Thomas Hutchinson in Context: The Ordeal Revisited.

Bernard Bailyn reviews his reasons for writing The Ordeal of Thomas Hutchinson, published in 1974, and concludes that, while still in agreement with his overall assessment of the last colonial governor, he evaluated Hutchinson's plight too narrowly. The local issues that trapped Hutchinson might have seemed like a problem of his own making, but turn out to have been part of a larger, transformational shift that was taking place in the Atlantic world. 1776 was not only the year of American independence, but also of the publication of works by authors such as Tom Paine, Edward Gibbon, Richard Price, Adam Smith, and Jeremy Bentham that pointed to the end of the ancien régime in Europe and later in Latin America.