Introducing The Pamphlet Debate on the American Question in Great Britain, 1764-1776

Reading Room readers, meet your revolutionary new friend: The Pamphlet Debate on the American Question in Great Britain, 1764-1776 Collection. 

Liberty Fund is working closely with the eminent historian Dr. Jack P. Greene to bring you a selection of British pamphlets from 1764-1776 that discuss the “American Question,” that is, what should the British do about those colonists clamoring for independence across the waters. More than 400 pamphlets will eventually be available in a modern, easily searchable, digitized form. The pamphlets address questions about independence, citizenship, responsibility, and what it means to be free. 

Jack P. Greene is the Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the Humanities, Emeritus at Johns Hopkins University, where he was a member of the Department of History for thirty-nine years. He has published widely on colonial British America and the American Revolution. He is also the editor (wth Craig B. Yirush) of Exploring the Bounds of Liberty: Political Writings of Colonial British America from the Glorious Revolution to the American Revolution which you can purchase here. 

These pamphlets constituted the first, most intensive, and most sustained public examination of the foundations and distribution of constituted authority within the British Atlantic Empire. Before there were op-eds and white papers and C-SPAN, there were pamphlets. Some stand on their own but many are part of ongoing conversations with explicit challenges, direct and indirect responses, and, what will be surprising to no historian, many insults and some name-calling. 

The first three pamphlets we published to the collection in July 2024 were a sample of many responses to Samuel Johnson’s Taxation no Tyranny; An Answer to the Resolutions and Address of the American Congress. August brings six more pamphlets including additional responses to Johnson as well as our second pamphlet with a known author. Edward Bancroft’s  Remarks On The Review of the Controversy Between Great Britain and Her Colonies which is directed against George Grenville, Minister of the Treasury. E

We have also published pamphlets that scholars suspect were written by Gervaise Parker Bush and Hugh Williamson but were published anonymously. Many pamphlets were published with no author’s name attached, or were signed, “Anonymous.” This was sometimes done to protect writers' reputations and even their personal safety when the ideas expressed were radical or politically and legally dangerous.

Many of these pamphlets have only been available from archives but on our site they are freely available to anyone with internet access. They have been digitized to improve searching, sharing, and quoting the content of the pamphlets. These pamphlets will reward those who study them carefully but are also accessible to interested non experts. Many of the issues--like taxation, empire, and trade--are still alive in today’s debates or only slightly transformed in the over 200 years since their publication. We are proud to make their discovery and study easier. And if you are interested in what modern scholars have to say about the pamphlets, be sure to explore A Call To Liberty every month for fresh commentary and discussion of aspects of pamphlet content and culture. 

More pamphlets will be published to this collection every month so be sure to check back regularly. We hope you will read them, learn from them, question them, and share them with others.