The exploration of eighteenth-century empires seems to require a wide-angle lens. Over the last three decades, Atlantic and global histories have uncovered a staggering multiplicity of imperial experience, the complexities of which transcend convenient binaries like subject and alien, periphery and center, and empire and home. In recognition of the pervasiveness of interimperial engagement in the Atlantic world, moreover, historians have been less and less inclined to focus on individual powers, often choosing to study the ways in which Spain, Britain, France, and others were bound up in one or more hemispheric systems. More entangled in today’s scholarship, empires are also far more extensive, stretching beyond the Atlantic and Indian Oceans into the vast and, for many historians of Anglo-America, unfamiliar Pacific. The internal diversity, interconnectedness, and global reach of European empires make them more imposing as subjects than ever before.1
No wonder so few scholars of empire are working microhistorically. The scarcity of imperial biographies is unfortunate, however. When approached in a way that eschews the representative individual and Great Person theories of history, biography is uniquely well-suited to the challenges of studying and writing empire.2
The term biography, as I understand it, applies to any work of nonfiction that attempts to reconstruct an individual life. There are many different types of biography, in many different media. Even within the category of print (as opposed to film, television, or painting), some biographies are more subject-centric than others. The work of historian Alfred Young, for instance, is arguably more concerned with patriotic myth-making and the fluidity of identity in early America than the personal truths of its subjects.3 Academic historians embrace this type of inquiry as “microhistory,” while keeping “biography” at arm’s length. If “biography is largely founded on a belief in the singularity and significance of an individual’s contribution to history,” Jill Lepore has written, “microhistory is founded upon almost the opposite assumption: however singular a person’s life may be, the value of examining it lies in how it serves as an allegory for the culture as a whole.”4 Kenneth Silverman conceives the distinction another way: “History concerns what Napoleon did; biography concerns what it meant to him.”5
But why the need for such a bright line between the genres? The examined life is most useful and engaging when it is a means to an end as well as an end in itself. In that spirit, I have attempted to balance the imperatives of “biography” and “history” in the foregoing narrative, following Dunmore’s path through the British Empire while elaborating on certain salient features of the political cultures he inhabited.
Dunmore was an unusual figure. Despite a family history of armed opposition to the House of Hanover, he managed to obtain a commission in the British army, a seat in the House of Lords, and three executive appointments in the American colonies. The influence he had, though moderate in the grand imperial scheme, gave him the latitude to safely break with convention in a number of ways. In addition to his controversial proclamation of emancipation, he undertook an unauthorized Indian war in the Ohio Valley. Later, he purchased Native American slaves at a time when the African (let alone Indian) slave trade was facing tremendous popular opposition. Ever bending and breaking the rules in defense of the system that ensured his privilege, Dunmore was a transgressive imperialist. As such, he provides an opportunity to explore the boundaries of what was possible in the Atlantic world at the end of the eighteenth century.
No matter how extraordinary their personalities or circumstances, individuals are contact points. To follow a name through the historical record is to encounter a prolific array of people, places, and ideas. Dunmore’s story involves slaves, free blacks, indentured servants, poor white fishermen, frontiersmen, land speculators, Scots merchants, patriots, loyalists, princes, kings, the French, the Dutch, the Spanish, Shawnees, Delawares, Cherokees, Creeks, and a host of others. He even had a vibrant symbolic life in print, with American propagandists depicting him crossing the racial and sexual boundaries within which they struggled to define the inchoate political community called “America.” Rather than isolating and analyzing the experiences of all these groups, I have tried to treat Dunmore as the epicenter of a web of interrelations. This strategy was dictated, in part, by available source material, for while Dunmore left an emphatic public imprint, very little of his personal correspondence survives. In many places, I have attempted to evoke the richness of the worlds he inhabited rather than speculate about his interior life.
This approach complements the encyclopedic mode in which some of the most important imperial history has been written in recent decades. For instance, The Oxford History of the British Empire, while an invaluable resource, treats Great Britain as though it were a collection of discrete units rather than the amorphous set of interconnected parts that it was.6 By assuming the organizational structure of the subject’s life, an integrated biographical narrative is better able to approximate the disordered unity of this past. Stories are constructed things, of course, that arrange events in ways in which they were not experienced.7 But the tendency to disaggregate, categorize, and dissect, while essential to virtually all humanistic inquiry, invites potentially even greater distortions that threaten to leave readers adrift in a sea of texts without context. Historian Stephen Oates has noted that the biographer, like the Victorian novelist, has the power to provide “a panoramic view of an age,” one in which attention to parts does not obscure the whole.8 The goal for biographical historians of empire, then, should be to deliver a single imperial experience in stereo—something that, in the context of the Atlantic world, necessarily involves all sorts of other people.9
As long as its practitioners recognize the historical realities of colonial hierarchies without reproducing the fallacies that sustained them, imperial biography need not flow from the bottom up in order to illuminate obscure lives. Dunmore’s career provides access to the experience and influence of a wide range of people. Regrettably, we cannot know enough about Diana and Sprightly, the Indian slaves who lived and worked on Dunmore’s plantation in 1788, for a prosopography let alone individual biographies. What little we do know needs to be told, however, and not merely because it has not been done already. When considered alongside Dunmore’s conflicted history with indentured servitude and black slavery, Diana’s and Sprightly’s stories suggest that the racial basis for freedom in the late-eighteenth-century Atlantic world was still far less rigid than it would soon become. To take another example, the actions and ambitions of women were central to Augusta Murray’s marriage to Prince Augustus Frederick, a controversy rich with public significance. Over the course of Dunmore’s career, people outside formally established structures of authority were continually making “political history,” even in the old-fashioned sense of that term.
While I have tried to treat Dunmore himself as an individual—something more human than the caricature that appears elsewhere—it has been just as important to me to humanize those who helped shape his life. Not every reasonably well-documented figure can boast the same volume and variety of associations as Dunmore. But those skeptical about the availability of potential subjects for this sort of history would do well to remember John Donne, whose famous observation that no one is an island unto itself rings particularly true in the diverse, entangled, and expansive worlds of eighteenth-century empire.10