The Language of Liberty 1660-1832

• Introduction: the structure of Anglo-American political discouse; 1. Law, Religion and Sovereignty; 2. Constitutional Innovations and their English Antecedents; 3. The genesis of political discourse; 4. Transatlantic ties and their failure; 5. The Commonwealth paradigm; 6. Denominational discourse; 7. The implications of theological conflict; 8. Denominational dynamics and political rebellions; Part I. The Conflict Between Laws: Sovereignty and State Formation in the Uniter Kingdom and United States: 1. Law, nationality and nationalism: monarchical allegiance and identity; 2. The creation of the United Kingdom, 1536–1801: religion and the origins of the common-law doctrine of sovereignty; 3. Sovereignty and political theory from Justinian to the English jurists; 4. Natural law versus common law: the polarisation of a common idiom; 5. Sovereignty, dissent, and the American rejection of the British state; 6. Sovereignty and the New Republic: the American constitution in transatlantic perspective; Part II. The Conflict Between Denominations: The Religious Identity of Early Modern Societies: 1. Before redefinition: politics and religion in the old society; 2. Anglicanism as an agency of state formation: the question of establishment; 3. Canon law, heterodoxy and the American perception of tyranny; 4. The Anglican ascendancy as the hegemony of discourse; 5. The Anglican dream: harmony and conflict in the English parish; 6. The Anglican nightmare: sectarian diversity in colonial America; Part III. Predispositions: Rebellion and its Social Constituencies in the English Atlantic Empire, 1660–1800: 1. Rebellions and their analysis in the Anglo-American tradition; 2. Covenanters, Presbyterians and Whigs: resistance to the Stuarts in England and Scotland, 1660–1689; 3. Colonial American rebellions, 1660–1689, and transatlantic discourse; 4. The rights of Englishmen, the rhetoric of slavery, and rebellions in Britain and America, 1689–1760; 5. The right of resistance and its sectarian preconditions in north America, 1760–1799; 6. The rhetoric of resistance and its social constituencies in England and Ireland, 1733–1828: some transatlantic analogies; 7. Denominations, social constituencies and their activation; Part IV. Political Mobilisation: The American Revolution as a War of Religion: 1. The American Revolution as a civil war; 2. Predispositions, accelerators and catalysts: the role of theology; 3. Heterodox and orthodox in the Church of England; 4. The divisions and disruptions of English dissent; 5. Heterodoxy and rebellion in colonial America, 1760–1776; Conclusion: 'Desolating Devastation': The Origins of Anglo-American Divergence.

'Jonathan Clark is the most controversial historian of his generation. … constantly arresting, intellectually provocative and demanding … throughout the work of a first class mind. The book will be required reading for all those interested in the period …' Jeremy Black, The Times