ABSTRACT
Economic discontent and oppression, industrial development and social dislocation - and perhaps even the example of the French Revolution - all gave a new urgency and vigour and a more popular and a more numerous following to reforming movements in England. The interest of English theoretical republicans in revolutionary America from 1774 until the end of the century was natural and perhaps even inevitable. About sixty different radical writers or agitators receive attention in the various modern histories of late eighteenth-century radicalism. Historians of the English republican tradition have explained how its exponents accommodated themselves to this form of constitutional government throughout most of the eighteenth century. These so-called republicans tried to reform aspects of it but they hesitated to declare it unconstitutional. Some radical writers argued that America gave the first example to the world of a government based on true constitutional principles.
