Politics and Empire: James Macpherson’s Political Writings and the Crisis of Empire in the Late 1770s

Chapter 4 examines Macpherson’s three political book publications of the late 1770s, in which he defends the interests of the British state against the American colonists and the East India Company. While his writing focuses on contemporary politics, Macpherson’s approach and methodology is that of history writing. The History and Management of the East India Company combines a narrative of the Indian and imperial past with philosophical reflection, all underpinned with erudite and scholarly footnotes. The purpose of the History and Management is to defend the interests of the British state against the increasingly powerful (and corrupt) EIC, and to support his wealthy patron, the Nawab of Arcot. Yet, Macpherson uses techniques of Enlightenment history writing that are closer in approach and methodology to Robertson’s and Gibbon’s works on empire. The second half examines Macpherson’s political writing about the American revolutionary war, where he defends British imperial policy and attacks the American colonists (and their British supporters). Yet each pamphlet is written as history, and Macpherson uses the past to make an argument about the present, creating historical narratives that valorised the British imperial state and to cast its opponents as not just wrong, but as outwith history itself.