In “From Empire to Revolution,” Greg Brooking investigates the life and conflicted career of Sir James Wright (1716-1785). Through Wright’s life, Brooking seeks to better understand the complex struggle for power in both colonial Georgia and the larger British Empire.
Wright lived a transatlantic life, taking advantage of every imperial opportunity afforded to him. He amassed a fortune totaling over £100,000 sterling and earned numerous important government posts. Wright was England-born and raised in Charleston, South Carolina. In his younger years, he served South Carolina in a number of capacities, public and ecclesiastical, prior to his admittance to London’s Gray’s Inn to study law. In 1761, he became the governor of Georgia after he was appointed South Carolina’s attorney general and colonial agent to London.
Wright’s imperial career delicately balanced dual loyalties to Crown and colony and offers a new perspective on loyalism and the American Revolution. In this biography, Brooking connects several important contexts in recent early American and British scholarship, including imperial and Atlantic history, Indigenous borderlands, race and slavery, and popular politics.
