In the modern vernacular Richard Drayton’s 2000 book Nature’s Government: Science, Imperial Britain, and the ‘Improvement’ of the World falls somewhere between a “mic drop” and ” could’ve had a v8.” That is to say that his main argument that Britain was just as influenced by its colonial holdings as its colonies were by the crown is either an astonishing bombshell of historical argument or is the most obvious thing you have ever heard. As you follow his argument from the broadest coverage of colonialism down to the minutiae within the offices of Hooker and Gladstone in Kew and Parliament (respectively).
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It is probably better to speak of the West at this point as simply the Frontier. On the American continent the East was even at once considered West. But it is more than a direction. Colonial frontiers such as New York and Ohio, are almost laughable as “West” by the standards of the Montanans and any of the video game characters that you managed to get to the end of the Oregan Trail without dying of dysentery or starving to death. Even the idea of West as being westerly falls into disarray when you look at it from the perspective of New Spain and Mexico. For them the West was North, into Texas (and even farther).
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