[MUSIC] So the tradition that Coke creates in the 1600s gets reused and literally republished in the 1640s and 1650s. Freeborn John, John Lilburne, for example, draws explicitly on that Cokian re-imagining of essentially a commonwealth tradition of English liberties. That tradition does not disappear. With the Whig party in the 1670s and 1680s that eventually after an attempt in the exclusion crisis, but certainly in 1688, topples Stuart tyranny. That creates a canon of political texts. Whether it is Cooke's institutes itself, whether it's Lilburne's writings, whether it's the writings of John Milton, of a whole series of Commonwealth political thinkers. Those authors get reprinted from the 1680s through to the 1770s. And it's that political tradition, John Wilkes is involved. The very important founder of reprinting, Thomas Hollis ensures that by the 1760s if you want to know about that political tradition you could buy cheap copies of pamphlets and writings of the 1650s. So we need to recognise that like William Penn, the first printer author of the Magna Carta in the new world, New England. The Englishmen that leave the country perhaps in the 1630s under fear of persecution. But by the 1680s they are leaving England to develop America in to an extension of the English state. And they take with them the political values that they've been educated in. Vast majority of them are Whigs, they're perhaps also religious dissidents. So in their own replication of an English Commonwealth abroad they used Magna Carta. So Magna Carta is written into all sorts of early constitutions in these federal states. And Magna Carta becomes, again, it does the same sort of work in Australia in the 19th and 20th century. It provides those communities with political and historical traditions. So when we get to the 1760s and the resistance, again, against a British tyranny, monarchial tyranny, those thinkers in the colonies are English thinkers. And they draw from the same set of resources. Literally recently republished in Philadelphia or Boston. Editions for example, the best example is Henry Care's English Liberties. First published in the late 1670s and 1680 as a handbook of civil rights, drawn from Magna Carta, citing Coke's Golden Passages. This is republished frequently in the colonies and becomes, if you like, a handbook of English resistance in the American colonies against royal tyranny. So we should think perhaps of 1776 not as the start of an American revolution, but as a continuation of that radical tradition that really was founded by Cook of resisting Stuart tyranny. And then resisting the tyranny of George III. So there is a continuity, both of community. The English men who were in the colonies, are Englishmen first and foremost. And there's a wonderful title of a very readable book that describes the 18th century in this way reminding us that London is the capital of America. So many times those English minds and English travelers come back to London and they buy books. They buy copies of Melbourne, they buy Hollis's edition of Milton or Hollis's edition of Locke. Or Hollis' edition of Tyrrell's reconstruction of the ancient constitution. So, we don't need to think of a break in tradition. It's a long tradition. And Bernard Bailyn's wonderful book, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, really reinforces that tradition. But there's also another book that you can access online. Caroline Robbins' The Eighteenth-Century Commonwealthman. Really establishes the connections between the British way of thinking in the later 17th century and that tradition in America in the 18th.
