On 22 March 1775, Edmund Burke rose in the House of Commons with the aim of restoring ‘the former unsuspecting confidence of the colonies in the mother country’: the occasion for his speech was a debate on the wisdom of restricting American trade with England. In a graphic deployment of the familiar metaphor of nation as body, Burke describes England as a fertile but exhausted mother being fed by her American colonies, and to those fellow members of the House who charge America with having unnaturally drawn life from the colonial mother, responds that in 1775 she sustains the nation that was once the selfless protector of her dependent outposts; now is the time for a grateful England to treat those colonies as political allies not as commercial competitors. Whereas at the beginning of the eighteenth century, the American colonies imported corn and grain from England, now the New World feeds the Old, and England should remember that she would have faced a ‘desolating famine, if this child of your old age, with a true filial piety, with a Roman charity, had not put the full breast of its youthful exuberance to the mouth of the exhausted parent’.

Given the long-standing ubiquity in British literature of metaphors of the body and colonization – one thinks, for instance, of Donne’s ‘To His Mistris Going to Bed’ in which the speaker celebrates his lover’s body as ‘O my America! my new-found-land, / My kingdome, safeliest when with one man man’d, / My Myne of precious stones, My Empirie, / How blest am I in this discovering thee!’ – it is hardly surprising that Burke fuses body and family when advancing his American argument for collaboration in place of confrontation.