Who Shall Rule at Home?

"Jonathan Mercantini's book attempts to revise our understanding of the development of opposition to British imperial authority in South Carolina and the colony's place in the American Revolution. In Mercantini's view, an abiding insistence of leading Carolinians on the pre-eminence of local rights, as manifested by their practice of political 'brinkmanship' whenever they deemed those rights to be under threat, constituted the key element in this history. His analysis, which tracks a series of disputes between what he styles as 'colonial' and 'imperial' elites, thus targets the longstanding view of Robert M. Weir that 'harmony' constituted the hallmark of South Carolina politics in the run-up to 1776"--From book review on H-Net.