Lunch and Fellowship with Robert Paulett

Header Image: A new map of the British Dominions in North America; with the limits of the governments annexed thereto by the late Treaty of Peace, and settled by Proclamation, October 7th. [London, 1763] Map by Thomas Kitchin, 1784. Courtesy of the Library of Congress. 

About the Topic

This project is an exploration of three significant pieces of British policy that profoundly reshaped the history of their North American colonies (including starting the colonies on the path to Revolution: the Treaty of Paris in 1762, the Royal Proclamation of 1763, and the Plan of 1764 revising the Indian trade). The research has located the ideological origins of these policies in a particular vision of kingdom and nation developed by George III and his first and most trusted adviser, the Earl of Bute. Reading these three policies with these origins in mind reveals an effort to transform the North American colonies into a vision of what George and Bute believed an empire should look like--whole, balanced, harmonious, unified, and moral. That attempt to transform the colonies' relations with each other and with Britain set the stage for the conflicts to follow.

About Robert Paulett

Paulett is an Associate Professor of American History at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville. A near-total product of Virginia public education, he received degrees from James Madison University and the College of William and Mary. His 2012 book, An Empire of Small Places, explored the intersection of British ideas of landscape and the spaces of the Anglo-Creek trade. At Mount Vernon, he will be researching British policy in the early 1760s as a product of an emerging mid-eighteenth-century “aesthetics of empire.” He also writes about maps, mystics, and madmen.

Paulett is a recipient of the Society of Colonial Wars Fellowship.