Atlantic '45: Gaels, Indians and the Origins of Imperial Reform in the British Atlantic.

This article offers a new explanation of the origins of imperial reform in the eighteenth-century British Atlantic. It does so by arguing that the efforts of Gaelic Jacobites in Ireland and Scotland, along with those of Native diplomats in North America, should be viewed as similar attempts to reshape the British empire by recourse to the French—and that in the period 1745–8 these attempts bore fruit. By comparing the efforts of imperial officials to cope with the Jacobite rising of 1745 and their failures in Indian diplomacy during the same period, the article posits the existence of an 'Atlantic '45', a shared crisis of diversity that prompted calls for imperial reform and shaped the way it played out in Scotland, North America and Ireland. As they struggled to repress the rebellion and win over Indian allies, imperial officials found that they could not gain control of Gaelic and Indian peoples without also gaining more control over their provincial subjects, an insight that lay at the heart of reform thinking for the rest of the century and put the empire on a collision course with provincial subjects' sense of what it meant to be British. By acknowledging the centrality of diversity and the important contributions of Gaelic and Indian peoples, the article offers a new way of understanding imperial reform and revolution, one that includes a richer and more complex cast and gives more purchase on the different trajectories of Ireland, Scotland, and North America both within and outside empire. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]