The very model of an early modern Major General: Thomas Gage and the British Atlantic World, 1763-1775

The concept of an Atlantic Empire in the eighteenth century – an empire built on trade, the generation of wealth, a common language, and the shared concept of British 'liberty' – has attracted a great amount of historical interest and debate in the last few years. Historians have sought to explain the varying ways in which Britons in Great Britain were connected to their fellow subjects, and fellow Britons, in the American colonies. This paper seeks to examine and analyze the ways in which the leading military figure in the years immediately prior to the American Revolution – Major-General Thomas Gage, the Commander-in-Chief of the British Armed Forces in North America from 1763 to 1775 – provides us with an example of a member of the Atlantic Community. The paper is based largely on Gage's personal and professional communications with the various Secretaries of State with responsibility for the American Colonies. This communication was Gage's main, and most reliable, link to the British establishment. In the correspondence – which is both official, and personal and private in nature – we find a fascinating point-of-view of the developing crises in the American colonies throughout the 1760s and 70s, and also an account of how one man can be seen to be playing out his life's events in the Atlantic World