Parliament and property rights in the late eighteenth-century British Empire

Eighteenth-century political ideology, for long a subject which attracted little scholarly interest and even some disdain, has been illuminated in recent years by some extremely distinguished writing. “Whiggism” has been shown to be a house with many mansions, which have been separately identified and given labels, such as “court” and “country,” “true,” vulgar” and “scientific,” “republican” or “liberal.” ¹ Sophisticated analysis has revealed the scope for conflict between those adhering to different strands of Whiggism in Britain, or in revolutionary America, and, above all, between Whiggism in Britain and America as a whole. Yet even the most sensitive probing still encounters solid strata of common beliefs which united Whigs of all shades of opinion. Doctrines about property seem to have been one of the areas in which no substantial disagreement existed. The security guaranteed to property rights was universally considered to be one of the glories of any British system of government. Blackstone’s maxim that “The public good is in nothing more essentially interested than in the protection of every individual’s property rights” ² was taken as a universal truth. Nevertheless, as this chapter will try to show, in the later eighteenth century, from the 1760s to the 1790s, many people of British origin, not only in the American colonies but also in the West Indies, Canada, and India, were to complain that their property rights were far from secure. Americans ultimately came to see their resistance to Britain as the necessary defence of their property.