William Paterson and the Apotheosis of the Scoto-British View of the British Atlantic Empire, 1747–1762

This article reviews the career of William Paterson, a Scottish colonial administrator in the mid-eighteenth century. Using several understudied manuscript sources, it reconstructs his conflicts with local colonial institutions, his conception of Britain's imperial political economy, and his idea of the British Empire as an Atlantic polity. Though recent scholarship has argued for a patriot movement in the 1720s and 1730s and a conservative-reactionary response to radical Whiggism in the 1750s and 1760s, this article argues that Paterson represented a Scoto-British tradition and view of Britain's empire that had taken shape during the first half of the eighteenth century. It demonstrates links between his manuscript materials and the writings of Sir William Keith, a colonial official and imperial theorist, and James Thomson, a close friend of Paterson's. It suggests that their worldview, though grounded in the celebration of the Glorious Revolution, the 1707 Union between England and Scotland, the Hanoverian succession, and an imperial polity that was commercial and maritime, had become conservative by the second quarter of the eighteenth century. After 1763, Paterson's Atlantic vision of the British Empire became increasingly untenable with Britain's growing global empire, and ultimately unrealizable after American independence in 1776.