Dartmouth Events

Event is sponsored by The Nelson A. Rockefeller Center for Public Policy and the Social Sciences.  Light refreshments will be served.

"Making a State in 1776: Political Economy, Imperial Politics, and the Declaration of Independence"

by Steven Pincus '84, Brad Durfee Professor of History, Yale University

After receiving the Declaration of Independence in July 1776, George Washington proclaimed to his troops in Manhattan that they could now see they were fighting on behalf of the privileges and rights guaranteed by the British constitution.  Why did Washington believe that fighting the British army entailed protecting the rights and privileges guaranteed by the British constitution?  To answer this question requires investigating the origins and development of a transatlantic Patriot political economy and its relationship tot eh British state.  That ideology demanded an activist state that would support immigration, oppose slavery, call for state support for socio-economic development.  By recovering the transatlantic Patriot ideas that informed the Declaration, it becomes to reinterpret America's founding document in fundamental ways.