reality towards British imperialist ends.

The Navigation Acts emerged following the Civil War in England, which represented a turning point for its American colonies. Because of the war, they emerged from their singular dependence on the colonial metropole and came into commercial relations with the Dutch and the French.^c1 By the time the dust settled in England, cheaper Dutch shipping was carrying goods between the colonies and Amsterdam. So, in 1650, England passed the first Navigation Act. All trade with the colonies had to be carried out in an English or colonial ship; an enumerated list of the trade’s most important goods had to be carried to English ports before being carried to any other market. By 1663, the inverse was true, too: foreign goods also had to be shipped to colonial markets via England.^c2

England used state power to illegalize the Dutch’s comparative advantage in shipping. They redirected the colonial trade from Amsterdam to English ports. The Dutch and the English went to war over this three times in just over twenty years: state violence was necessary to defend the protection of each nation’s commercial interests.

This violence was exorbitantly expensive. It was, of course, naval. European states in this era were never going to extract the funds to support this from their landed classes. As members of state themselves, they were unwilling to place the burden of the war on their own wealth. Even if they did, their wealth wasn’t liquid enough to fund wars. Instead, the very commercial interests that these wars were fought to protect had to bear the burden. They paid the customs taxes that funded these wars; they suffered from the difficult trade environment that these wars caused.

A century of conflict later, Navigation Acts brought what was now Britain into another war: the American Revolution.^c3 In response, James Anderson wrote a series of proposed articles called The Interest of Great Britain with Regard to her American Colonies. They looked to not just end the conflict, but completely restructure the global protection regime. Though it comes from a reading of the paradigms of a later phase of British imperialism, I contend that John Gallagher and Ronald Robinson’s definitional work on imperialism can inform a reading of Andersons’ articles. For them, imperialism is the “sufficient political function of this process of integrating new regions into the… economy.”^c4 I should qualify this by adding that for them, formal and informal empires vary not in type but in degree.^c5 That is to say, the only difference between formal and informal empires is the extent of the sufficient political function needed for economic integration. Whether a direct occupation is necessary or not, it is still imperialism.

I propose a reading of Anderson’s peace plan as an attempt to rework the protection regime to a more effective imperialism, as I’ve just defined it: that is, to reduce the sufficient political function of integrating the Americas into British commercial interests. It may have benefited its proposed European signatories insofar as it allowed them to profit off of this empire, too, but its central purpose was to draw up a protection regime that served British economic interests — something that he himself admits!

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The documents’ first article simply does away with the status quo protection regime by nullifying the sort of political agreements that animate it. The “treaties, immunities, and dependencies”^c6 states used to protect their merchant’s interests are all abolished. In their place, Anderson stipulates a free trade system structured to favor British commercial interests: both in direct economic ways and by ensuring a global system that maintains its hegemony in a peaceful (i.e. cheap) way.

First off, the terms for free trade in the Americas have a fundamental asymmetry. Almost any imports to America would be free,^c7 but exports would be subject to duties as the local authority sees fit.^c8 This means that imports to America — that is, British manufactured goods which America lacked the indigenous capacity to produce cheaply, if at all — would remain as cheap as possible for the American consumer. At the same time, any nascent American manufacturing production would be potentially subject to export duties. American manufacturers would have no chance at competing with the already established British ones, whose imports would be free.

This arrangement, though, is structured in such a way that all European states must have parity: export duties would be the same for all exporters. The root of the violence that made the existing protection regime unsustainable is absent. Again, though, this is particularly beneficial for British interests. Being the dominant naval power in this period, British shipping was the cheapest. If all exporters are subject to the same duties, then it’s the British ones who stood to be most competitive.

The exception to free imports is an intentional one: “conſumable provisions of all kinds” (i.e., food).^c9 To an extent, this assured stability. From the revenue, American states would have the means to provide the law and order necessary to facilitate the more lucrative (and free) trade of finished British manufactured goods. More importantly, though, this means that no matter what commercial duties the states levy, they would always be in British manufacturing interests. If put on exports, they would prevent any American manufacturing from becoming competitive. If put on food imports, they would drive food prices up, which would mean wages would need to increase to compensate, which once more would make American manufactures more expensive and American consumers more able to buy the cheap British manufactures.

Another stipulation holds that land duties in the Americas on exports must be no more than sea duties.^c10 This means that the system has a built-in incentive for a land-based, regionally integrated American economy, since exporters of American goods will find it cheaper to export on the continent than overseas. That integration, once again, benefits British manufacturers: it increases the size of the markets they can sell to. All of these stipulations are examples of Anderson’s efforts at sufficient political function of integrating the Americas into British economic goals. There is no need for direct colonial governance when the conditions of the trade favor them. There is no need for costly wars to gain exclusive rights for Britons either: this system of equal free trade is structured in British interests.

Still, though, Anderson’s imperialism requires some direct control. He concedes many of the Thirteen Colonies to the Republicans, but the cotton-growing south and the “town of New York” would remain under direct British control.^c11 Britain would maintain control of the territories that produce one of its most important material inputs (cotton) and the center of transatlantic trade, as the benefit of these territories is enough for the cost of governance. For the rest, the articles above are enough. The concession of independence in some regions but not others coheres with Anderson’s goals because, as Gallagher and Robinson remind us, they are not of a different type: they simply represent the continuum of sufficient political function necessary to integrate different regions into British commercial interests.

All of these policies were predicated on a surrounding hegemony that would enforce them. The equal access to free trade by all the proposed European signatories means that they, too, would have the opportunity to profit from the great wealth of empire. Consent is in their interest. This was contingent, though, on their agreement to an enforcement mechanism. Any state that operates outside of the stated trade regime^c12 or any states that helps them^c13 would be frozen out from the economic benefits of the empire and met with violence. To ensure the peaceful world order this system requires, any European power at war would be systematically denied access to the instruments of war by the signatories.^c14 You can’t fight a war without wood for building ships, and by this period, that wood was coming from abroad.^c15 In response to the preceding centuries of expensive violence, Anderson looks to make that violence untenable while ensuring that the peace in its stead is in British commercial interest.

Of course, this peace extends to Europe and its settlements, but it does not extend to the world. Anderson never says anything about going to war against non-colonized non-Europeans. If anything, his proposed protection regime would benefit from this, as this would fold new markets into it. His proposed protection regime puts European states’ self-interest not in opposition to each other, but towards the end of profit from an imposed free trade that first and foremost favors Britain. As he puts it:

If no principle of action is ſteady but ſelf-intereſt, it will follow, that theſe aberrations can never be ſteadily and uniformly repreſſed, unleſs by contriving that the ſelf-intereſt of many ſhall be hurt by the errors of only one… if we reflect on what might have been the conſequence to the manufactures and induſtry of nation; if the ſums of money above mentioned, instead of having been expended on the deſtructive operations of war, had been employed for the encouragement of domeſtic industry… our manufactures and commerce would now have been in a much more flouriſhing ſtate than at present.^c16

Anderson, predicting the logic of early- to mid-nineteenth century imperialism, invents a new imperialism in which the self-interests of other European states correspond to British manufacturing interests. He lays out a protection regime in which the sufficient conditions necessary to ensure economic integration — the costs of imperialism — are reduced by the very nature of the geopolitical structures that bracket global economic activity.