ABSTRACT
In the 1760s and 1770s, those British colonists in America who voiced their discontent with aspects of government legislation moved incrementally, in pro-government publications, from being stalwart upholders of British imperial ambitions against the French to ‘canting, whining’ wretches and fodder for the Tyburn gallows. If ‘Britishness’ is a problematic term in relation to eighteenth-century perceptions of the self, ‘American’ is no less so. The term ‘American’, although commonly in use in the 1760s, defines for Jonathan Clark only a geographical residence, and not an agglomeration of certain views and interests. Pro-British rhetoric characterizes the British nation as united; its rational conduct in international affairs unimpeachable; and its relationship to other nations that of the elder statesman to the parliamentary ingenue. Just as the great towering flag of the Union proclaimed the might of the British Empire, the Ranger and the Indian announced (prematurely) its essentially American identity.
