Europe

Europe is presented in Common Sense not simply as a collection of foreign powers but as the wider homeland, trading sphere, and diplomatic setting in which America must define its future. By placing the colonies within a continental frame, the argument challenges the idea that Britain alone is their natural parent and recasts independence as a way to pursue trade, peace, and political standing without being drawn into British conflicts.

Europe as a Wider Homeland

Paine disputes the claim that England is America’s parent country. He argues that Europe, rather than England alone, is the more accurate point of origin: the New World had become an asylum for people seeking civil and religious liberty from every part of Europe. In this account, migration does not represent flight from a universally nurturing mother country; it also reflects escape from political oppression, whose effects, Paine says, continued to pursue descendants in America.

The argument enlarges belonging by analogy. A person’s sense of fellowship expands from a neighbor to a townsman, countryman, and, when abroad, fellow Englishman. By the same reasoning, Europeans meeting in America should recognize one another as countrymen on a continental scale. Paine notes that fewer than one third of the inhabitants of Pennsylvania were of English descent, making the exclusive label of England as the parent country especially narrow. The claimed European kinship therefore contests a political vocabulary that would privilege England over the diverse population of the colonies.

Trade, Peace, and Strategic Distance

Europe is also the principal market in Paine’s account of America’s interests. He argues that the colonial plan should be commerce, not defiance of the world, and that a free American port would serve the interests of Europe as well as America. American trade, he maintains, could help secure peace and friendship; the continent’s lack of abundant gold and silver would make it a less tempting target for invasion. Grain, too, could find a market in Europe, while imported goods would have to be paid for wherever they were purchased.

That commercial orientation supports a policy of avoiding partial attachment to any European power. If America’s market is Europe, Paine argues, dependence on Britain makes the colonies a counterweight in British politics and turns them against nations with which they otherwise have no quarrel. He warns that Europe’s many kingdoms make lasting peace uncertain: when Britain goes to war with another power, colonial trade suffers because of its connection to Britain. In a future war, neutrality, he suggests, could provide safer passage for commerce than service under a British warship.

Paine also makes geography part of the argument. The distance between England and America appears as evidence that one was not naturally designed to govern the other; he adds the timing of America’s discovery and the circumstances of its settlement to this case. His comparison of a small island and a continent reinforces the same point: a continent permanently governed from an island reverses what he presents as the ordinary order of nature. England belongs to Europe, he concludes, while America should belong to itself.

War, Separation, and Political Reorientation

The outbreak of hostilities changes the terms of political debate. Paine describes proposals made before April 19 as superseded: before fighting began, supporters of force and of friendship differed chiefly over how to achieve union with Great Britain. Once force had failed and friendship had lost its influence, the argument had to be reconsidered in light of the colonies’ dependence and the injuries it entailed. Europe thereby shifts from being the background to colonial relations with Britain to the wider arena in which the consequences of those relations must be judged.

The practical difficulty of distant rule strengthens the case for a change in sovereignty. Paine argues that Britain cannot administer the continent’s affairs with tolerable convenience because it is far away and knows too little about the colonies. A petition could take three or four thousand miles of travel, wait four or five months for an answer, and then require another five or six months of explanation. That delay, he predicts, would increasingly appear foolish and childish; a system once considered proper had reached its proper time to end.

The same political change would alter how other powers could respond. While America called itself subject to Britain, Paine argues, no outside power could mediate its quarrel with Britain as a dispute between separate parties. France or Spain would have little reason to assist if their help merely repaired the British connection, and foreign courts would regard armed colonists who still professed British allegiance as rebels. A declaration of independence, followed by a manifesto describing the grievances, failed peaceful efforts, and desire for peaceful trade, could present America abroad as a distinct political actor. Under the existing designation of British subjects, Paine says, the colonies could neither be received nor heard at foreign courts; independence would allow them to take their place among nations.

A Continental Future and Its Costs

The appeal to Europe accompanies an argument about what the colonies owe to future generations. Paine warns that a temporary political arrangement cannot secure what parents might hope to bequeath to their children. If the present generation incurs debts while leaving the work of establishing a durable government unfinished, it burdens posterity without giving it the benefit of the struggle. The relevant choice is not simply between peace now and conflict now, but between completing the political work and leaving a renewed conflict to the next generation.

He treats the public debt as a possible instrument of state-building rather than an absolute grievance. A debt incurred to secure a settled government and independent constitution, he argues, could be worth its cost; the same expenditure merely to repeal a few acts or replace a ministry would leave posterity both the larger task and a debt from which it gained nothing. He describes national debt as a bond when it bears no interest, contrasting Britain’s debt of more than £140 million, with annual interest exceeding £4 million, against America’s lack of both debt and navy. In his estimate, one twentieth of Britain’s national debt could provide America with a navy twice as large as Britain’s, whose navy he values at no more than £3.5 million.

Land revenue offers another proposed means of meeting the cost. If Britain remained sovereign, Paine argues, America would lose the means to reduce its debt: lands in some provinces, he says, had been withheld through the extension of Canada’s boundaries. He values those back lands at more than £25 million Pennsylvania currency on a calculation of £5 sterling per hundred acres, with quit-rents of one penny sterling per acre yielding £2 million a year. Selling the lands could retire the debt without burdening individuals, while reserving the quit-rents could progressively support the annual costs of government. The Continental Congress would act as trustee in this arrangement.

Across these proposals, Europe has a double significance. It is a shared cultural inheritance broader than England, and it is the commercial and diplomatic world with which America must deal. Paine’s point is not that the continent should turn against Europe, but that it should cease being made an instrument of British policy within Europe. A separate political standing would, in his account, make trade, neutrality, mediation, and durable self-government more attainable.