just fifteen years, 3 percent of Scotland’s population and almost as many Irish had bolted for the New World in what one Scot called “America madness.” The empire was both a political construct and a business enterprise—colonies existed to enhance imperial grandeur by providing raw materials and buying British goods—so the “disease of wandering,” as Dr. Samuel Johnson dubbed this migration, was unnerving. And, of course, the Treaty of Paris had left various European powers aggrieved if not humiliated, with smoldering resentments among the Prussians, the Spanish, the Dutch, and, most of all,
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