Space as Gravitational Field: The Empire and the Atlantic in the Political Thought of Thomas Pownall

This article surveys the concepts of space and power in the political thought of Thomas Pownall, governor of the Province of Massachusetts Bay before the Stamp Act crisis and later a member of Parliament. Looking at Pownall’s administrative treatises and parliamentary speeches as sources for a conceptual analysis, I intend to assess Pownall’s political and theoretical involvement in the transformations of his time. Pownall traced a connection between property and power that emerged from his analysis of society and government. In determining the position of power in space, property became the factor which organized space itself. Scaled up in the Atlantic, this connection between property and power influenced Pownall’s reflection on the American Revolution and on Anglo-American relations in the aftermath of independence. Pownall faced the revolutionary developments of his age by articulating new spatial assemblages: his changing response to the American Revolution took the form of two proposals that demanded a constitutional incorporation of the colonies and a federal organization of the North American empire in the 1760s and 1770s, respectively. After American independence, he theorized the Atlantic as an economic and political space organized by commercial relations and controlled by an Anglo-American ‘Atlantic Alliance’.