Lawrence Henry Gipson

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Lawrence Henry Gipson (born December 7, 1880 in Greeley, Colorado ; died September 26, 1971 in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania ) was an American historian .

Gipson is best known for his fifteen-volume history of the British Empire at the time of the Seven Years' War (French and Indian War) and the American Revolution ( The British Empire before the American Revolution , published 1936–1970). He was regarded as one of the outstanding representatives of the so-called Imperial School of American historiography , which suggested a more objective view of the revolution and ultimately presented a pro-British reinterpretation of the events. Although Gipson's interpretation of the revolution no longer plays a role in historical discourse, his work is at least valued as a reference work because of its wealth of detail.

Life

Gipson, son of a journalist, grew up in Caldwell, Idaho . Here he attended high school and the preparatory Academy of the College of Idaho, but did not graduate from either school. After some time by doing odd jobs, he attended the University of Idaho from 1903 ( AB 1906). After graduating there he won one of the very first Rhodes scholarships , which enabled him to study at Oxford University ( BA 1907). At Oxford he initially toyed with the idea of devoting himself to Medieval studies , but ultimately decided to devote his studies to the history of the British Empire. The reason for this decision may be that, as a visiting student from the American provinces, Gipson was deeply impressed by Oxford's scholarship and wanted to prove himself worthy of it.

After returning to the United States, Gipson married Jeanette Reed in 1909 and began teaching at the College of Idaho . After a year as a Farnham Fellow at Yale University , where he studied with Charles McLean Andrews , he was Head of Department and Professor of History and Political Science at Wabash College in Crawfordsville , Indiana from 1910 to 1924. In 1918 he received his doctorate after another year of research at Yale with a thesis on the loyalist Jared Ingersoll , again supervised by Andrews. After its publication, the dissertation was awarded the Justin Winsor Prize of the American Historical Association in 1920 . In 1924 Gipson accepted an appointment at Lehigh University in Bethlehem , Pennsylvania, with which he remained connected until his death in 1971. Lehigh, founded as an engineering college, was to be expanded to a full university at that time. Gipson was given the task of establishing a new department for history and politics, which he headed until 1946. As a condition of his acceptance, he made the university management promise to be supported in his planned work on the American Revolution when the work was done.

The preparatory work for this planned work led Gipson further and further into the developments in the colonies and the British Empire as a whole that preceded the revolution. The planned introductory chapter finally turned into nine volumes - when he published the tenth volume of his Magnum Opus in 1961, he wrote in the foreword that this was the book he had hoped to write forty years ago. The first three volumes of The British Empire before the American Revolution were published 1936–1939 by his brother's publishing house in Idaho; with the fourth volume, the renowned publisher Alfred A. Knopf took over the series. After Gipson had resigned the chairmanship of the history faculty, Lehigh University set up a research professorship for him in 1947, which largely relieved him of his teaching duties. 1951-1952 he taught for a year as Harmsworth Professor of American History at Oxford University. In 1952 he retired, but Lehigh University continued to support him in completing the final volumes by creating a position as research professor emeritus for him . Gipson also received financial support from the Rockefeller and Carnegie Foundations and not least from his publisher Alfred A. Knopf, for whom The British Empire before the American Revolution was a foreseeable loss; no volume appeared more than a thousand copies, a large part of the edition went to libraries. During the decades of work on his overview work, Gipson rarely devoted himself to other projects such as the edition of the writings of the settler pioneer Lewis Evans (1939). In 1954 he wrote the volume The Coming of the Revolution, 1763-1775 , a brief summary of his oeuvre for the book series The New American Nation published by Harcourt Brace .

Gipson received honorary doctorates from Temple University (1947), Lehigh University (1951) and the University of Idaho (1953) in his academic career . For the sixth volume of The British Empire before the American Revolution he received the Loubat Prize from Columbia University in 1948 , the Bancroft Prize for the seventh volume in 1950 , and the tenth volume in 1962 with the Pulitzer Prize . In 1969, shortly before his death, the journal Pennsylvania History dedicated an entire issue to him.

Gipson died in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania in 1971. He bequeathed all of his fortune to Lehigh University, which used these funds to set up the Lawrence Henry Gipson Institute for Eighteenth-Century Studies , a research area on the 18th century, which still exists today .

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classification

In American historiography, in the tradition of George Bancroft , but also by British Whigs such as George Otto Trevelyan , the revolution was often portrayed as a heroic struggle for freedom against a tyrannical monarchy.After 1900, American historians in particular increasingly questioned the ideological premises and the nationalist pathos of such a monarchy Presentation. At the beginning of the century two new “schools” of historiography emerged: on the one hand the Progressive School around Charles Beard , which described the revolution as a class conflict, and on the other hand the so-called Imperial School around Charles McLean Andrews , Levi Osgood and George L. Beer which demanded a de-ideologized, scientifically objective representation of the colonial era. This was accompanied on the one hand by an emphasis on the history of institutions (contrary to an event-historical or biographical method) and on the other hand by the conviction that the revolution can only be represented and interpreted in the overall structure of the British Empire. While American historiography had relied almost exclusively on American archives from its beginnings with Jeremy Belknap to Bancroft and beyond, Andrews and later Gipson made the relevant material accessible in Europe, particularly in the London Public Record Office . While Andrews still had the objective presentation of historical facts through a source-critical methodology over their interpretation, Gipson's work had a noticeably pro-Critical tendency from the beginning; Some reviewers such as Jackson Turner Main explained this attitude, which is strange for an American historian, not least with the assumption that Gipson might have relied too much on the English archives over the American archives and that the "official" British view ultimately rubbed off on him.

Robert Middlekauff sees in the probritic tenor Gipsons the decisive difference to the imperials of the previous generation: if Andrews had ascribed the economic and political flourishing of the colonies to a fortunate coincidence, for Gipson this was to the credit of the British government, which selflessly and far-sighted the further development of their colonies I deliberately planned colonies for the benefit of the colonies and the empire as a whole. Gipson also questions the idea of ​​a salutary neglect in political terms. While Andrews shared the traditional view that the British Parliament had little interference in the internal affairs of its colonies before the Seven Years War, Gipson insisted that such interference was commonplace and taken for granted before 1750. The complaints of the revolutionaries about the restrictions introduced after 1750 therefore appear to Gipson as a rhetorical maneuver without any factual basis.

The British Empire before the American Revolution

The British Empire before the American Revolution is a comprehensive overview of the economic, social and political development of the British Empire from 1748 to 1776, with a special focus on the colonies in North America and their revolt, which culminated in the Declaration of Independence of the United States in 1776 . Gipson underscored his claim to completeness with interspersed chapters on developments on the periphery of the empire, such as India, Newfoundland and Gibraltar. The first of the fifteen volumes presents the political development of the British Isles, in particular the closer ties between Ireland and Scotland and England in the United Kingdom (which, according to Gipson, could have modeled the British colonization of North America). The development of the colonies up to 1748 is the subject of volumes II and III. Volumes IV and V describe the prehistory of the Seven Years' War , volumes VI and VII the course of the war. In the following four volumes, Gipson traces how the efforts of Great Britain to reorganize the world empire after the Peace of Paris in 1763 led to the American Revolution and ultimately to the loss of the Thirteen Colonies . The last three volumes offer a summary, a historiographical overview as well as a detailed bibliography and archive overview.

Gipson's work speaks of an undisguised admiration for the Empire - the coat of arms of the United Kingdom adorns the covers of all 15 volumes as blind embossing ; Volume VI is even dedicated to the "thousands of soldiers from the British Isles" who fell in the "Great War for the Empire" and "lie in unknown graves here in the New World." The United Kingdom was unique in the mid-18th century been his liberty; No other state has offered its residents such a degree of freedom of conscience and freedom of the press, local self-government and legal security, even those in its colonies. The Empire was able to bring the most diverse peoples, religions, cultures and mentalities peacefully into harmony with one another in a pax britannica . Not only could the colonies now enjoy the constitutionally guaranteed “English freedoms”, thanks to a forward-looking mercantilist trade policy, they too had flourished economically.

The Empire reached its zenith with the victory in the Seven Years' War , when most of the French colonial empire fell to Great Britain with the Peace of Paris in 1763 . The outcome of the war - for which Gipson coined the term "The Great War for the Empire" - he sees as the real world historical event of the 18th century, since the fate of North America was decided in this conflict. The fact that the victory over France ensured that the future of the continent would be English at least in spirit and language was therefore more decisive than the outcome of the American Revolution. While American historiography had previously described the war as a prologue to the revolution, Gipson always represented the revolution as a consequence of the war. Gipson emphasizes the sacrifices that Great Britain made for the security of its colonies; Unlike American historiography, the “ French and Indian War ” was by no means a proxy war that unexpectedly embroiled the colonies in distant European conflicts, but rather an American war from the outset, caused by advances driven by material self-interest of the colonists in the hinterland claimed by the French beyond the Appalachians . The colonies would never have been able to resist the French superiority on their own, so they relied on the support of the mother country.

British policy towards its colonies after 1763 also justifies Gipson in view of the enormous military and, ultimately, financial efforts it had made to defend it during the war. In Volume X, for example, he traces in detail, colony by colony, how the individual colonies were generously compensated for their part in the campaigns from the British treasury. As early as 1931, he had described the rapid debt relief of the Connecticut colony in an article and came to the conclusion that this colony had ultimately diverted more money from the London treasury than it was entitled to through a systematic balance sheet falsification to the disadvantage of the Board of Trade in the post-war period . While the British national debt soared to unprecedented heights due to the interest on the war bonds and the British population was burdened by ever new taxes, the colonies were largely debt-free by 1765. Trade restrictions such as the various navigation acts and customs and tax laws such as the Sugar Act 1764 and the Stamp Act 1765, with which the British government now also taxed the colonies, do not appear disproportionate to him: "Given the impressive growth of the North American colonies," said Gipson, it is hardly presumptuous to conclude that these restrictions would hardly have seriously impaired the rise of the colonies. The colonists' constitutional objections ( no taxation without representation ) were rejected by Gipson as not valid. Regarding the supposed “oppression” of the colonists, he remarked:

"The reader should not be misled by some of the pronouncements of colonials in their perfectly legitimate striving for political equality after 1763. For when they branded the conduct of the government of Great Britain as tyrannical, this accusation came, it must be remembered, from." lips and pens of people who had become the freest, most enlightened, most prosperous, and most politically experienced of all colonials in the world of the eighteenth century. The very fact that such statements could be freely printed and circulated was surely not evidence of British tyranny but rather of British indulgence and the flowering within the Empire of ideas of English liberty. "

“The reader should not be misled by the claims of some of the colonists who, after 1763, legitimately sought political equality. For if they castigated the government of Britain as tyranny, one must remember that the accusation came from the mouth and writings of men who were the freest, enlightened, wealthy and politically experienced of all the colonists. The mere fact that such opinions could be printed and circulated is certainly not a sign of British tyranny, but rather of British forbearance, a sign that the idea of ​​English freedoms bore fruit in the [enlarged] Empire too. "

- So in: The British Empire before the American Revolution , Volume XIII, pp. 204-205.

If you look at the leading revolutionaries (e.g. James Otis Jr. or Patrick Henry ), it becomes clear that the revolution was fueled by the merchant elites of the port cities and the quasi-aristocratic planter class , who were at least as interested in the preservation of property as they were in the promised political freedoms . The tax-privileged Americans therefore refused, out of self-interest, to accept even a tax burden that was conceivably small compared to the motherland and thus to take on part of the responsibility for the entire Empire. Gipson underscored the disloyalty of the American merchant class to the motherland with succinct remarks about how they had increased their prosperity during the war through prohibited trade with the war enemy France. In his 1967 résumé, Gipson wrote that after all these years of research he had come to the conclusion that the American colonists "revolted not to create a new social order but to get rid of interference from the British government," which they only dared when the mother country had made great efforts to save them from the threat from the French.

The historian John Shy sees the colonists in Gipson's description not only portrayed as "ungrateful children"; the endless quarrels that filled the thirteen volumes symbolically conveyed to him the sheer impossibility of formulating a rational explanation for the revolution:

“His stories vividly show the reader the unruliness of the American colonists; Gipson was fascinated by the relationships between the colonies, and between the regions within the colonies. He described the history of land and border disputes, lease conflicts and tax collectors until pre-revolutionary America was portrayed as anarchy [...]. Never before has a historian shown so convincingly that Americans were mad, that their anger was disproportionate to the grievances, their fears to the dangers; [...] the American Revolution must therefore, at least as far as its cause is concerned, be viewed as grotesque. "

- John Shy : The Empire Remembered: Lawrence Henry Gipson, Historian , pp. 129-130.

At the end of the series, Gipson pondered counterfactual speculations such as the questions of whether the revolution could have been averted and whether the USA - similar to Canada or Australia later - would not have found a livelihood in a kind of Commonwealth in a global English-speaking empire.

reception

Gipson's position in American history is ambivalent: it is true that his achievements, especially his research in dusty archives, have been generally recognized and appreciated by his reviewers; Michael Kammen even described Gipson in a 1966 review as the “doyen of Anglo-American historians.” On the other hand, Bernard Bailyn stated that the “monument” that Gipson created “casts no shadow.” One reason for Gipson's name In the historical discourse during his lifetime, it may be that his theses were barely discernible among the sheer mass of details before Gipson summarized them in Volume XIII in 1966. But when he finished his series, it already appeared out of date for content and methodological reasons, Gipson as a representative of the Imperial School as the "last of its kind".

The main reason for this muted response, however, is Gipson's undisguised enthusiasm for British imperialism . His pro-British reinterpretation of the American colonial era is noticeably shaped by the zeitgeist of the middle of the 20th century, when a new alliance of the English-speaking nations promised to usher in a new "Anglo-Saxon" dominated era in world history in the two world wars. As early as the 1960s, however, his praise for the Empire seemed noticeably out of date. While the second British Empire spanned large parts of the globe when the first volume of The British Empire before the American Revolution was published in 1936, it had largely disbanded by the time the series was completed in the late 1960s.

Gipson was barely able to keep pace not only with political developments, but also with methodological and theoretical developments in historical studies. He wrote his concluding consideration of the reasons for the revolution in 1967, the very year that Bernard Bailyn's The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution appeared, a diametrically opposed interpretation of the revolution that has shaped the historical discourse on the revolution ever since. While Gipson, like English Tory historians before him, had characterized the revolution as a basically conservative movement, the “ Neo-Whigs ” like Bailyn emphasize the innovative or even radical character of the social conception that grew out of the revolution. Bailyn accused Gipson in his review of the XII. Band proposed to completely neglect this ideological background as the driving and formative force of the revolution. Although Gipson took note of Bailyn's work in the historiographical overview in the following volume, critics continued to accuse him of not dealing with these and other new explanations of the revolution (such as those of the " new social history " of the 1960s). Francis Jennings, for example, who presented an ethnohistorical history of the Seven Years' War in America in 1988, sharply criticized Gipson in the preceding research overview for his pro-British tendency, his degradation of Quaker pacifism in the chapters on Pennsylvania, and for his willful neglect of the Indians as actors; in all, the 15 volumes of The British Empire before the American Revolution contained "a disturbing amount of false information."

Works

A complete bibliography of all Gipson's publications up to 1969 can be found at:

All of Gipson's works that have appeared in book form are listed below:

The British Empire before the American Revolution (15 volumes, 1936–1970; Volume 1–3: Caxton Printers, Caldwell, Idaho; Volume 4–15: Alfred A. Knopf, New York)

  • I: Great Britain and Ireland (1936)
  • II: The Southern Plantations (1936)
  • III: The Northern Plantations (1936)
  • IIV: Zones of International Friction: North America, South of the Great Lakes Region, 1748–1754 (1939)
  • V: Zones of International Friction: The Great Lakes Frontier, Canada, the West Indies, India, 1748–1754 (1942)
  • VI: The Great War for the Empire: The Years of Defeat, 1754–1757 (1946)
  • VII: The Great War for the Empire: The Victorious Years, 1758-1760 (1949)
  • VIII: The Great War for the Empire: The Culmination, 1760–1763 (1954)
  • IX: The Triumphant Empire: New Responsibilities within the Enlarged Empire, 1763-1766 (1956)
  • X: The Triumphant Empire: Thunderclouds Gather in the West, 1763–1766 (1961)
  • XI: The Triumphant Empire: The Rumbling of the Coming Storm, 1766-1770 (1965)
  • XII: The Triumphant Empire: Britain Sails into the Storm, 1770–1776 (1965)
  • XIII: The Triumphant Empire. Part I: The Empire beyond the Storm, 1770-1776; Part II: A Summary of the Series; Part III: Historiography (1967)
  • XIV: A Bibliographical Guide to the History of the British Empire, 1748–1776 (1969)
  • XV: A Guide to Manuscripts Relating to the History of the British Empire, 1748–1776 (1970)

Other

Gipson's estate and library are kept by the Lawrence Henry Gipson Institute at Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania.

literature

  • Patrick Griffin: In Retrospect: Lawrence Henry Gipson's The British Empire before the American Revolution. In: Reviews in American History , Volume 31, 2003, Issue 2, pp. 171-183.
  • ARM Lower: Lawrence H. Gipson and the First British Empire: An Evaluation . In: Journal of British Studies Volume 3, 1963, pp. 57-78.
  • Jackson Turner Main: Lawrence Henry Gipson: Historian . In: Pennsylvania History , Volume 36, 1969, Issue 1, pp. 22-48 (also in: William G. Shade: Revisioning the British Empire in the Eighteenth Century: Essays from Twenty-five Years of the Lawrence Henry Gipson Institute for Eighteenth Century Studies, Associated University Press, Cranbury NJ 1998. pp. 27-54).
  • Robert Middlekauff : The American Continental Colonies in the Empire . In: Robin W. Winks: The Historiography of the British Empire-Commonwealth: Trends, Interpretations and Resources. Duke University Press, Durham, NC. Pp. 25-45.
  • Richard B. Morris: The Spacious Empire of Lawrence Henry Gipson . In: The William and Mary Quarterly . Third Series , Volume 24, 1967, pp. 169-189.
  • John M. Murrin: The French and Indian War, the American Revolution and the Counter-Factual Hypothesis: Reflections on Lawrence Henry Gipson and John Shy . In: Reviews in American History , Volume 1, 1973, pp. 307-318.
  • William W. Shade: Lawrence Henry Gipson's Empire: The Critics . In: Pennsylvania History , Volume 36, 1969, Issue 1, pp. 49-69.
  • John Shy: The Empire Remembered: Lawrence Henry Gipson, Historian . In: John Shy: A People Numerous and Armed: Reflections on the Military Struggle for American Independence . Oxford University Press, New York 1976, pp. 109-131.
  • J. Barton Starr: Lawrence Henry Gipson . In: Dictionary of Literary Biography . Volume 17, Gale Research Co., Detroit 1983, pp. 187-190.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Biographical information in the following from: J. Barton Starr: Lawrence Henry Gipson .
  2. ^ John Shy: The Empire Remembered: Lawrence Henry Gipson, Historian , p. 112; See Gipson's autobiographical reflections . In: Pennsylvania History 36, No. 1, 1969, pp. 10-15.
  3. ^ John Shy: The Empire Remembered: Lawrence Henry Gipson, Historian , p. 114.
  4. ↑ The Lawrence Henry Gipson Institute at lehigh.edu.
  5. ↑ Patrick Griffin: In Retrospect: Lawrence Henry Gipson's The British Empire before the American Revolution. P. 172. Gipson's formulation of this approach can be found in: Gipson: The Imperial Approach to Early American History . In: Ray Allen Billington (Ed.): The Reinterpretation of Early American History: Essays in Honor of John Edwin Pomfret . The Huntington Library, San Marino, CA 1966.
  6. ↑ Jackson Turner Main: Lawrence Henry Gipson: Historian , p. 27.
  7. ^ Robert Middlekauff: The American Continental Colonies in the Empire , pp. 29-30; 40-42.
  8. ^ The British Empire before the American Revolution , Volume VI, p.
  9. ↑ The British Empire before the American Revolution , Volume XIII, pp. 175-176.
  10. ^ The British Empire before the American Revolution , Volume III, pp. 4ff.
  11. ^ Connecticut Taxation and Parliamentary Aid Preceding the Revolutionary War . In: The American Historical Review 36, 1931, No. 4, pp. 721-739.
  12. ↑ The British Empire before the American Revolution , Volume XIII, pp. 190-194, pp. 198-202.
  13. ↑ Cf. Lawrence Henry Gipson: The American Revolution as an Aftermath of the Great War for the Empire, 1754–1763 . In: Political Science Quarterly 65, 1950, Issue 1, pp. 103ff.
  14. ^ The British Empire before the American Revolution , Volume XIII, p. 215.
  15. ↑ The British Empire before the American Revolution , Volume XIII, pp. 211-212. See John M. Murrin: The French and Indian War, the American Revolution and the Counter-Factual Hypothesis: Reflections on Lawrence Henry Gipson and John Shy . In: Reviews in American History , Volume 1, 1973, pp. 307-318.
  16. ↑ Michael G. Kammen: Review of The Triumphant Empire: The Rumbling of the Coming Storm, 1766-1770 and The Triumphant Empire: Britain Sails into the Storm, 1770-1776 . In: The New England Quarterly 39, 1966, No. 4, p. 554.
  17. ↑ Patrick Griffin: In Retrospect: Lawrence Henry Gipson’s The British Empire before the American Revolution, p. 172, pp. 176–177.
  18. ↑ See Bailyn's review of Volume XII in the New York Times of July 3, 1966 (also reprinted in: William W. Shade: Lawrence Henry Gipson's Empire: The Critics. Pp. 68-69).
  19. ^ Francis Jennings: Empire of Fortune: Crowns, Colonies, and Tribes in the Seven Years War in America . WW Norton, New York / London 1990. pp. Xxi.
This version was added to the list of articles worth reading on May 8, 2011 .
personal data
SURNAME Gipson, Lawrence Henry
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American historian
DATE OF BIRTH December 7, 1880
PLACE OF BIRTH Greeley, Colorado
DATE OF DEATH September 26, 1971
Place of death Bethlehem, Pennsylvania