South Carolina - Nation State

I didn’t realize until this past year how fragile is the very idea of a nation state. I sat through all those hours of undergraduate history classes dutifully remembering names and events in the Thirty Years War and the Hundred Years War and the Louis of France without much comprehension.

It turns out, this wasn’t all my fault. Steven Pincus believes it was the consequence of an English politician, Thomas Macaulay, who wanted people to think their past had been a bland, inevitable progression from the Magna Carta to the Hanovers who ruled when he was alive.

However, Bernard Bailyn, in his review of Pincus’ new book, argues the second overthrow of the Stuarts in 1688 was the consequence of competing views of a nation state, one dominated by a single man who inherited his position, and one dominated by a merchant elite. While men who favored a state argued about the form, he suggests there were still a great number who simply rejected the very idea of centralized power.

Except for New England, organized by merchants and dominated by Puritan congregations, many of the men who migrated to the colonies still held the medieval view of landed property owners as sovereign. Richard Dunn suggests none of the Caribbean colonies accepted the legitimacy of their proprietors, the Stuarts or Cromwell, and worked through their assemblies to defy any authority. Within the Macaulay tradition, most of these disputes have come to be described as instances of modern Englishmen demanding representation instead of medieval barons refusing to submit.

The proprietors themselves tended to see themselves as medieval barons in the tradition of the Bishop of Durham, Anthony Bek, who was granted extraordinary powers in exchange for protecting England on the Scots border in the late thirteenth century. The Earl of Carlisle, James Hay, demanded the vulnerable Charles I delegate similar powers to raise maintain an army, shire the land, and collect taxes, duties and quit rents in Barbados in 1627 that had been granted to William Alexander in Nova Scotia in 1621.

When Anthony Ashley-Cooper, the most active partner among the South Carolina proprietors, drew up the Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina in 1669 he assumed he had the same powers as Durham to organize the colony. The colonists simply refused to ratify it, and continued to reject every revision. Unlike the colonists who came with William Bradford to Plymouth, they didn’t propose an alternative constitution. They simply rejected any contract for government.

After Ashley-Cooper died in 1683, the Carolina colonists abandoned any pretense of accepting central authority. The large areas of settlement argued with each other, and people within the settlements quarreled among themselves. In 1719, the colonists simply took power from the proprietors and asked to become a royal colony, not for the benefits of order, but to ensure they were legally free of any existing rules or obligations.

Today, we call countries like Afghanistan run by territorial barons cum war lords failed states, when, in fact, like many of the Caribbean and Carolina planters they never entered into the world of nations. It was a fragile concept when James II was trying to implement it, and it remains so today.

Notes:
Dunn, Richard S. Sugar and Slaves, 1972.

Macaulay, Thomas. History of England, 1848-1855.

Pincus, Steven. 1688: The First Modern Revolution, 2009, reviewed by Bernard Bailyn in The New York Review of Books, 29 November 2009.