3 - Jacobitism and anti-Jacobitism in the Atlantic public sphere

Summary

Religious controversies, the operation of imperial politics and the appointments system provided a mechanism for public and private expressions of both Jacobitism and anti-Jacobitism. Moreover, these religious and governmental systems served as institutional networks of communication, connecting colonists to the religious controversies and party politics of mainland Britain. However, the communication of a political culture deeply imbued with Jacobitism was not limited to institutional links. Ideas, images, news and attitudes also circulated via extra-institutional means such as newspapers, material culture, personal letters and family networks. Jacobitism, therefore, was as much a cultural phenomenon as it was a political or religious movement, thus proving to be a significant and enduring aspect of a transatlantic political culture. Indeed, it permeated nearly every aspect of British culture, including print, religion, poetry, architecture, medicine and politics.

Cultural conflicts did not dissipate after emigrants left Britain's shores nor did they evolve beyond recognition. Informal personal networks and an increasingly vibrant print culture provided a means of transmitting and sustaining multi-faceted and contested elements of British culture throughout the British Atlantic. Contested religious and political beliefs circulated around the Atlantic. So too did the news, pamphlets and broadsides which triggered or inflamed the disputes. In the colonies, as well as in Britain, both Jacobitism and anti-Jacobitism were important components of news and print culture primarily because they were deeply rooted elements of British society. Informational and cultural exchanges were communicated to and throughout the colonies via a migration of peoples and a lively print network, which together fed a shared extra-institutional Atlantic public sphere. This effectively knit together a transatlantic British public, thus creating a keen awareness among Whigs in the colonies of the perils posed by Jacobites, while simultaneously contributing to a transatlantic Jacobite subculture.

The British Atlantic was a dynamic world of cultural and information exchange. Ian Steele's unsurpassed study of communication and community in the English Atlantic demonstrates the extensive communication networks which connected the Atlantic world.2 Thousands of people from England, Scotland and Ireland crossed the Atlantic to settle in Britain's colonies. Thousands more connected the disparate regions together through an extensive and aggressive pursuit of trade and commerce. After their arrival in the colonies, colonists or merchants were kept apprised of British news by correspondence with friends and family or through interaction with the multitude of traders who dealt in both news and material goods.