A History of Modern Europe - From the Renaissance to the Present

414 Ch. 1 1 • Dynastic Rivalries and Politics

disassociated themselves clearly from Wilkes, in part because of his rather
unsavory reputation and identification in upper-class eyes with “the
mob.” They were wary of demonstrations for universal male suffrage. Few
Whigs were willing to go beyond insisting on the principle of ministerial
responsibility.
Literary and “philosophical” societies, which had sprung up in most
large towns, facilitated the emergence of an even wider political culture
than that which had developed during the political crises of the seven­
teenth century. Inns and coffeehouses added special reading rooms to
accommodate their clientele. By 1760, London printing presses, the number
of which had increased from seventy-five in 1724 to about two hundred at
the time of Wilkes’s first arrest, churned out eighty-nine newspapers, four of
which were dailies. Another thirty-five newspapers were published outside
London. By 1790, there were fourteen daily London newspapers, and the
number of provincial papers had multiplied by four times. Political pam­
phlets, handbills, and caricatures inundated the capital and the larger provin­
cial towns. By the 1760s, artists stopped omitting the names of the targets of
their satirical wit. Like its Whig opponents and the extra-parliamentary radi­
cals, the government found itself obliged to utilize newspapers, pamphlets,
brochures, and handbills to argue its case before public opinion.

American Revolutionaries

During the 1760s, another challenge to the British crown was smoldering far

across the Atlantic Ocean in North America. The thirteen American colonies,

many times the size of England, had become ever more difficult for the

British government to administer. The population of the colonies, which

took in 20 percent of British exports and supplied 30 percent of its imports,

had grown by tenfold in just seventy years, from about 250,000 in 1700 to

more than 2.5 million in 1775, compared to about 6.4 million people in En­

gland at the same time. Those arriving in the colonies found a land of oppor­

tunity. Many were able to purchase land that would have been beyond their

means at home. Artisans and even common laborers commanded relatively

high wages because of the shortage of labor in the colonies.

Over the decades in the eighteenth century, the residents of the colonies

had developed a sense of living in a British-American society with its own

distinct culture. The North American colonies had developed without the

kind of centralized organization for economic exploitation and determina­

tion to conquer that had characterized the Spanish Empire. The English

settlement colonies had been founded in the quest for trade and economic

opportunity, as well as religious freedom, as in the case of Massachusetts

Puritans, and religious toleration, as in the case of Maryland Catholics.

Thus, the colonies’ insistence on the liberty of “freeborn Englishmen”

(and, after 1707, British subjects) was easily transferred into a demand for

a more encompassing liberty that included rejection of the idea that British