It can be easy to think of the American Revolution as a fire lit at the margins of empire, where distance made it hard for central authorities to wield control. The American colonists, we’ve come to understand, learned how to govern themselves partly because the British government was an ocean away. Then, when Crown and Parliament sought to assert more control, the homegrown spirit of self-government rose up to resist.
But this leaves out an earlier chapter, one centered not in Boston but in London, where the memory of Charles I—beheaded by order of a court established by the House of Commons in 1649—and the Glorious Revolution decades later had immense staying power for aristocrats and commoners alike. The theory of revolution, the demand for popular sovereignty, the idea of something called “the rights of man”—all of these developed earlier in London rather than in the colonies. Radical energy spread from the capital across the Atlantic as rabble-rousing dissidents fled London for fear of punishment, and as business and personal letters tied together conversations between the colonies and the mother country.
For every act that provided a drumbeat in the march to revolution in America, something similar had already occurred in Britain. In 1765, the American colonists rioted against a new tax on paper known as the Stamp Act. But in 1763, the British themselves had already rioted against a newly imposed tax on cider, one that hit ordinary people especially hard.
Or consider the Boston Tea Party. The fiercely self-reliant colonists were again protesting economic policies—a tax on tea that gave a protective advantage to the East India Company at the expense of colonial importers. But this came after protests by weavers in London: the so-called Spitalfield Riots. For a sustained period in the 1760s—years before Bostonians dumped shipments of tea into the harbor—weavers in Britain vandalized workshops and organized angry demonstrations to protest government policies that eroded their earnings.
Or take the Boston Massacre. In 1770, British soldiers fired into a crowd gathered outside the statehouse, a modest brick building adorned with a heraldic lion and rearing unicorn that was home to the royal administration in Boston. The soldiers killed five people and further provoked anti-British opinion. But two years earlier, in 1768, British troops in London had fired into a crowd of protesters on the grasslands at St. George’s Fields, just south of the King’s Bench Prison, and killed seven people. The protesters had been angered by the imprisonment of Wilkes. The killings at St. George’s Fields roused England’s radicals to more strenuous effort, just as the Boston Massacre would rouse the Americans.
