The Imperial Public Sphere: The Press, Publicity, and the Destabilization of the British Empire, c. 1695–1765

Abstract The arrival of an English translation of The structural transformation of the public sphere in 1989 set anglophone historians about revising Habermas’s original explanation of the development of the public sphere in the eighteenth century. In particular, his ‘model case of British development’ came under fire. Notably absent from these many critical appraisals is consideration of the wider British empire. Herein lies the problem that this article addresses: the rise of a ‘British public sphere’ has been described in national terms, and as a result those communities that were living beyond the realm have been left out of the discussion. In essence, the dominance of the nation-state in historical studies has obscured another transitional phase through which a British public sphere began, and in the end failed, to integrate political communities in Ireland and the American colonies in the evolving political structures of the imperial state. By recovering the features of this ‘imperial public sphere’, and the colonial presses that brought it into existence, we can begin to transcend national frames of analysis and reassess where the national stories we have inherited fitted into the larger story of what was really still an age of empires.