Sometime in 1766 or 1767, Ezra Stiles, the popular minister of Newport, Rhode Island, and the future president of Yale College, catalogued the “struggles for liberty and revolution AD 1765 and 1766” around the world. For Stiles, as for many contemporaries, the agitations against the Stamp Act in North America, the West Indies, and Britain were part of a global phenomenon. Stiles noted that in “Europe” weavers took to the streets in Britain, Madrileños rioted against the policies of Leopoldo de Gregorio Marquis of Esquilache, and Corsicans took up arms to establish, albeit briefly, a form of republican government. In “America,” new imperial policies met fierce resistance in French Saint Domingue, New Spain, New Granada, and Peru. Stiles knew that the riots and celebrations that he witnessed first hand in Newport and Connecticut were a local instantiation of a trans-imperial phenomenon.
Stiles knew whereof he spoke. On both sides of the Atlantic a political economic crisis shook the great European empires to the core in the 1760s. The French, Spanish and British Empires emerged from the Seven Years War overwhelmed by ballooning sovereign debts. To avoid defaulting the leading ministers in all three states pursued austerity measures and sought new ways to raise revenues. In all three empires, these policies provoked massive popular resistance. Thousands, even tens of thousands, took to the streets in Madrid, in Quito, in Puebla, in Havana, in Saint Domingue, in Martinique, as well as in London. Wilkesite protests in Britain matched Parlementaire resistance throughout France. British American protests against the Stamp Act were part and parcel of pan-imperial protests against extractive imperial political economy.
All three great European overseas empires seemed on the brink of collapse in the 1760s. In all three cases, popular protests placed imperial state actors on the defensive. Many contemporaries believed that only the British Empire would survive the crisis. Yet, the French empire survived intact until the Haitian Revolution. The Spanish Empire was even more resilient, lasting through the Napoleonic invasion of Spain. It was the British American empire that broke apart in the 1770s. The question we should be asking is not why was there an American Revolution in the 1770s and 1780s, but rather why did the empire of the victors of the Seven Years War collapse well before that of its defeated imperial rivals?