Tea, the American Revolution, and Some New Books

The New Yorker is running a piece, written by Caleb Crain, entitled Tea and Empathy: Did Principle or Pragmatism Start the American Revolution?“

Crain concludes:

In the mid-twentieth century, historians trying to make sense of the paranoid style in American Revolutionary politics suggested that it derived from essayists on the fringe of the Whig Party in England who saw themselves as heirs of the men who had launched the English Civil War. Though marginal in England, these conspiracy theories seemed cogent in America, where colonists lived under governors with strong executive powers but no local constituency. Still, historically informed descriptions of what people believed don’t explain why colonists stood up for their principles only some of the time, and why they disagreed so acrimoniously that they were willing to dip one another in tar barrels. In a 1972 article, “An Economic Interpretation of the American Revolution,” Marc Egnal and Joseph A. Ernst suggested that the Revolution may have been triggered by the growth of British capitalism, which for decades flooded the colonies with easy credit and with manufactured goods that were better and cheaper than Americans could make themselves. The British were doing to us in the seventeen-sixties more or less what China is doing to us today. Merchants were the first to make their discontent political, because they were the first to see that the economic predicament could be eased if the colonies had the autonomy to, say, print paper money or trade with other nations. The people, for their part, may have hoped that boycotts of imported luxuries would limit their personal spending and encourage American manufacturing, which might, in time, employ them. But the people’s enthusiasm for the boycotts far outran the merchants’. In banning such items as funeral scarves and elaborate mourning dress, the colonists seem to have been admitting to powerlessness, as if their desire for British goods were itself the instrument of their subjugation.