“Nothing less than a global conspiracy against liberty”

More from David Armitage, this time from a History Today round-up of historians discussing conspiracy theories that had real-world results:

Starting during the Stamp Act Crisis of 1765 and gathering steam in the following decade, white settler rebels dusted off 17th-century slogans to decry popery and, above all, ‘slavery’ in the evil designs of Westminster and even – in the most perfervid imaginings of Thomas Jefferson – George III himself.

After armed resistance broke out in British America, the Continental Congress issued a series of documents laying out nothing less than a global conspiracy against liberty directed first against the American colonies, then spreading to Ireland, the British Caribbean and South Asia. In response, many Britons believed a parallel conspiracy: that excitable descendants of Puritans and Roundheads were hellbent on independence from the British Crown and Parliament.

The collision of conspiracy theories inflamed and propelled divisions on both sides of the Atlantic, to form what the great early American historian Bernard Bailyn called ‘the ideological origins of the American Revolution’. The colonists’ fears may have been overblown and their invocation of ‘slavery’ hypocritical; meanwhile, metropolitan Britons’ prophesies became self-fulfilling in July 1776. Yet both showed that not every conspiracy theory is necessarily a con: to be actionable it just has to be credible.

The other authors in this column discuss the “Popish Plot,” the “Papal Octopus,” and a pair of mysterious deaths in the time of Tiberius.

(Shown above is Paul Revere’s 1774 version of “The Mitred Minuet,” copied from a British original. On either side of the Atlantic, this cartoon expressed wariness about the British government countenancing Catholicism as the established religion in Québec. In Boston, there was paranoia not just about Catholic bishops but Anglican ones as well.)