Description
Autograph Letter Signed ‘Geo: Chalmers’, to Charles Taylor, about a 1786 publication by the Society of Arts on the promotion of the growth of Hemp within the British Dominions, requesting a copy and any further Proceedings on the same subject. 3 pp. 9 x 7 inches, a clean tear at centre fold repaired, creases, in good sound condition. Office for Trade, Whitehall, 13 December 1800. George Chalmers (1742-1825), antiquary and political writer, spent 1764-1775 in Maryland, where he became unpopular as a loyalist. In 1780 he published his Annals of the Present United Colonies, in which he insisted that the American colonies had always had a subversive desire for independence and that parliament had the right to tax the colonies without their consent. In 1782 he produced his Introduction to the History of the Revolt of the Colonies, which was even more severe on the Americans, and highly critical of the weakness of the British government in dealing with them. In 1792 he became agent for the Bahamas in London. Between 1807 and 1824 Chalmers published what he regarded as his major work, Caledonia, an encyclopaedic regional survey of Scottish history and antiquities, which was not completed in his lifetime. Chalmers requests copies of any “proceedings of your Society, which may have taken place, in any subsequent years, with regard to the same import and object of encouraging the growth of Hemp within the British Dominions.”