The Isle of Man and Britain’s Eighteenth-Century Empire

This article examines two debates concerning the British Empire. It discusses, firstly, the relationship between ‘centre’ and ‘periphery’ in imperial-colonial studies, using the case study of the Isle of Man, a jurisdiction over which the crown assumed the customs rights in 1765. Historians of Britain’s empire have long recognised similarities between constitutional structures in the colonies and the motherland, but have been less attentive to correspondences between jurisdictions within the British Isles and across the transatlantic empire. This essay explores their entanglements and parallels, and their impact on how contemporaries approached imperial and constitutional questions. A second, substantive contribution follows to questions over the character and periodisation of empire: whether these are defined by ‘salutary neglect’, mercantilism, episodic breaks, ideological constants, partisan in-fighting, or pragmatic muddling through in Britain’s case. In Man, all of these were arguably operative: from 1763, the government adopted an aggressive approach owing to a mixture of consensual shifts in thinking among political elites, ministerial zeal and peculiar circumstances relating to the Isle. Man lost its customs rights where America did not, but the island was not, like other parts of Britain's geographical ‘centre’, subject to greater submission. It retained a semi-autonomous status, like that of the American colonies before the 1760s and Britain’s remaining Atlantic dominions, owing to a mixture of principled and pragmatic considerations. In the Manx case, part of the British Isles was treated as an imperial ‘periphery’, displaying a varied and contingent approach.