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In June 1764, Ezra Stiles, the Congregationalist minister of Newport, Rhode Island, and future president of Yale College, was provoked by the policies of the new British Prime Minister George Grenville into musing about the rise and fall of empires. "The measures and despotisms of the crowns of France and Spain towards their provinces have been the cause which has prevented the growth of their colonies, between which and ours there is a confessed difference principally owing to our politics and liberty," Stiles informed his friend and fellow minister John B. Hubbard, "by means of which we have surpassed them, though they had a century's advantage of us in settlement." "Among the Greeks, Romans, and every colonization in the world, even those of Goths and Vandals," Stiles continued, "franchises, liberties, legislative powers were in the nature of things necessary to be granted to their adventurers." His wide-ranging reading in history had convinced Stiles that "there never has been any successful plantation in ancient ages or modern times without this."1Yet Stiles was a modern. When he came to examine the British Empire, and Stiles was a great admirer of the British empire-builder William Pitt the elder, he argued that its unique success was the result not of Britain's commitment narrowly to constitutional liberty, but to political economic prosperity.2"Whatever tends to render us a wealthy and flourishing people," Stiles concluded, "must naturally make us the most beneficial to the Mother Country."3
For Ezra Stiles and a wide variety of commentators on both sides of the Atlantic, the crisis that American historians have come to call the Stamp Act Crisis was in fact a much broader, even global, crisis in the political economy of empires. Stiles understood that in fact the events were part of the "worldwide struggles for liberty and revolution AD 1765 and 1766."4Stiles was right. As a consequence of the immense national debts accumulated during the Seven Years' War (1757-63), the French, Spanish, and British empires all ratcheted up their imperial policies of austerity and extraction. These new policies provoked colonial revolts that threatened to break apart these great European Empires in Quito, Vera Cruz, Saint Domingue, as well as in colonial North America. They also led...