An Empire on the Edge, which won the 2015 George Washington Book Prize, lives up to the aims of the prize, to honor “the year’s best new books on early American history, especially books that are written for a broad audience.” Bunker demonstrates that the rapid expansion of the British Empire during the eighteenth century, with its attendant economic and political crises, cost Great Britain its least profitable, but most symbolically important section of its empire.
Bunker’s thesis is that the expansion of the economic relationships between Asia and England, particularly speculative trade in tea from China and India created an economic bubble in England in 1770s. The Home Office’s solution to stave off the collapse of the East India Trading Company [it was “too big to fail”] was to move their excess stock of tea to the North American colonies to tax and sell. In telling this story, Bunker draws on the records of the East India Company, Parliamentary notices, newspapers accounts, and correspondence between Massachusetts Bay Colony’s beleaguered Governor Hutchison and Lord Dartmouth, the secretary for the Colonial office. Bunker easily darts between machinations of Lord North’s privy council, the schemes of banks trying to stay afloat, and the complexities of the crown juggling the competing demands of their Caribbean, North American and Asian interests.
The book’s sixteen chapters are divided into four sections: a prologue, which sets the stage in North America and in Britain; part one, which describes the development of the Asian market and the “tea bubble”; part two, describes a short-sighted, politically reactive solution to resolve the “tea bubble”; part three, the home office determines to regain control of her rebellious North American colonies. The book concludes with insightful essays on side issues: the meaning of treason and the value of currency in the 1770s. The volume concludes with endnotes organized by chapter. The Kindle edition of the book contains helpful links between the citation and the note.
Bunker uses vivid geographical and biographical vignettes to advance his thesis. The North American colonies were from the beginning generally administered with a light hand. As long as the tobacco, cotton, rice, and naval stores were sent to England and sugar from the Caribbean and furniture from the Midlands was purchased and sent back to the colonies, all was well. The North American colonies were essentially not a major issue on the plate of Lord North and his secretaries. The Prologue describes an eighteenth century North American setting where the boundaries between the English and French territorial claims were not made firm until after the Seven-Years War. The boundaries, moreover, were not well defended, and the New England colonists were ever pressing for definite permission to expand westward, something the Home Office was reluctant to allow because they did not want to exacerbate the Indians further. Setting this aside momentarily, Bunker shifts the focus of his narrative to the East.
Bunker focuses most of Part One on the trade with China for tea. He offers a lively account of various ships and captains negotiating with Chinese tea merchants. He describes the inner working of the East India Tea Company, and the company towns that they set up throughout Asia. Speculation on the price of tea, because it was such a profitable venture, eventually caused credit to be extended to far, and precipitated the banking crash in 1772 in England. This economic crisis was partially blamed on the work of tea smugglers who undercut the prices of legitimate wholesalers in England. Rhode Island was a regular destination for smugglers and an early effort by England to capture and commandeer smuggling ships met with resistance. Bunker highlights the burning of a Navy ship hunting for smugglers, the Gaspee, as an early precursor to the Boston Tea Party, which is the focus of Part Two.
Part two follows the political and economic machinations of Lord North and the East India Company as the company, determined to survive the crash, looked to the Treasury for a fix. Parliament, meanwhile, having been alerted by the Gaspee incident, was determined to get a better grip on the North American colonies, especially since their defense had cost so much money and manpower. The New England colonists, meanwhile, were aghast at the idea that the Gaspee perpetrators might be shipped back to Westminster for trial. It went against the British ideal of trial by a jury of your peers. Lord North could not touch them without solid evidence, and that was not forthcoming. Parliament wanted to make a statement to the colonials that they would be taxed, and Lord North needed a good place to dump a load of tea so that the price would drop precipitously and ruin the smuggling operations. The tea ships set sail for New York, Philadelphia, and Boston.
Part three describes in vivid detail the build-up to and the operation of the Boston Tea Party. The main characters are the Royal Governor, Thomas Hutchinson, whose family traded in legal tea and who had agreed to receive the tea when it landed. John Hancock and Samuel Adams rallied the colonials, both in Boston and its environs, and the Massachusetts committee for correspondence sent letters up and down the Atlantic coast seeking mutual support from her sister colonies. Lord North had no idea that the resistance would be so stiff. Bunker lays the blame squarely on General Gage, whose during his tenure in New York as commander of his majesty’s army did not include gathering intelligence or travelling about the other colonies. The colonies were at peace; he married a pretty New Jersey girl and settled down. Bunker also indicates that none of the colonial governors during the 1770s were particularly fonts of information for Lord Dartmouth in the Home Office. The only seemingly reliable source for information was letters from private correspondents and newspapers from the colonies. Bunker’s description of the Tea Party incident is the stuff that movie scripts are made from; muscular men dressed as Indians overpowered the ships crews and cracked open the tea chests on the ships and sent the leaves floating into the bay. Hutchison, not anticipating this sort of civil disobedience, had not allowed the ship’s captains to move back to sea to await a calmer environment for disembarking their cargo.
This incident hardened Parliament’s resolve to punish New England for their resistance to their authority. Part three traces the negotiations between Benjamin Franklin and Lord Dartmouth’s intermediaries. Bunker builds a case that lack of trust and communication between Franklin and Lord North, combined with the colonies’ recalcitrance on the matter of taxation, forced the issue. When Hutchison was recalled from his post as Governor of Massachusetts, General Gage was dispatched to replace him. He was ill-suited to the dual roles of politician and soldier, and, like the Home Office, was much too obsessed with the business at hand in Boston and its environs. The colonies had slipped out of the control of the Crown, and the Crown’s efforts to rein them in, at the insistence of Parliament. It was too little, too late. The colonies were too well organized and were too polarized, and Parliament too insistent for a light hand to manage the situation.
Bunker artfully makes his case that the Colonial office’s ad-hoc management of England’s colonial interests inevitably set up a situation where their oldest and most established colonies might break away. As long as North America trade was profitable, then the colonies were left alone. In this situation, they became increasingly self-governing, even with the presence of royal governors. Bunker makes the case that better communication, and even travel of leaders between the colonies and England, would have helped Lord North and his co-horts better understand the lay of the land in America, both geographically and politically. Their negligence was due to the burgeoning growth the Empire in the East, which is where the Empire focused after losing the North American colonies.
