Creating the British Atlantic: Essays on Transplantation, Adaptation, and Continuity 9780813933887, 9780813933917, 9780813933894, 2012044575

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CREATING THE BRITISH ATLANTIC

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Early American Histories Douglas Bradburn, John C. Coombs, and S. Max Edelson, Editors

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CREATING THE BRITISH ATLANTIC Essays on Transplantation, Adaptation, and Continuity •

Jack P. Greene

U NIV ER SIT Y OF V IRGINI A PR ESS Charlottesville and London

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University of Virginia Press © 2013 by the Rector and Visitors of the University of Virginia All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper First published 2013 135798642 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Greene, Jack P. Creating the British Atlantic : essays on transplantation, adaptation, and continuity / Jack P. Greene. pages cm. — (Early American histories) Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 978-0-8139-3388-7 (cloth : alk. paper) — isbn 978-0-8139-3391-7 (pbk. : alk. paper) — isbn 978-0-8139-3389-4 (e-book) 1. Great Britain—Colonies—America—History—18th century. 2. Great Britain— Colonies—America—Administration. 3. United States—History—Colonial period, ca. 1600–1775. 4. United States—History—Revolution, 1775–1783. I. Title. e195.g74 2013 973.3—dc23 2012044575

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Contents

Preface part one

vii Perspectives

one

Hemispheric History and Atlantic History

two

Reformulating Englishness: Cultural Adaptation and Provinciality in the Construction of Corporate Identity in Colonial British America

19

State Formation, Resistance, and the Creation of Revolutionary Traditions in the Early Modern Era

33

Colonial History and National History: Reflections on a Continuing Problem

64

three four

part two five

six

seven eight

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3

Governance

Transatlantic Colonization and the Redefinition of Empire in the Early Modern Era: The British-American Experience

83

Traditions of Consensual Governance in the Construction of State Authority in the Early Modern European Empires in America

101

Britain’s Overseas Empire before 1780: Overwhelmingly Successful and Bureaucratically Challenged

113

“Of Liberty and of the Colonies”: A Case Study of Constitutional Confl ict in the Mid-Eighteenth-Century British American Empire

140

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Contents

nine

1759: The Perils of Success

208

ten

An Empire of Freemen? The British Debate over the Status of Overseas Representative Assemblies, 1763–1783

226

part three eleven twelve thirteen fourteen

fifteen

Empire and Identity from the Elizabethan Era to the American Revolution

253

“By Their Laws Shall Ye Know Them”: Law and Identity in Colonial British America

278

Liberty, Slavery, and the Transformation of British Identity in the Eighteenth-Century West Indies

293

Alterity and the Production of Identity in the Early Modern British American Empire and the Early United States

323

State Identities and National Identity in the Era of the American Revolution

340

part four sixteen

Identities

Social Construction

Social and Cultural Capital in Colonization and State Building in the Early Modern Era: Colonial British America as a Case Study

363

seventeen Pluribus or Unum? White Ethnicity in the Formation of Colonial American Culture

381

eighteen nineteen

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The Cultural Dimensions of Political Transfers: An Aspect of the European Occupation of the Americas

401

Early Modern Southeastern North America and the Broader Atlantic and American Worlds

426

Index

439

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Preface

T

his volume brings together a selection of nineteen of the articles, book chapters, and essays I have written during the fifteen years since the University of Virginia Press published four volumes of my essays under various titles between 1992 and 1996.¹ Like those, this volume covers several interrelated subjects in the broad areas of early modern English/British America, the British Empire, and the early United States. Unlike those, which concentrated, respectively, on cultural history, political and constitutional history, the American Revolution, and historiography, this volume is far more multifaceted in focus, containing essays on four broad historical topics: perspectives, governance, identities, and social construction. The title, Creating the British Atlantic: Essays on Transplantation, Adaptation, and Continuity, calls attention to three of the principal themes that I have tried to develop in my earlier writings and that provide some coherence for this volume. Transplantation refers to the often self-conscious efforts to impose Old World institutions, forms, values, and identities upon the New World societies that settlers, traders, colonial enterprisers, and other participants in the colonizing process were creating in America. Adaptation connotes the reconfiguration and reformulation of those transplanted political, constitutional, legal, and social components of Old World culture to meet the specific conditions that participants encountered and created in constructing and articulating new, economically viable, and expansive culture hearths and effective polities in a wide variety of physical and social settings. Continuity calls attention, not only to the many extensions of Old World culture to America through the process of transplantation and 1. Jack P. Greene, Imperatives, Behaviors, and Identities: Essays in Early American Cultural History (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1992); Greene, Negotiated Authorities: Essays in Colonial Political and Constitutional History (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1994); Greene, Understanding the American Revolution: Issues and Actors (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1995); Greene, Interpreting Early America: Historiographical Essays (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1996).

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the incremental adaptation of those extensions, but also to the foundational importance of those adaptations in the construction of formally republican regimes among the revolting colonies after 1776 and in the formation of the new American republic of the United States. I have divided the volume into four sections. The first, “Perspectives,” contains four chapters. Chapter 1, “Hemispheric History and Atlantic History,” proposes a general hemispheric framework as a device for the comparative study of the process of European expansion in the Americas that would focus not just on the commonalities but also on the infinite and incredibly interesting variations in that process. Complementary to an Atlantic history perspective, this framework, I argue, is far less parochial and distorting than what has become known as a continental approach to the study of the early American past which includes only those areas that subsequently became part of the United States. Chapter 2, “Reformulating Englishness: Cultural Adaptation and Provinciality in the Construction of Corporate Identity in Colonial British America,” argues for the continuing relevance of the concept colonial British America as a category of analysis. From the perspective of English/British experience with the transplantation of political, constitutional, legal, social, economic, and cultural values to colonies, the adaptation of those values to local conditions and institutions, and the centrality of those transplanted and modified values in the creation of provincial identities, it also proposes a general framework for the comparative study of those phenomena in settler societies throughout the colonial Americas. Endeavoring to lay out the commonalities and differences among early modern “revolutions” from the Dutch revolt in the late sixteenth century through the English and French uprisings of the seventeenth century, the American, French, and St. Domingue revolutions of the late eighteenth century, and the Latin American wars for independence in the early nineteenth century, chapter 3, “State Formation, Resistance, and the Creation of Revolutionary Traditions in the Early Modern Era,” uses the insights of early modern state-formation studies to put the American Revolution within the broader history of early modern revolutions, to argue for its commonalities with earlier revolutions, and to emphasize the differences between it and the French and later revolutions. Stressing the powerful continuities between colonial and national expansion and state organization in the areas that composed the United States, chapter 4, “Colonial History and National History: Reflections on a Continuing Problem,” uses the findings of state-formation studies about the limitations of central authority in early modern states and empires and of postcolonial analy-

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ses of settler colonialism about the persistence of colonialism under modern national regimes to make the case for the desirability for a state-, rather than a nation-centered, framework for a history of the United States. The section called “Governance” includes six chapters. Chapter 5, “Transatlantic Colonization and the Redefinition of Empire in the Early Modern Era: The British-American Experience,” uses the English/British experience to illustrate some contentions about the effects of transoceanic colonization upon the definition of empire during the early modern era. More particularly, it explores those conditions that ensured that imperial governance in the era before the American Revolution would be consensual governance and that metropolitan authority would be negotiated with local centers of power in America, contends that before the 1760s the resistance of those centers effectively stymied recurrent metropolitan efforts to impose centralized political controls more in accord with emerging metropolitan theories of empire, and argues that metropolitan determination to remedy this situation in the wake of the Seven Years’ War by substituting directive for consensual imperial governance heralded the coercive empires of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. As the title indicates, chapter 6, “Traditions of Consensual Governance in the Construction of State Authority in the Early Modern European Empires in America,” examines the importance of the principle of consultation in the formation of early modern European empires in America. Focusing primarily on the English transplantation of parliamentary institutions to Ireland and America, it emphasizes the role of settler initiatives in this development and explores settler adaptations of English jurisprudential political discourse on consensual governance and the rule of law to their own situations and their resistance to metropolitan efforts to lessen the authority of provincial consensual institutions during the first century and a half of British overseas colonization. Chapter 7, “Britain’s Overseas Empire before 1780: Overwhelmingly Successful and Bureaucratically Challenged,” extends the discussion in the two previous chapters of the emergence of the British Empire as an imperial state through an examination of the various elements that accounted for the success of the empire, including settler actions and expectations, mercantile interests, and state aspirations. Tracing the development of the bureaucratic resources created in the metropolis and the colonies and the theories of governance bureaucratic agents developed in their efforts to achieve more political authority over the empire, it concludes that the bureaucracy was the least important of the various ingredients in the construction and success of the empire between 1600 and 1783. Chapter 8, “Of Liberty and of the Colonies”: A Case Study of Constitutional Confl ict in the Mid-Eighteenth-Century British American Empire,” provides

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a detailed analysis of the nature of constitutional confl ict in the British Empire in the mid-eighteenth century. It explores what was perhaps the most serious constitutional crisis to arise in the British Empire before the Stamp Act crisis in 1764–66, the contest arising out of the successful resistance of the legislative leadership to metropolitan efforts to alter the customary constitution of that colony during the mid-1750s. Analyzing why and how metropolitan officials sought constitutional change as well as how and why Jamaicans resisted such initiatives, the chapter provides an in-depth illustration of the operation of many of the general phenomena explored in chapters 5 through 7. “1759: The Perils of Success,” chapter 9, raises again the question of the extent to which Britain’s extraordinary successes in the Seven Years’ War demanded a metropolitan reevaluation of the nature and structure of the overseas empire. It considers the imperial problems that metropolitans identified before, during, and after the war, the ways they thought about and acted upon those problems over the next quarter century, the difficulties that their efforts encountered, and the effects of their attempts to grapple with those difficulties upon the empire that survived the loss of sixteen American colonies as a result of the American War for Independence. Chapter 10, “An Empire of Freemen? The British Debate over the Status of Overseas Representative Assemblies, 1763–1783,” explores the vigorous debate in Britain over the nature and authority of the colonial assemblies during the long consideration of the American question from the early 1760s through the early 1780s. It shows the gradual emergence of a strong body of support for the  colonial contention that those assemblies had parliamentary status with exclusive power to tax and regulate the internal governance of their respective polities and explores how the course of the war and the need to grapple with other imperial problems eventually forced the British administration to acknowledge the legitimacy of this contention. Section 3, “Identities,” is composed of five chapters. Addressing the question of how the acquisition of empire affected the national identity of English/ British people, chapter 11, “Empire and Identity from the Elizabethan Era to the American Revolution,” lays out the principal components of that identity, shows how imperial commercial and maritime expansion contributed to enlarge it, contends that the idea of English people as a free people with a distinctive and fortunate system of law and governance was the most important of those components and lay at the core of an emerging imperial identity during the eighteenth century, and explains how disagreements over how far and how fully that identity extended to overseas possessions, and the excesses associated with overseas expansion after 1760, called that identity into question. The role of law in the construction of provincial identities throughout colo-

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nial British America is analyzed in chapter 12, “ ‘By Their Laws Shall Ye Know Them’: Law and Identity in Colonial British America.” Based on an analysis of much new empirical work in colonial British America’s legal history, the chapter points out that settlers used the law to create viable arenas of authority in the colonies and argues that the deeply consensual, indeterminate, flexible, dynamic, accessible, and locally self-fashioned legalities they created were definitional of the settlers’ deepest senses of self and identity and therefore should be accorded a central place in any analysis of the emergence of provincial identities. Chapter 13, “Liberty, Slavery, and the Transformation of British Identity in the Eighteenth-Century West Indies,” uses the extensive polemical literature generated by various public debates over aspects of the political and social development of Britain’s West Indian colonies to analyze the tensions arising out of the incongruity between the widespread use of slave labor and colonial claims to an identity as English people. Examining how England’s identity as a free society transferred to the slave regimes of the West Indian colonies and how the slave labor systems of those colonies affected this process in the era roughly from 1690 through the debate over the Somerset Case in the early 1770s, it emphasizes the extent to which West Indian free people clung to their identity as freeborn Britons even though their inability to join the continental colonies in their resistance to metropolitan measures repugnant to a British identity forced them to acknowledge that their need for metropolitan protection against their own slaves rendered their claims to such an identity suspect. “Alterity and the Production of Identity in the Early Modern British American Empire and the Early United States,” chapter 14, takes up the widespread use of a language of alterity in reference to colonial peoples and the societies they created in America. Tracing this language back to the earliest days of colonization and through many genres of metropolitan literature, it shows how the language affected the ways metropolitans thought about the participants in overseas empire and how those participants responded to the disrespect implicit in such language, and speculates about how its continuing use affected the debate over the American question after 1763 and the relationship of the United States to Britain after American independence. Contending that American colonists had always been strong British nationalists and never more so than in the wake of their participation in Britain’s achievements during the Seven Years’ War, chapter 15, “State Identities and National Identity in the Era of the American Revolution,” suggests that this British nationalism was mediated through powerful provincial identities and that these identities, rooted in a well-articulated sense of provincial distinctiveness and mutual distrust, both continued to be the principal ways that

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Americans defined themselves and inhibited the development of a deep sense of American national identity through the American Revolution and in the new American republic. Chapter 16, “Social and Cultural Capital in Colonization and State Building in the Early Modern Era: Colonial British America as a Case Study,” the first of four chapters in the section entitled “Social Construction,” expands the term social capital, as developed by social scientists, to social and cultural capital and argues that this concept may be a useful tool in understanding the construction of new overseas societies during the early modern era and the transformation of many of those societies beginning in the last quarter of the eighteenth century. More specifically, it emphasizes the extent to which New World settlers relied upon their Old World inheritance in constructing European-style societies in the Americas, the ways in which selective uses of inherited forms of social capital and their subsequent elaboration provided the foundations for the emergence of recognizably civil societies well before some of them undertook to make themselves independent states, and the degree to which that development carried over into and shaped the new federal nation of the United States. “Pluribus or Unum? White Ethnicity in the Formation of Colonial American Culture,” chapter 17, takes up the question of how European immigrants and their descendants assimilated to the new English colonies established in North America during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Examining the experiences of non-English groups from the perspective of two contemporary models, Crèvecoeur’s emphasis upon ethnic intermixing or assimilation and Franklin’s stress upon ethnic separation or ethnicization, it surveys the history of the most important ethnic groups by region and in terms of the pressures toward assimilation and the conditions that permitted significant ethnicization and concludes that the process of cultural formation in colonial British North America was a matter of Unum and Pluribus. As the title of chapter 18, “The Cultural Dimensions of Political Transfers: An Aspect of the European Occupation of the Americas,” indicates, it examines the problem of cultural retention in territories transferred from one European cultural area to another in the early modern Americas. In particular, it focuses on the related questions of how much of their existing political, legal, and other cultural arrangements the old inhabitants managed to retain and under what conditions and how extensively the conquering power was able to impose its cultural patterns upon the old inhabitants and under what conditions. Pointing out that, in most cases, old settlers lost control over the cultures they had created, it suggests that historians need to take into account the disproportionate role of power in the creation of the Americas.

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Chapter 19, “Early Modern Southeastern North America and the Broader Atlantic and American Worlds,” considers the disadvantages of the framework history of the South for historians working on earlier periods in areas that would not become a self-conscious entity before the 1820s and the advantages that may accrue from an imperial, Atlantic, extended Caribbean, or plantation complex perspective. It recommends the plantation complex as being especially suitable for placing the history of the North American southeast in its most illuminating context, calling attention to the commonalities among those societies with similar agricultural and slave labor regimes in warm climates in the broad area stretching from Brazil north to the Chesapeake and for uncovering the extraordinary diversity of peoples, culture, and modes of life that characterized the southeast region throughout its pre-national history. Mostly set within an expansive British imperial and transatlantic framework, with some using a broad comparative focus, these selections are informed by recent literature on state formation, postcolonialism, law and culture studies, and selective categories of social analysis. Yet they also complement and advance themes developed in the earlier volumes of my essays as well as in my various books and explore subjects that have long interested me, including the dynamics of colonization, the psychology of settler behavior, the regional differences within colonial British America, the cultural congruity among American colonies whether or not they revolted in 1776, the empowering of free populations in the process of colonial society- and province-building, the development and character of provincial identities, the relationship between the new settler societies in America and the emerging British Empire, the indeterminacy of authority within the empire, the legitimacy of provincial resistance, and the role of cultural power in social and political formation. Of the nineteen pieces published here, one has never been previously published, two are still in the process of publication in the books for which they were written, and one has not before been previously published in English. Of the eighteen items that have been or will be published elsewhere, ten were originally published as chapters in books, and eight as journal articles. In putting this volume together, I have been careful to make no substantive changes in the original selections, with one important exception. To avoid repetition, I have eliminated paragraphs and sentences that repeat those from earlier chapters, always referring the reader back to the original site of the eliminated material. I have also made a few small editorial changes; standardized form, spelling, and citations; and added at the end of each chapter a short paragraph recounting its history and giving the place of original publication. As I reviewed the provenance of these studies, I was astonished to discover that all nineteen of them originated in invitations for lectures, seminars,

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conferences, or chapters and that only six of them were on subjects on which I had already done considerable research or to which I had given sustained thought before my acceptance of those invitations. This discovery makes it clear how much I have always enjoyed the challenge of working out the dimensions of interpretive problems in my general field of study and reminds me of how grateful I am to the many individuals, institutions, publishers, and others who issued those invitations. By encouraging me to take up subjects on which I might otherwise have remained largely uninformed, they contributed significantly to my historical education. I refrain from listing them here out of fear that I might have forgotten one of them, but they will know who they are. In readying this volume for the press, three people were especially helpful. S. Max Edelson provided useful advice about the selection and arrangement of the chapters, Amy Turner Bushnell made many useful editorial suggestions, and John E. Crowley and Peter S. Onuf provided useful advice on the general title.

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part one

Perspectives •

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— one —

Hemispheric History and Atlantic History

H

istorians of the early modern Americas have always been open to the broader approach. Already by the closing decades of the nineteenth century, they had recognized and sought to subvert the tendency of emerging national histories to reduce the colonial past to little more than the prehistory of the independent nations that formed in the Americas after the mid1770s. By insisting that colonial histories be contextualized, both as parts of the empires to which they belonged and as subsets of the greater process of European expansion, they called attention to the larger worlds in which early modern colonies took shape and to which they were intimately and immediately attached. Considering themselves what we might now call cosmopolitan contextualists, colonialists regarded those who tried to shoehorn colonial histories into the mold of the new states that were consequent to decolonization as parochial anachronists. In this spirit, early modern colonialists have been at the forefront of the rush to adopt still larger perspectives over recent decades. Including the whole of the Atlantic basin—Europe, Africa, the Americas, and adjacent seas and islands—the Atlantic perspective, first articulated in the early 1970s and energetically pushed by fresh proselytes in the early 1990s, has been enthusiastically embraced by students of the colonial British world and has begun to gain considerable currency among scholars working in other areas of the early modern world that formed around the Atlantic. As a result, few early modern Ameri-

The earliest version of this chapter was written as a comment on papers by James Lockhart and Stuart Schwartz and given at a plenary session entitled “Colonial America: Spanish and Portuguese Worlds,” at the fi fth annual conference of the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, University of Texas at Austin, June 11, 1999. A second version was published as “Comparing Early Modern American Worlds: Some Reflections on the Promise of a Hemispheric Perspective,” History Compass 1 (May 2002), an online journal. The third and fullest version, “Hemispheric History and Atlantic History,” in Jack P. Greene and Philip D. Morgan, eds., Atlantic History: A Critical Reappraisal (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 299–315, is here republished with permission.

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canists remain unconverted to the idea that developments throughout the Americas can be more fully understood when placed within the broader transAtlantic, inter-Atlantic, or intra-Atlantic settings in which they occurred. One of the central attractions of this perspective has been the prospect that, by calling attention to social, economic, political, and cultural commonalities and interactions among areas that either were not connected by national allegiances or did not remain within the same national state system, it would help to break the hold of the national frameworks within which history traditionally has been written, frameworks that have operated, not just to parochialize specific histories, but also to obscure the larger patterns and processes within which the several societies around the Atlantic functioned and of which they were integral parts.¹ Even more recently, a second broad and complementary movement toward a multicultural perspective has exhibited considerable vigor. Among early American historians within the United States, this perspective seems to have been the immediate consequence of a growing consciousness that some portions of the United States had a “pre-national” history that was neither English nor exclusively indigenous. Like the Atlantic perspective, this consciousness is not exactly new. Herbert Bolton was an ardent exponent of this point of view more than three-quarters of a century ago,² and his influence upon a few English colonialists—particularly Max Savelle, who produced one of the best and most widely used texts in colonial British American history—was by no means insignificant.³ But the proliferation of interest in the Spanish, French, and Russian origins of the United States among pre–United States historians is relatively recent and arises largely and logically out of two impulses in historical studies: an older impulse, deriving from the Annalistes’ ambitious goal of constructing a histoire totale decentering elite white males, and a newer and more parochial impulse to give all cultures and regions space within the United States historical narrative. The latest manifestation of this multicultural, multiregional impulse has been the emergence of a demand for the creation of a continental history that would place the indigenous inhabitants at the center of the story and give as much attention to Spanish, French, and Russian colonies in the 1. See Jack P. Greene, “Beyond Power: Paradigm Subversion and Reformulation and the Recreation of the Early Modern Atlantic World,” in Jack P. Greene, Interpreting Early America: Historiographical Essays (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1996), 17–42; and David Armitage, “Three Concepts of Atlantic History,” in David Armitage and Michael J. Braddick, eds., The British Atlantic World, 1500–1800 (New York: Palgrave, 2002), 11–30. 2. Herbert E. Bolton, “The Epic of Greater America,” American Historical Review 38 (1933): 448–74. 3. Max Savelle, The Foundations of American Civilization, a History of Colonial America (New York: Henry Holt, 1942).

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Hemispheric History and Atlantic History

5

middle and on the western edges of the continent as to British provinces on the eastern coast.4 So far, I think it is fair to say that the recent interest of pre–United States historians in non-British areas has been largely confined to those regions that would subsequently become part of the United States. At least in its earliest stages, this development was a potential boon to those scholars who, having been marginalized in their own field of early modern Latin American history precisely because the areas upon which they worked—Florida, New Mexico, Texas, California, Louisiana—were no longer a part of Spanish or French America, now suddenly found a home in pre–United States history and a new and enthusiastic audience for their work.5 But it is also fair to say, I think, that the new multicultural interest in the non-British roots of United States civilization has not moved far beyond the borders of the present United States and has remained relatively unconcerned with the larger cultural worlds to which the areas of Spanish or French penetration were attached. Indeed, calls for a continental history often turn out to exclude significant portions of the North American continent to the south of the Rio Grande and to the north of the later boundary between Canada and the United States.6 As a result, the United States community of early American historians has continued to be largely uninformed about the extensive and rich historiography produced, especially over the last half century, on those larger Spanish and French cultural worlds. Incorporation into the national history of the United States has thus effectually dis-attached areas with non-British origins from the national cultural areas with which they were associated for lengthy periods of their early histories. Such decontextualization cannot be expected to produce comprehensive understandings of the histories of the areas that suffer it, much less to enrich them. While the emergence of the Atlantic perspective has served to undermine traditional national frameworks, the multicultural turn has thus largely functioned to reinforce them. The central contention in these brief reflections is that this need not be the case, that the new interest in the non-English colonial 4. Daniel H. Usner Jr., “Borderlands,” in Daniel Vickers, ed., A Companion to Colonial America (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2003), 408–24, provides an excellent recent historiographical guide. 5. See Amy Turner Bushnell, “Gates, Patterns, and Peripheries: The Field of Frontier Latin America,” in Christine Daniels and Michael V. Kennedy, eds., Negotiated Empires: Centers and Peripheries in the New World, 1500–1820 (New York: Routledge, 2001), 15–28. 6. A notable exception is Vickers, Companion to Colonial America, 429–507, which includes four chapters under the rubric “Comparisons” on the Caribbean, New Spain, New France, and Atlantic Canada, by Verene Shepherd and Carleen Payne, Robert Ferry, Allan Greer, and Peter Pope, respectively.

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histories of areas in the United States points logically in the direction of the desirability of a broad hemispheric perspective that, by promoting broad comparative analysis across both the Southern and Northern American hemispheres and their adjacent islands, might actually enhance the prospects for transcending national frameworks. Moreover, a hemispheric perspective also seems to offer better prospects for achieving one of the unfilled promises of the Atlantic perspective, the possibility of drawing comparisons. The developing field of Atlantic history has tended to concentrate on identifying and elaborating the connections that tied the Atlantic together and, as J. H. Elliott remarked, will probably “always . . . remain a history framed more in terms of connections than of comparisons.”7 The primary obstacle to the development of a hemispheric perspective is, of course, the dense historiographies that, especially in recent decades, have emerged in the study of all areas of the Americas, historiographies that require enormous time and energy to master.8 In 1999, at a conference of historians primarily concerned with the history of those parts of colonial British America that became the United States, James Lockhart and Stuart Schwartz, two of the most distinguished contributors to the literature on colonial Latin America and coauthors of an acclaimed synthesis, Early Latin America,9 endeavored to guide their audience into this wholly different and unusually rich terra incognita.¹0 Their remarks provide a foundation for the following speculations about the possible benefits of a broad hemispheric approach. As both Lockhart and Schwartz made clear, the historiographies they represent stand in no need of intellectual colonization by pre–United States historians. Indeed, as Lockhart pointed out, pre–United States historians working on Spanish areas should not expect to make a significant contribution to this literature until they have mastered it. Devoted to the exposition of cultural complexes radically different from the British, with different laws, different if sometimes parallel institutions, and different social dynamics, those historiographies are based on sources unfamiliar to students of the British American 7. J. H. Elliott, “Atlantic History: A Circumnavigation,” in Armitage and Braddick, eds., British Atlantic World, 1500–1800, 237. 8. See the collection of articles reprinted in Amy Turner Bushnell, ed., Establishing Exceptionalism: Historiography and the Colonial Americas (Aldershot, U.K.: Variorum, Ashgate, 1995). 9. James Lockhart and Stuart B. Schwartz, Early Latin America: A History of Colonial Spanish America and Brazil (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983). 10. James Lockhart, “Some Comments on Early Latin American Historiography,” and Stuart B. Schwartz, “The Recent Historiography of Early Modern Brazil in a Comparative Perspective,” unpublished papers presented at the plenary session, “Colonial America: Spanish and Portuguese Worlds,” fi fth annual conference of the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, University of Texas at Austin, June 11, 1999.

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world. The two presenters provided a powerful sense of how much there was to learn and how demanding such an enterprise might be. They made it clear that those who aspire to advance a more inclusive version of the pre–United States past would do well to hie it to one of those rare universities at which it is possible to study with equal seriousness the histories of all the colonial Americas. Superficially and on a general level there seem to be many similarities between the historiographies of early Latin American and colonial British American history. At least until comparatively recently, both have been sourcedriven and both have followed Lockhart’s well-known law of the conservation of the energy of historians: “Always take the easiest, most synthetic source first.”¹¹ In colonial British American history, the private narratives of settlement produced by such people as John Smith, William Bradford, John Winthrop, and Andrew White—the nearest equivalents to the Spanish chronicles of conquest—never acquired the historiographical importance of those chronicles, but both early American fields were dominated for many decades by studies based on official correspondence and metropolitan and provincial institutional records, an emphasis that grossly exaggerated the importance of the metropolis and provincial centers in the construction of colonies and empire. In pursuit of social history, both fields turned to legal records and notarial archives—or in the British case, to probate records, deeds, and parish and church registers. The absence of notarial records in British America may have been responsible for what I perceive to have been a lag in the turn to social history among historians of the English-speaking world, who took a bit longer to devise ways to bring the methods of the Annalistes to bear upon social history issues. Between the earlier emphasis on institutional history and the advent of social history, historians of colonial British America used a rich cache of contemporaneously and locally generated and produced printed materials, including political tracts, political economy treatises, improvement literature, sermons, chorographies, civil and religious histories, natural histories, a variety of belletristic productions, and newspaper essays, as the foundations for an intellectual history stage that dominated colonial British American historiography for at least a generation in the wake of World War II and seems to have had no counterpart in early Latin American studies. Only during the last quarter century have a few historians begun to use similar materials to explore the intellectual and cultural development of Hispanic America with a comparable level of detail and sophistication.¹² 11. Lockhart, “Some Comments on Early Latin American Historiography,” 4. 12. Superb examples include D. A. Brading, The First America: The Spanish Monarchy, Creole Patriots, and the Liberal State, 1492–1867 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991);

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Because British America, like the rest of the Americas outside greater Mexico and Peru, lacks the extensive indigenous language sources that scholars such as Lockhart and his students have exploited so brilliantly for the Nahuatlspeaking polities of central Mexico, it has, of course, missed the New Philology phase that has been so prominent in recent early modern Latin American studies. It has, however, participated fully in the eclecticism characteristic of much recent work on early Latin America: the rise of ethnohistory and the interest in indigenous peoples, the reexamination of African slavery, the focus on women’s history and gender definitions, the exploration of transatlantic intellectual connections in political, economic, social, educational, and religious life, the turn to cultural history and the emergence of creole or American cultural systems and identities, and perhaps even the development of a new interest in the history of secondary centers and peripheral areas in the Americas. In both colonial Latin American and British American studies, moreover, much of this recent work has relied less upon the use of new kinds of sources than upon revisiting and requestioning documents that have long been familiar to historians. Indeed, some of this work is driven not by sources but by the absence of sources and by the theory that scholars have generated to help them fill the historical silences present in the records. In view of the fact that early Latin American and colonial British American historians are part of the same general historical community, these similarities in historiographical development are hardly surprising. No matter how different their sources or the cultures they study, both sets of historians are equally subject to the same professional intellectual fashions that make social history the darling of one generation and cultural history the central interest of the next. And the parallels could be extended to the historiographies of the fragmented early modern American enterprises of both the French and the Dutch.¹³ As one dips even casually into the historiographies of the early modern colonial Americas, however, one senses that the parallels and correspondences extend beyond historiography to substantive issues involving structures and Brading, Mexican Phoenix: Our Lady of Guadalupe: Image and Tradition across Five Centuries (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); Anthony Pagden, The Fall of Natural Man: The American Indian and the Origins of Comparative Ethnology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982); and Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, How to Write the History of the New World: Histories, Epistemologies, and Identities in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001). 13. Alan Greer, “Comparisons: New France,” in Vickers, ed., Companion to Colonial America, 469–88, provides a full discussion for New France, though not for the French settlements in the Caribbean and the West Indies.

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processes. The first impression is one of extraordinary and fundamental difference. Iberian American polities were established a full century before those of the north Europeans—before the Protestant and Catholic Reformations had occurred, before the chivalric model had lost its appeal, and before the international market system was well developed. Within a generation of contact, moreover, the Spanish happened upon, conquered, and occupied the two areas with the greatest mineral wealth and the largest concentrations of indigenous peoples in the Americas. The post-conquest societies that the Spanish constructed in New Spain and Peru were the New World’s great exceptions. Nowhere else was mineral wealth so readily accessible or native political and social development so complex. The presence of such numerous peoples required extensive adaptation on the part of the Spanish as well as the indigenes. Although the Spanish used indigenous labor to work the mines, the ranches, and the agricultural settlements they established, they eventually negotiated the system of two republics—Spanish and Indian—that permitted the indigenes a degree of self-government under the Spanish crown. At least in part because of the vast wealth they acquired through these conquests, the Spanish, moreover, were able to invest large sums of money and considerable manpower in evangelization. Through the mission system, combining civil and religious pacification, these efforts extended well beyond the sedentary indigenous empires of New Spain and Peru. Encountering no similarly exploitable cultures, the Portuguese American settlements in Brazil exhibited quite different relationships with the indigenes, spent far fewer resources upon their evangelization, and established flourishing agricultural and cattle-raising societies before finding great mineral wealth a century and a half after their first effective settlement. In many respects, Spanish polities established in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries beyond the areas of highly developed indigenous states and great mineral wealth—in Central America, New Granada, Venezuela, Chile, Paraguay, Rio de la Plata—were, like Brazil, the products less of conquest than of settlement and focused on agriculture and livestock. Despite these differences, the various Iberian polities were profoundly similar. They shared an attachment to Roman Catholicism, and they were unusually inclusionary and even fusionist, in two senses: first, they incorporated indigenes and Africans into the legal and political systems they established, and second, they generated the extensive mixed populations that by the early nineteenth century could credibly claim to be the people of Brazil or Mexico.¹4 Established a full century later and also lacking mineral wealth and highly 14. Schwartz, “Recent Historiography of Early Modern Brazil,” 26.

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developed indigenous societies, the French colonies were similar to the Iberian colonies in their Catholicism, the extensiveness of their efforts at evangelization, their mixed-race populations, and the civil spaces those populations occupied. In all these respects, the situation was far different in British and Dutch American polities established at roughly the same time as the French, after the Protestant Reformation, just as the new international trading system that would reach full flower in the early nineteenth century was taking off. Neither the Dutch nor the British encountered a densely populated indigenous empire nor discovered any mines. They spent little energy and less funds on the evangelization of the indigenes, and they established polities that were—implicitly with regard to the indigenes and explicitly with regard to imported Africans and their descendants—much more exclusionary than those established by the Iberians. The mixed populations they generated, while not insignificant, were never numerous or powerful enough to appropriate the title of the people. As the above sketch suggests, there can be little doubt that, within the vast Iberian American world, colonial outcomes were determined less by cultural differences among Europeans than by physical differences, economic potentialities, and the nature and density of indigenous populations in occupied areas. Spaniards and Portuguese shared a common religion, albeit one more heterodox and independent of Rome than historians from Protestant countries used to assume. They also shared a civil law tradition with Roman origins and scrupulous written records. To instruct them in their forays in the Americas, they both had had extensive contact with non-Christian peoples: Moors in Iberia and North Africa, Guanches in the Canary Islands, and, for the Portuguese, peoples along the west coast of Africa and around the Indian Ocean. Notwithstanding these and other broad cultural similarities, however, the colonial process produced a wide variety of different kinds of political societies in the Iberian American world, differences not just between Spanish and Portuguese colonies but within the Spanish Empire and within Portuguese Brazil. If we extend the field of comparison to include the polities established by North Europeans in the West Indies and North America, however, we may discover that cultural differences were more important. Certainly, considerations of what sort of resource environment and indigenous societies were encountered and what the economic potential of an area was were paramount in determining the nature of the polities created in North European as well as in Iberian America. But the fact that the British and Dutch were mainly Protestant peoples, that the English functioned within a common law tradition and the Dutch within a similarly customary one, and that the British operated within a political culture that was explicitly consensual and participatory may

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also have been deeply differentiating. Not just the languages spoken, the books read, and the national or ethnic styles of deportment or transactions exhibited, but the underlying religious and, even more profoundly, legal and political cultures may have distinguished British and Dutch polities in America from those that were Spanish, Portuguese, or French. A comparison between Portuguese and British America is revealing in this regard. Despite the fact that neither of them encountered great sedentary indigenous empires and that both of them imported large amounts of African labor and developed staple agricultural economies fi lled with a combination of plantations and smaller settlements, Brazil and the British polities of the West Indies and North America, so similar on the surface, exhibited important divergences—for instance, in the relationship of the slave and free colored populations to the law—that have to be marked down largely to cultural differences. As interesting as these differences may be, even a casual review of the burgeoning literatures on the early modern Americas strongly suggests that there were also some remarkable commonalities. The various colonizing powers were all mutual participants in the colonial process that transformed the Americas in the centuries after 1492. As European agents, often assisted by African or indigenous auxiliaries, their subjects took the initiative in reconstructing the social order throughout the Americas. They all established a number of new societies shaped by a combination of local conditions and immigrant efforts to replicate the cultures they had left behind, societies that both deviated from metropolitan norms and were unmistakable offshoots of the national cultures they represented. They all involved transfers of people— substantial transfers in the case of Spain, Portugal, and Britain—drawn by the opportunities that the Americas offered, and they all participated in an aggressive European reconstruction and renaming of American spaces and a massive exploitation and economic, social, and political reorganization of American peoples and resources. To one degree or another, they all conceived of the changes they wrought as the working out of a providential design and as part of an extensive civilizing project and used their own legal inheritances and forms of governance to impose their mastery over large parts of the Americas. They all unwittingly introduced pathogens that destroyed vast numbers among the indigenous populations and addressed their labor problems through a resort to unfree labor, including slavery. They all participated in a profound cultural transformation by which a galaxy of indigenous groups were reduced to far fewer tribes or nations. Nor were these the only commonalities. With the exception of the Dutch, who lost their foothold in North America and their principal holdings in South America during the seventeenth century, they all experienced impressive ex-

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pansion and economic and social development, including, in the eighteenth century, considerable economic acceleration and diversification, a process that over time led to the transformation of some areas from fringes of the European world into colonial centers and peripheries. They all produced a wide variety of provincial political societies, each with a distinctive legal system and collective identity to fit its changing peculiarities, experiences, and circumstances. Over time, they all experienced a significant transfer of political authority to the creoles or native-born Americans who presided over these societies, and mid-eighteenth-century wars led in the cases of both the Spanish and the British to metropolitan policies that challenged settler autonomy and ultimately provoked or contributed to reluctant settler revolts and the establishment of independent nations. The identification of these many general similarities provides the additional advantage of calling attention to the remarkable extent to which the secondary centers and peripheries in the New World and the settler, indigenous, and enslaved populations who inhabited them were active participants in the construction of early modern empires and of the broader Atlantic and hemispheric worlds of which they were all a part.¹5 Yet these casual contrasts and parallels only raise the question of why pre– United States historians should be interested in the experience of early modern Latin America and vice versa. If pre–United States historians need instruction as they endeavor to contribute to a more inclusive pre-national history, what is in it for Latin Americanists or Quebecois? Most historians seem to be quite content to let national boundaries channel their research interests. Surely, however, there is more at stake here than bringing neglected areas and experiences into one or another national narrative. At best, that objective is an extremely modest one, and it creates many intellectual problems. In the case of pre–United State historians, for instance, focusing only on the Spanish borderlands not only reinforces the power of the nation-state paradigm in United States historical studies but leaves the core areas of the Spanish American enterprise out of the picture altogether. Much more interesting are the possible benefits that may accrue from the adoption of a much wider perspective encompassing the entire Western Hemisphere. A hemispheric approach that has for its long-range objective the development of a comprehensive comparative analysis across both South and North America and their adjacent islands and oriented toward the analysis of the encounter between the Old Worlds of Europe, America, and Africa, the sub15. See Amy Turner Bushnell and Jack P. Greene, “Peripheries, Centers, and the Construction of Early American Empires: An Introduction,” in Daniels and Kennedy, eds., Negotiated Empires, 1–14; Schwartz, “Recent Historiography of Early Modern Brazil.”

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sequent creation of many New Worlds in the Americas, and the ongoing development of those New Worlds has much to recommend it. Like the continental approach, it directs attention to both sides of that encounter: the invaded as well as the invaders. Unlike the continental approach as so far formulated, it avoids anachronism, not excluding contiguous and closely connected areas that happen to fall on the wrong side of a later national boundary. Furthermore, it encourages the contextualization of regions that during the colonial era formed part of the same national culture area. In all these ways, it offers an effective way to escape the distortions that subordination to the nationstate paradigm imposes upon colonial histories. Because it is infinitely broader than the continental approach, it also promises to yield the richest and most comprehensive understanding of the early modern Americas. In virtually every respect, a hemispheric perspective seems to be superior to a continental one. A hemispheric perspective would complement an Atlantic perspective and in some respects be more effective in that it keeps the focus on developments within American spaces rather than upon connections among them. A hemispheric perspective on the colonial process would identify the widest possible range of variations over time, place, and social type as those variations become evident, in the case of the settlers, in patterns of land occupation, relations with indigenous peoples, socioeconomic structures, forms of governance, and modes of religious and cultural life; and, in the case of the indigenous and the enslaved, in patterns of resistance, accommodation, amalgamation, or exclusion. To contextualize these and other subjects, a hemispheric approach, no less than an Atlantic approach, would need to be attentive to ongoing interactions between metropolises and provinces, between American provinces and the source cultures of their populations, and among and within the Americas. A hemispheric perspective thus promises to produce the fullest and most deeply contextualized understanding of the changing character of the early modern American world as well as of the central elements in its formation. It has a greater capacity to generate comparative analysis and to free the study of the colonial era from the cage of national political boundaries. Of course, this approach has deep historiographical roots. Bolton called for a hemispheric history in his 1933 presidential address to the American Historical Association,¹6 which generated a lively debate over whether the Americas had a common history¹7 and helped to inspire a collective project, supported by the Rockefeller Foundation and spearheaded by the Mexican historian Silvio 16. Bolton, “Epic of Greater America.” 17. Lewis Hanke, ed., Do the Americas Have a Common History? A Critique of the Bolton Theory (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1964), collected much of this material.

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Zavala and other historians from Latin America, to produce a multivolume hemispheric history in three broad parts, respectively covering the indigenous, colonial, and national eras. Simultaneously published in 1962 in both a Spanish edition and an English abridgement by Max Savelle, Zavala’s The Colonial Period in the History of the New World, an insightful and extended discussion of the subjects to be covered in the second part of the project, was one of the initial fruits of this project and remains perhaps the best single analysis of the issues inherent in a hemispheric approach and of the rich promise it holds out for achieving an understanding of the full complexity of the colonial process in the early modern Americas. Only by investigating this process “in its totality,” Zavala observed, could historians “obtain a more complete knowledge of each of the colonizations and regions in particular” with their many “similarities and diversities.” His complaint that the early modern American hemisphere had “not received sufficient comparative attention” explicitly held out the hope that the project in which he was involved would produce not just a general history of the Americas but a comparative one.¹8 This project was finally brought to fruition in 1987, with the publication of an eleven-volume history of the colonial era under the editorship of the Venezuelan historian Guillermo Morón.¹9 Each written by a specialist, the many chapters in these volumes provided authoritative accounts of their respective subjects as of the time they were written, but, as in the case of the multivolume histories now being produced for many areas by UNESCO,²0 the specialist authors rarely spoke across chapters to one another. As a result, the volumes failed to deliver on the promise of comparative history, providing instead what might better be thought of as parallel histories, and it is difficult to see how any similar undertaking would be more successful in facilitating, much less achieving, a comparative hemispheric history of the early modern Americas. Moreover, the logistics and publication delays of such massive projects mean that many of the chapters will be out of date before they are published. But a multivolume, multiauthored project is not the only approach to the pursuit of a hemispheric history. One alternative might be for some younger scholar with extensive language proficiency to write a volume following the 18. Silvio Zavala, The Colonial Period in the History of the New World, abridged by Max Savelle (Mexico: Instituto Panamericano, 1962); quotations on p. x. A version of Zavala’s penetrating and thoughtful introduction appeared as “A General View of the Colonial History of the New World,” American Historical Review 66 (1961): 913–29. 19. Guillermo Morón, ed., Historia General de América: Período Colonial, 11 vols. (Caracas: Academia Nacional de la Historia de Venezuela, 1987). 20. For instance, The History of Humanity: Scientific and Cultural Development, 7 vols. (Paris: UNESCO, 1999).

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broad outlines Zavala laid out in the early 1960s. Whether any individual scholar is likely to complete a project of this magnitude, however, is doubtful. Few historians will ever be better equipped to do so than J. H. Elliott, whose recent Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in America, 1492–1830²¹ is a truly magnificent scholarly achievement. Demonstrating his extensive mastery over two rich and sophisticated historical literatures, this well-crafted synthesis provides a genuinely comparative history of the Spanish and British Empires from the Columbian voyages during the closing decades of the fifteenth century through the independence era of 1770 to 1825. Elliott impressively accomplishes his objectives of transcending the atomization that has increasingly characterized colonial studies of the Americas and, through his comparisons, of throwing new light on the colonial process as it operated in the Americas. Whether his hefty volume will actually “help to shake historians out of their provincialisms” remains to be seen.²² Broad as his study is, however, Elliott makes no claim to comprehensiveness. As he acknowledges, he did not, by design, include the Portuguese, French, and Dutch empires, and he focused mainly on “the development of the settler societies and their relationship with their mother countries,” treating indigenous peoples and the African enslaved only insofar as they related to that development. As he also acknowledges, he was selective in his choice of which settler societies to cover in detail, focusing heavily on the prominent Spanish kingdoms of New Spain and Peru and the older and more populous British colonies in Virginia and New England. He thus neglects the Caribbean colonies and gives scant attention to the British middle and lower southern colonies or to the Spanish territories in Central America, New Granada, Venezuela, Chile, Rio de la Plata, Florida, or the northern borderlands of New Spain, the last two of which he characterizes as the “orphans of Spain’s empire in America.” One can scarcely disagree with Elliot’s observation that “the number of colonizing powers . . . and the multiplicity of the societies they established in the Americas” make “a sustained comparison embracing the entire New World” a project “likely to defy the efforts of any individual historian.”²³ A third alternative might involve a cooperative undertaking involving just a few devoted scholars, each of whom has mastered segments of the increasingly extensive literatures on each of the Americas: not only South and North, island and continental, Spanish, Portuguese, French, Dutch, Scandinavian, and Russian, but also neo-African and indigenous America as well as the populations, 21. John H. Elliott, Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in America, 1492–1830 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006). 22. Ibid., xvi. 23. Ibid., xvi, xviii, 272.

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entities, and cultures that grew up and occupied the interstices between and within those worlds. The aim of such a project would be to produce, not a comprehensive general history, but a systematic and authoritative comparative study of the early modern Americas, an analytic overview that would endeavor to identify the processual commonalities and the rich social and cultural variations throughout the hemisphere in the early modern era.²4 The difficulties involved in all three of these strategies strongly suggest, however, that the ultimate goal of a hemispheric perspective should not be the production of a general history of the early modern Americas, nor even of a multiauthored comparative analysis. In four decades, Atlantic history has not managed to generate such a volume. Like Atlantic history, American hemispheric history should rather pursue a more incremental and diff use approach, one that emphasizes the production of well-researched synthetic studies and monographs with a comparative dimension or a comparative promise. Accessible to those with the necessary linguistic skills, the rich monographic literature produced over the last half century provides a sturdy foundation on which to build synthetic studies of many aspects of the early modern transformation of the Americas. But, the wide scope of a hemispheric approach strongly suggests that collaborative enterprises, made more manageable by web-based networking and circumventing the linguistic deficiencies of individual scholars, may be the most promising way forward. Moreover, such studies would not have to be comprehensive to be useful. They could treat as few as two national spheres. The range of topics that could be illuminated by such undertakings is virtually limitless, including, to list only a few, the changing indigenous experience with and response to European intrusions, settler adaptations of inherited Old World values, institutions, and customs to New World conditions, the development of viable provincial economies, the recruitment and organization of labor, patterns of ethnic interactions, relations between colonial provinces and their respective European metropolises, and the emergence of provincial identities throughout the new American political units. Of course, collaborative studies would not have to be limited to such broad questions. They might, perhaps with more effectiveness, focus on particular aspects of such subjects, such as family formation, gender relations, wealth differentiation, inheritance practices, and patterns of land or resource utilization. 24. This is precisely the sort of working group that James Lockhart, Stuart Schwartz, and I undertook to establish in the early 1990s at the Humanities Research Institute of the University of California. A combination of budgetary shortfalls and my departure from the University of California, Irvine, sabotaged that particular effort, but any attempt to put together and finance a group of specialists to produce a genuinely comparative history of the early modern Americas would face similar obstacles.

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But the tried and true method of producing new knowledge is through new research and the publication of monographs. Depending on the extent of their linguistic skills, scholars have at least three strategies available to them. First, those able to do research in more than one language can design studies of the same phenomenon in two or more similar or contrasting places in different cultural areas. Mariana Dantas’s carefully integrated study of urban laborers of African or biracial descent in the Brazilian town of Sabará in Minas Gerais in Brazil and in Baltimore during the last decades of the eighteenth century and the early decades of the nineteenth century is a model of this type of study.²5 Second, teams of scholars with complementary expertises can collaborate on comparative projects that transcend national and linguistic historiographical boundaries. Thus have Trevor Burnard, a specialist on the British West Indies, and John Garrigus, a student of the French Antilles, jointly undertaken a comparative study of Jamaica and St. Domingue, the two most prolific sugar regimes in the eighteenth-century Caribbean. Third, colonial historians, especially those who study either the Spanish, Portuguese, British, or French American colonies, each of which extended over a broad range of societies formed in a great variety of physical spaces, have always been implicit, and occasionally even explicit, comparativists, and scholars can do important and useful comparative studies without moving out of a specific imperial region. Elizabeth Mancke’s rigorous comparison of the economic, community, and political development of two socioeconomically similar towns in Massachusetts and Nova Scotia and Cynthia Radding’s comparative study of the Sonora region of northwestern New Spain and the Chiquitos region of lowland Bolivia, two ecologically different Spanish frontier colonies, provide particularly good examples of this approach.²6 Unfortunately, the pedagogical devices necessary to encourage new generations of colonialists to step outside national state paradigms and work within a hemispheric framework are not yet in place. Just as the proliferating interest in Atlantic history has led to the creation of programs to foster the study of that subject, however, I hope that the intellectual attractions of studying the internal histories of the new early modern American worlds may lead to the creation of similar programs to promote the analysis of those worlds and foster the intellectual interchange and comparative thinking necessary to enable scholars 25. Mariana Dantas, Black Townsmen: Urban Slavery and Freedom in the Eighteenth-Century Americas (New York and London: Palgrave, 2008). 26. Elizabeth Mancke, The Faultlines of Empire: Political Differentiation in Massachusetts and Nova Scotia, ca. 1760–1830 (New York and London: Routledge, 2005); Cynthia Radding, Landscapes of Power and Identity: Comparative Histories of the Sonoran Desert and the Forests of Amazonia from Colony to Republic (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2005).

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to cross traditional specialized fields.²7 The creation of a center devoted to bringing together younger scholars and advanced doctoral students working in various areas of the colonial Americas to discuss their work and exchange ideas within a broad hemispheric framework would also be an effective device for advancing this perspective.²8 Having embraced the broader Atlantic perspective in recent years, pre– United States historians may now be ready to embrace—as a counterbalance— a complementary hemispheric one. While the Atlanticists continue to pursue connections and interactivity, Hemispherists can concentrate on developing comparisons. With these two broad perspectives before them, early Spanish American, colonial Brazilian, colonial British, and colonial French historians may manage finally to escape—and transcend—the national frameworks that have long channeled their work and inhibited broad comparative analyses. Early modern colonial history would then become something more than the prehistory of the adventitious national states of the contemporary American world. In the process, knowledge of the transformation of the American hemisphere following the Columbian encounter, surely one of the grandest and darkest subjects in the unfolding history of the human race, would be enormously deepened and enriched. 27. Earlier models for such a program include the Tropical History program that flourished at the University of Wisconsin in the 1960s and early 1970s and the interdisciplinary Atlantic History and Culture program that functioned so successfully at Johns Hopkins University in the 1970s and 1980s. The former required and the latter strongly encouraged doctoral students not to work entirely or even mostly within a single national boundary, while the latter offered the opportunity for doctoral students in early modern colonial history to trade a possible expertise in the national era of the United States or Latin America for a knowledge of a parallel segment of the early modern colonial enterprise. 28. Perhaps the relatively new Center for New World Comparative Studies at the John Carter Brown Library, the world’s most extensive and comprehensive collection of published works on the Americas during the early modern period, will undertake to raise the funds necessary to enable it to play a catalytic role in the spread of the hemispheric approach.

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— t wo —

Reformulating Englishness Cultural Adaptation and Provinciality in the Construction of Corporate Identity in Colonial British America

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ew developments have had a greater impact on the social organization of the globe than the movement of peoples outward from Europe beginning during the early modern era. At first moving west and south into the Americas and south and east into Africa and Asia, this expansion inaugurated a movement of peoples and cultures that during the nineteenth century extended through Siberia, Australia, Oceania, and Africa. Moving as explorers, traders, mariners, soldiers, prospectors, missionaries, and settlers, these Europeans never represented more than a small fraction of the population of any European cultural area, even those areas—Iberia and the British Isles— which contributed most substantially to the initial population flow. Yet, their numbers were sufficient to make them the agents of a fundamental transformation in human history. In the Americas, their disease pathogens altered the human landscape by decimating the indigenous populations, and their hunger for precious metals, land, and other resources reduced native empires to subaltern status, subjecting the imperial peoples to labor in plantations, ranches, and mines, while driving the less settled peoples deeper into the interior. The

Under the title “Reformulating Englishness: Cultural Adaptation and Provinciality in the Construction of Corporate Identity in Colonial British America,” this chapter was written for presentation at the international seminar “Brasil: De Império a outro (1780–1850),” University of São Paulo, Brazil, September 5, 2005, and was the keynote address at the conference “Diasporas, Migration and Identities,” British Group in Early American History, Clare College, Cambridge University, September 10, 2005. It was later presented as a lecture at the Department of History, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, January 30, 2006, and, in a Portuguese version entitled “Reformulando a identidade inglesa na Américabritânica colonial: Adaptaçâo cultural e experiência provincial na construçào de identidades corporativas,” it was considered in a follow-up session of the international seminar at the University of São Paulo, May 30, 2006. It was published under that title in the online journal Almanack Braziliense 4 (November 2006): 5–36. Shorn of the closing sections, which repeat materials published in chapter 17 of this volume, it is published here, for the first time in English, from the original paper.

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Europeans’ ravenous demand for labor was the driving force behind the development of a destructive transoceanic trade that brought millions of enslaved Africans to the New World and deeply affected social and political relations within Africa. New trades and flows of products greatly stimulated the economies of western Europe, providing stimulus for domestic economic developments and for the expansion of commerce that by the second half of the nineteenth century would bring Europe to a degree of world economic and political domination never before enjoyed by any segment of the world’s population. The current rage for Atlantic studies has focused historical attention upon the ways these developments refashioned the broader Atlantic world. As my colleagues at Johns Hopkins and I quickly discovered when we started the first formal doctoral program in Atlantic history and culture in the late 1960s, neither the flows of people, goods, and cultures nor the social processes that characterized the expansion of Europe were ever confined to the Atlantic. From the beginning these developments had a global reach—into the Indian and Pacific Oceans and the littorals surrounding those oceans—and that reach became ever more extensive and intrusive over the centuries. Nevertheless, the Atlantic basin continues to provide a useful and manageable arena for the study of this expansive process during its first three centuries. My own expertise is limited to just one part of the Atlantic basin, the part that is known among North American academics and their intellectual auxiliaries as early America. For two reasons, I have never found this term satisfactory. First, it is unthinkingly imperial, yet another example of the uncritical expropriation of the term America to refer to just a portion of the hemisphere. Nor does the more recent trend to think of “early America” in more inclusive terms render it any the less imperial, because that usage still mostly refers only to those areas that would subsequently become part of the American nation. Second, it is far too vague and general to foster effective critical usage. There was never just one but a great many early Americas, before and after the early modern era. Precisely to address this problem explicitly, Jack Pole and I in the early 1980s used the term colonial British America as the title for the volume of essays we organized and edited on the then state of the field.¹ We intended this usage to make clear both that the subject matter of the volume was the broad cultural area that was nominally British, that is, associated with or in alliance with Great Britain and, as I spelled out in several later essays, that colonial British America was one of many early modern Americas, including Hispanic, Portuguese, French, Dutch, Swedish, Danish, Russian, and of course count1. Jack P. Greene and J. R. Pole., eds., Colonial British America: Essays in the New History of the Early Modern Era (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984).

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less indigenous Americas. Unless the subject matter of early America is parochially reduced to nothing more than the prehistory of the United States, a tendency against which I have been battling for most of my professional life, any comprehensive history of early America would obviously require consideration of the history of all of these many culture areas. Of course, we have known for generations that none of these entities was composed exclusively of people from the nation with which it was associated. We have known, for instance, that Hispanic America contained many Portuguese and Flemish emigrants as well as vast, largely self-governing, and settled republics of Indians; that the British Empire included thousands of German, French, Irish, and Jewish emigrants; and that Dutch American settlements were similarly polyglot. For an even longer time, we have known—even if most historians chose to ignore it—that Africans constituted large portions of the emigrant and settled populations throughout the Americas. The heterogeneity of these populations and the mixtures that invariably resulted should long since have called into question the adequacy of any scheme of nomenclature that would imply national demographic homogeneity. For British America over the past generation, many fine studies of the non-English populations, whether of European, African, Amerindian, or mixed descent, have emphasized the extent to which these groups managed to hang on to important elements in their inherited cultures and have thereby added even more saliency to the question of who composed “early America.” The problem that now confronts historians of early modern America is whether the use of such national or ethnic identifications is any longer of much value, and my intention in this chapter is to make the case that they are not only still useful but absolutely essential to any effort to understand the transformation of the Americas during the early modern era. In particular, in reference to the British colonies, I propose to make a case for the continuing utility of the phrase Jack Pole and I adopted for our volume in the early 1980s, colonial British America. I want to make it clear at the outset that this advocacy is not meant to excuse the Anglocentrism that has often characterized versions of America’s colonial past, much less to repeat or extend it. On the contrary, as a life-long enemy of all sorts of “centrisms,” whether of the national, local, religious, ethnic, racial, class, or gender variety, I believe that the most important achievement of my generation of scholars of colonialists was to break out of such boxes and to underline the need for what the Annalistes called a histoire totale. Accordingly, I begin with the assumption that we need to find a place for all the peoples involved in the transformation of the Americas. The concept colonial British America, as I define it, does not imply the irrelevance of those participants who

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were not British. The continuing presence of indigenous peoples, the increasing number of people of African descent, the growing number of non-British European immigrants, the incorporations of new populations of European, African, and Amerindian descent from the other Americas as a result of war and conquest, and the formation of new social entities in frontier and border areas—all represent an important part of that story. What I do wish to do by using the concept colonial British America, at least in the first instance, is to call attention to and to emphasize the enormous disparities of power inherent in the early modern colonial situation. Even during the long era in which historians uncritically bought into historical constructions, themselves artifacts of the colonial era, that stressed the achievements of settler populations, scanting the effects of those achievements upon other segments of the population and largely ignoring the important roles played by those other segments, historians were always at least implicitly aware of the disparities in power in the transformation of the Americas. Indeed, historical studies operated within a paradigm of power according to which whatever entity had the most power was the most worthy of historical study. In this respect, historians differed profoundly from literary scholars, who seem only in the last generation to have taken an interest in the role of power in the formation and operation of cultures. Notwithstanding their late entry into the game, however, literary scholars, through the medium of what has come to be called postcolonial studies, have been most responsible, in my view, for underlining and bringing to the forefront of historical investigation the profound discrepancies of power that are inherent in colonial situations. Perhaps, as I have often heard it said, they have not told historians much that they did not already know, and that certainly is true of those post–World War II historians and other social analysts whose works focused on the effects of decolonization in Africa and Asia and the lingering effects of the colonial experience upon the formerly colonized. Over the past generation, however, the efforts of literary scholars have been critical in attaching new meanings to old historical knowledge, in developing a fuller and more explicit appreciation of the nature and social effects of colonialism, and in undermining or challenging the assumptions that had long inhibited so many historians from developing a similar appreciation. Postcolonial theory, however useful, cannot be applied uncritically to the study of the early modern colonial Americas. Its practitioners have primarily developed it from, and applied it to, the study of nineteenth- and twentiethcentury colonialism where the colonizers never constituted more than a small fraction of the populations of densely occupied “colonies of exploitation,” only infrequently applying it to colonies composed of and dominated by large numbers of settlers. To cite a few examples, in settler colonies the dominant settler

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population may have been the colonizers in their relationships with neighboring indigenous populations, but in their relationship to the metropolitan societies to which they were attached they were also the colonized. Similarly, those indigenous groups who remained outside the settler colonies and resistant to the cultural influences of the settlers were scarcely part of the colonized, at least not before their displacement and subjugation. The same is true for those self-governing republics of Indians in Hispanic America which paralleled the republics of Spaniards without coming under the immediate political control of Spanish settlers. Then, there is the question of the masses of nonindigenous enslaved peoples who were forcibly brought into areas of settler control. They were certainly victims of colonialism, but were they part of the colonized and if so, in what sense? Despite these terminological problems, the fundamental point that we can draw from the work of the postcolonialists remains valid: namely, that within settler colonies the settlers—the colonizers—quickly came to exert the overwhelming preponderance of power. Of course, this is not to say that that power was neither resisted nor contested. One of the most prominent developments in the historiography of this generation and the former has been the recognition that in almost every set of social or political relationships, even among masters and slaves, those traditionally regarded as power-less have had at least some room for maneuver, and that the power-ful have often found it advisable to negotiate their authority with them. To whatever extent this preponderance of power was subject to negotiation, its existence is undeniable, and that existence raises the larger questions of how settlers managed to acquire it, how they expressed it, and to what effect. By what process did they go about transforming an indigenous America into a colonial British America? These are the questions I propose to deal with in this chapter. To some important extent, settler power derived from superior numbers. As settler population increased, spread through the countryside in any colony, and reorganized existing landscapes, it quickly came to play a predominant role within those landscapes. Yet, simple numerical preponderance was unnecessary for the English/British to establish their supremacy. In several West Indian colonies and in low-country South Carolina, free settlers constituted a majority of the emigrant population for only a few decades. Yet, they were still able to establish and maintain their supremacy over the political societies they established there. So it was not just numbers of people but the goals those people brought with them and their success in achieving them that were chiefly responsible for the extraordinary defining power they managed to exert in their new societies. Mostly, if not overwhelmingly, English, the settlers of the earliest colonies—in the Chesapeake and New England and on the At-

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lantic island of Bermuda and the West Indian islands of Barbados and the Leeward Islands—came with the intention of establishing provincial societies along English lines. In later colonies, the proportion of English emigrants was smaller but still sufficient to enable them to pursue the same goal. Conquered colonies fell into a special category. In those in which most of the established settlers left with the arrival of the English, including Jamaica in 1655, and East and West Florida in 1763, English immigrants had a relatively free hand to do what they wanted. But in those in which the majority of established settlers remained behind—and this was the case with New York, New Jersey, and Delaware—English newcomers were no less determined to render their new homes English, but it took them several decades and substantial concessions to reach this goal. Conquered colonies to which English immigration was initially slight, such as Nova Scotia, represented a special case that proves the rule. Without English settlers pursuing the goal of creating English societies, Nova Scotia remained an essentially French colony until British settlement there began in earnest after 1748. With an already dense population of French people and only a small number of British immigrants, Quebec remained an essentially French settlement with French laws and a French civil and religious establishment. Wherever English settlers came to dominate the public life of a colony, however, they, operating under broad constraints set down by a weak, distant, and often negligent metropolitan government with little capacity for coercion, became the central agents of turning indigenous into British Americas. This is to say that most of the agency in the construction of the new polities that constituted early modern empires rested in the hands of the settlers themselves. They settled and reconstructed the new spaces, creating the economic and household structures that enabled them to live in those spaces, and their agents—in the form of representatives and magistrates—largely fashioned the systems of laws and governance that enabled them to regulate social and economic interactions and to govern the acquisition and circulation of property in land, slaves, and material goods. Of course, they were not entirely free agents in this process. In particular, they were restricted by their metropolitan legal and cultural inheritance. In the English colonies, this meant that they were reproducing variants of the common law cultures they had left behind, cultures that, varying from one political entity to another according to local custom, gave them enormous flexibility in adapting the law to local conditions while at the same time marking them as resolutely, even militantly, English. To the extent that they had any qualms about what they were doing to local indigenous peoples and to Africans, settlers justified their behavior in terms of the story they constructed to explain the larger meaning of their lives. Ac-

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cording to that story, which was the same throughout the English and many other parts of the newly colonized worlds of the Americas, they were engaged in a noble enterprise: the bringing of previously improperly exploited territories into a cultivated state. They were constructing outposts of European civility and thereby beginning the work of bringing civilization to a vast new world. This ennobling—and enabling—story provided the rationale for the wholesale expansion of settlement throughout the colonial era, as settlers rushed to establish new political units to bring law and governance wherever they went. The spread of settlement thus represented an astonishing spread of culture as frontiers rapidly became backcountries and backcountries quickly developed into forecountries. A particularly interesting approach to the study of this broad cultural transformation is through the study of identity: what did English/British colonists do to make their new political societies English or British—and why was that process important? Difficult as it may be to understand now, the study of identity, or character, carried relatively little legitimacy among historians as recently as a quarter century ago. To be sure, scholars in American studies after World War II exhibited a strong interest in studying the American character, and the psychologist Erik Erikson produced an intriguing and influential essay on American identity in the 1950s. But relatively few historians followed suit, regarding such questions as fluff, subordinate to the political, economic, intellectual, and social questions that then lay at the center of the historical enterprise. My own interest in such questions dates back more than half a century to the early 1950s when, as a young researcher in London, I found myself fascinated by one of the central features of the chorographies, histories, and travel accounts emanating from the early colonies, which I was then reading for the first time: invariably, they included sections, and often substantial sections, on the character of the place and the people that the authors were describing. But I did not seriously or systematically pursue this fascination for another twenty years, until I received an invitation to give a set of three lectures in southern history at Mercer University. I was then deep into the study of various features of the development of British plantation colonies, and I decided to give my lectures on the changing corporate identity of three plantation colonies, Virginia, Jamaica, and South Carolina, during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. My working title, “Paradise Defined,” was intentionally ironic. These lectures were pretty crude. But in the process of putting them together and later trying—so far unsuccessfully—to expand them into a book, I had to confront a number of questions about the study of corporate identity, and I made a number of significant discoveries, some of which I will elaborate here.

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Identity, by which we mean how individuals or collectivities identify themselves to themselves and to others and how others identify them, can be studied on a variety of levels and through a number of different strategies. It can be studied on an individual level and on any of the many other levels on which people organize themselves into collective or corporate entities. Not only every individual but every family, every kinship group, every congregation, every club, every community, every polity, every language group, every denomination, every province, every nation has an identity to which a sufficient number of members conform enough of the time to give it some credibility—and utility. The specific kind of identity that interested me was the corporate identity of colonies, in colonial British America during the seventeenth and eighteenth century, particularly in the three colonies I treated in my original lectures and in Barbados, which I added to the project later. My first discovery was that each of the colonies I was treating had a distinctive identity and that that identity changed over time. All four places shared several common attributes: they shared a common English/British social, cultural, political, and legal heritage and a Protestant religious heritage, they were incorporated into the same extended polity, they were located in tropical or semitropical places, they developed plantation agricultural systems based on unfree white and enslaved black and indigenous labor; a large proportion, if not a majority, of their populations consisted of enslaved people; each place developed valuable export trades to the British Isles and elsewhere; their dominant populations shared common economic, social, and political objectives; and they were highly successful economic enterprises. Indeed, metropolitans thought of them as Britain’s four most valuable colonies. Yet, they constructed demonstrably different identities for themselves. Obviously the product of generations of living and acting together within the same polity, the distinctiveness of these identities was so pronounced as to render highly problematic any effort to talk about a mainland identity among British North American colonies or a general West Indian identity. Notwithstanding these differences in outcome, the process of identity formation in these new societies—and this was my second important discovery— was remarkably similar, and it involved three overlapping stages. Early on, as I pondered what strategy to pursue in investigating my project, I figured out that one might approach the study of identity either through the laws these societies made for themselves or through the contemporary discursive literature emanating from and about them. In many ways, I have subsequently decided, the first approach may well be the better one. Probably nothing reveals a political society’s identity, changing over time, so fully as its laws and the judicial actions taken to enforce those laws. Law is the result of the collective action of

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the lawmakers, who, in the societies under consideration, were representative of the independent people in them, and the laws both represent the values of those independent people and reveal the behaviors by other segments of the population that to some extent provoked those laws.² Perhaps largely because I first identified the subject and defined the parameters of the project through extensive reading in the discursive literature, however, this is not the approach I chose. This decision turned out to be a useful one because changes in the nature of the discursive literature enabled me to identify the three phases in the creation of colonial corporate identities. In the first phase, the literature concentrated heavily upon describing the physical spaces a given colony was to occupy and on developing proposals for the effective use of that space. Travel reports, sometimes masquerading as histories, and promotional tracts sought to describe and to evaluate for metropolitan readers the nature of the land, the vegetation, the indigenous peoples, the rivers and streams, the harbors, the wildlife, the rainfall, and the climate. They speculated about what products then in demand on the eastern side of the Atlantic might be produced there and imagined how that peculiar physical space might be adapted to English designs. If they often discussed the perils that made life difficult or uncongenial to English people, they tended to emphasize the promise that would make colonization attractive to prospective investors and immigrants. The longer a colony took to develop, the longer this first phase persisted. Relatively short in Barbados, it extended far longer in Virginia, Jamaica, and South Carolina. In the second phase of identity formation, the focus of contemporary literature, which often took the form of chorographies or histories, shifted from what could be done in a particular physical space to what the settlers had or had not done to render them productive recognizably English places. The principal emphasis in this literature, in other words, was no longer upon a colony’s physical attributes, though these were never ignored, but upon the social, economic, cultural, and political changes wrought by the settler population. The authors of this literature, creoles and assimilated immigrants, took pride in and examined in detail the extent to which settlers had been able to adapt English social and cultural practices—including patterns of land occupation, layout of urban, village, and rural settlements, land use, modes of economic production and distribution, family and household structures, housing, domestic and animal husbandry, diet, clothing, political and religious organization, and, perhaps 2. I have treated this subject at greater length in Jack P. Greene, “By Their Laws Shall Ye Know Them”: Law and Identity in Colonial British America,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 33 (Autumn 2002): 247–60 (see chap. 5 in this volume).

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most important of all, legal structures—to the physical conditions they had encountered in their new places of abode. With few exceptions, they celebrated these adaptations as evidence of the substantial improvements that they and their ancestors had wrought upon the social landscapes they had seized from the indigenous inhabitants. In the process, they took the first steps in creating the rationale by which their descendants and later generations of immigrants would expand around the continent or on to other islands, seeing themselves as engaged in a massive civilizing process by which formerly unproductive and unorganized land was transformed into productive and organized entities along European lines. Often, this literature was exhortatory, urging settlers on to efforts that would more fully realize the physical potential of a given colony and eliminate those features that cast doubt upon the depth and extent of their Englishness. This focus upon depicting a colony as an improved, improving, and still improvable place, with the definition of improvement resting heavily upon English models, continued into the next stage of identity formation. In this third stage, however, the emphasis shifted to an articulation of the specific emerging identity of the colony and its peoples (principally of course its free peoples). The claim of the authors of the chorographies, histories, and other descriptive literature produced by settlers and their auxiliaries in this third phase was that each of these ostensibly British places had achieved a settled identity of its own, a distinctive identity growing out of and interacting with its specific physical space and the character of the society that had developed there through the collective activities over generations of the people who had resided there and made a history together. This distinctive identity, they suggested, both identified the place and distinguished it from all other similar entities. The implicit suggestion in the commentaries and works that illustrate this third phase of identity formation was that the earliest generations of settlers may have started out trying to recreate little Englands in the Americas, but in every case they had wound up reformulating Englishness to suit the specific conditions they had found or created in each province. Evident in just about every aspect of their lives and societies, the process of reformulation, these writers suggested, had wound up creating distinctive provinces with distinctive identities. Moreover, the claim of these writers was not only that a given colony had become a distinctive corporate entity unlike any other similar entity in the British world but also that its residents had become a distinctive people unlike the British people who lived anywhere else. If they had once been all (or mostly) English, they were now Virginian, Barbadian, Jamaican, or South Carolinian variants of English. But making the case for provincial distinctiveness did not require the rejection of English/British standards and models. The residents of the four colo-

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nies had a number of features in common. Building on the achievements of their forebears, they all shared the experience of founding and developing new British entities in the New World. While maintaining a connection with Britain, they also shared the experience of interacting with peoples among them who were not English: indigenous peoples in Virginia and South Carolina, and African peoples in all four colonies. Most of all, however, they shared an identity as English people overseas with a profound reverence for all the characteristics that that identity was thought to entail, including a deep attachment to English forms of consensual governance, to the system of English laws with its emphasis upon the rule of law and the sanctity of private property, to Protestantism, and to the commerce that had long kept them in close contact with the parent society. Indeed, they all saw their provincial identities as variations of this larger English or British identity. My third important discovery was that two analytically and functionally distinct types of cultural models were at work in the process by which the free settlers in the colonies came to understand who they were. Borrowing from reference group theory, we can call these types of models normative and comparative. For English colonists, Britain, with its complex and rich culture, provided a normative model from which the founders of the colonies, the charter groups, could draw selectively in their efforts to create offshoots of the Old World in the New and upon which later generations of settlers could model their own schemes for improving their society. Normative models supply standards against which cultural achievements can be measured and social development assessed. In the process of identity formation in colonial British America, however, the mimesis of metropolitan models was always selective. Settlers picked and chose from among the vast store of traits or practices that English metropolitan society provided. Comparative models, which can be either positive or negative, could be used, by contrast, to refer to those people, principally indigenous and African, whose seemingly outlandish deportment and rude and uncultivated behavior provided examples of what settlers hoped not to become. To some extent, non-English residents of the colonies could function in a similar way, while for those colonies situated in close proximity to the colonies of foreign powers, such as South Carolina and Jamaica, the Catholic residents of those places could also function as negative comparative models. Inevitably, of course, the often intimate cultural negotiations that went on between the dominant settler populations and these negative reference groups, these others, constituted an important element in the process of reformulating Englishness into distinctive provincial cultures. My fourth important discovery was that these provincial identities long survived the dismemberment of the British Empire in the 1780s. The American Revolution certainly had an impact upon those identities, providing a new

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set of heroes and a new frame of reference for the new continental states and a sense of isolation, loss, even impotence among the old West Indian colonies. Provincial identities not only differed one from another over British America, they also changed within themselves over time in response to new conditions. But the core of the identities that had begun to form during the early generations in all four colonies remained intact and important, at least through the 1820s, where I ended my study. In Virginia and South Carolina, they survived the incorporation of those states into the American union. In Barbados and Jamaica, they survived the new imperial system that began to emerge in the 1790s and even the metropolitan attack on and eventual elimination of slavery in the early 1830s. These insights, drawn from a study of four colonies, can, I suggest, illustrate the broad outlines of the process by which colonial settlers and their auxiliaries turned portions of America into a variety of recognizably British—not Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, or French, but British—Americas. To describe the essential elements in this process in broad strokes, the overwhelmingly English people who created and organized all of the English or, after 1707, British colonies in America took with them to their new homes explicit and deeply held claims to the culture they left behind and to the national identity implicit in that culture. Everywhere they went to colonize, they manifested their powerful determination to express and preserve their Englishness by reordering existing physical and cultural landscapes along English lines; imposing upon them English patterns of land occupation, economic and social organization, cultural practices, and political, legal, and religious systems; and making the English language the language of authority. This was true even of those settlements formed by those who, like Massachusetts Puritans, hoped to improve upon English institutions. Far from being moderated by the contemporary importation of large numbers of Africans and the immigration of significant numbers of people from other parts of Britain, Ireland, France, Germany, and other places in Europe, this anglicizing impulse seems actually to have been reinforced during the decades after 1740 by growing communication and commercial links between the colonies and Britain and by the colonies’ important participation in the imperial wars against Catholic, and allegedly despotic, France and Spain between 1739 and 1763. Probably at no time during the colonial era had colonial British patriotism and nationalism been more intense than they were at the conclusion of the Seven Years’ War. For English colonists and their descendants, however, a variety of conditions operated during the long colonial years both to render colonial claims to Englishness problematic and to enhance the urgency of such claims among immigrants and their descendants. These included the colonists’ great physical

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distance from England; the social and cultural contrasts, especially during the colonies’ earliest decades, between the simple and crude societies they were constructing and the complex and infinitely more polite society from which they came; their situation on the outermost edges of English civilization, in the midst of populations who to them appeared pagan, barbarous, and savage; the presence, if not the preponderance, in their societies of aliens, in the form of Amerindians and, later, Africans; their frequent reliance upon new institutions, such as plantations and chattel, race-based slavery; their persistent confl icts with the parent state over whether they, as colonists, were entitled to English laws and privileges; and, perhaps most important of all, a general tendency among people in the home islands to regard them as “others” who fell considerably short of metropolitan standards. Focusing on the area of my specialization, this chapter has not been explicitly comparative. But it has endeavored to use the experience of the British colonies to identify some general concepts and processes that may be useful in analyzing other settler colonies established in the Americas during the early modern era. On the basis of this analysis, we might propose a number of testable propositions. First, individual participants—traders, settlers, fighting men, and missionaries, sometimes organized into expeditions, trading companies, religious orders, or families—not governments or bureaucratic officials, were the primary agents in European expansion and the transformation of indigenous cultural and political spaces into Europeanized ones. Second, the first generation of European occupants—the charter groups— largely determined the contours of economic, social, political, legal, and religious life in every new colony or province. Third, these charter groups and their descendants, driven by a desire to maintain their connection to the metropolitan culture from which they emanated and to command the respect of that culture, exhibited a powerful mimetic impulse to transplant metropolitan culture to their new places of abode. Fourth, in the process of transplantation, colonial groups found it necessary to reformulate, that is, to creolize, metropolitan culture to adapt it to local physical conditions and to emerging socioeconomic structures and patterns of land occupation and use and to make it accommodate and control populations of different cultural backgrounds. Fifth, the conjoint processes of transplantation and creolization produced marked cultural variations over time and space and in response to changing historical conditions within spheres of European colonization. Sixth, these variations—as well as similarities—can best be understood through a study of changing corporate identity. Seventh, the most promising site for such studies is at the level of the colony

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or province, at which the collective experience of the inhabitants with landscape reorganization, polity construction, institution building, rule making, law enforcement, and social structuring primarily took place. Eighth, these provincial units became the principal sites for the negotiation of the distribution of authority between the center and the peripheries of national empires. In the light of arguments presented elsewhere in this volume, specifically chapters 8 and 18, we can add to this list of testable hypotheses seven others: Ninth, the remarkably durable cultural hearths formed in these provincial units often became powerful engines for geographical expansion into new provinces, which in turn resulted in the creation of new polities with their own peculiar corporate identities constructed through the same process as had occurred in older provinces. Tenth, colonialism of the kind represented by the transformation of portions of the New World into at least partially Europeanized units did not end with the achievement of independence. Eleventh, there were powerful continuities between pre-national and postnational colonialism in terms of both polity building and identity formation within polities. Twelfth, after independence, as before, public life continued to center in the provinces, not in the nation. Thirteenth, long after the casting off of imperial connections and the formation of national, often federal, governments, existing provincial identities continued to be the primary form of corporate identity. Fourteenth, the construction of national histories has operated to obscure the continuing importance of the province as a political collectivity and the weakness of national identity. Fifteenth, an emphasis on national styles of colonial formation has obscured the commonalities in this process over time, space, and culture. Whether these hypotheses, drawn principally out of my own study of colonial British America, may be useful in organizing historical investigation in other cultural areas must be left to specialists in those areas.

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— three —

State Formation, Resistance, and the Creation of Revolutionary Traditions in the Early Modern Era

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T

he 1997 sears symposium, “Transatlantic Revolutionary Traditions 1688–1824,” at Purdue University seems to have been a response to two historiographical trends, an older and by now quite venerable, not to say antique, interest in revolutionary ideology and the newer and more trendy interest in the transatlantic context of historical developments around the Atlantic rim. Particularly evident in the English-speaking world and stimulated by the pioneering works of Bernard Bailyn, Gordon S. Wood, J. G. A. Pocock, and many other students of the history of early modern and Enlightenment political thought, the interest in revolutionary ideology has, over the past thirty years, generated a vast, if relatively narrowly focused, literature on confl icting ideologies used to sustain—or explain—the revolutionary and nation-building projects from the late seventeenth through the early nineteenth centuries. Dating back at least as far as R. R. Palmer’s seminal transatlantic comparative studies of late eighteenth-century revolutions in North America and Europe, the rising interest in Atlantic studies calls attention to the possibilities for comparative studies and the interconnectedness of developments within the larger Atlantic world. On November 1, 1997, the Purdue University Department of History brought four scholars together for a symposium, “Transatlantic Revolutionary Traditions 1688–1824,” with papers devoted to the Glorious Revolution, the American Revolution, the French Revolution, and the Mexican Revolution. The organizers subsequently asked me to provide a lecture to put those revolutions into a general framework, and this chapter is the result. Originally entitled “Transatlantic Revolutionary Traditions: A Retrospective,” this chapter was written to be delivered as the Biennial Louis Martin Sears Lecture at Purdue on April 6, 1999. It is here reprinted with permission and corrections from “State Formation, Resistance, and the Creation of Revolutionary Traditions in the Early Modern Era: A Retrospective,” in Michael A. Morrison and Melinda Zook, eds., Revolutionary Currents: Nation Building in the Transatlantic World, 1688–1821 (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2004), 1–34.

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But there is still a third historiography that is relevant to understanding the emergence and character of revolutionary traditions in the early modern world: the historiography growing out of the new literature on state formation (and, to a lesser extent, nation building) that began to appear in the early 1990s and has since been proliferating rapidly. By showing that the unitary nation state was principally a development of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, this historiography has called attention to the rather different—what might be called, the premodern—character of early modern states and empires, to the structural tensions inherent within those polities, and to the relationship between those tensions and the emergence of “revolutionary” movements and traditions in several areas of the Atlantic world between the mid-sixteenth and the early nineteenth centuries. With the objective of teasing out some of the most important commonalities and variations among these revolutionary movements and the traditions that both informed and grew out of them, this chapter focuses principally upon these subjects. The contest over what the nature of state and empire should be, it suggests, was the principal underlying issue that linked together all early modern “revolutions” and the traditions associated with them. II That early modern polities differed radically from modern states is perhaps the central conclusion of the recent literature on state formation. As Charles Tilly and other contributors to this literature have shown, the organization of Europe into “a small number of unitary and integrated nation states” is relatively recent. “It took a long time,” Tilly writes, “for national states—relatively centralized, differentiated, and autonomous organizations successfully claiming priority in the use of force within large, contiguous, and clearly defined territories—to dominate the European map.”¹ In 1490, on the eve of Europe’s expansion across the Atlantic, “Europe’s political structure,” as Mark Greengrass notes, was still “dominated by a multiplicity of regional political entities,” just under five hundred in all, with “a rich variety of [political and constitutional] traditions.” These included “large old-established states, new principalities, dynastic empires, city states, confederations,” the Holy Roman Empire, representing “the ideal of universal world monarchy,” and the papacy, with its claims to worldwide spiritual and temporal jurisdiction.² 1. Charles Tilly, Coercion, Capital, and European States, AD 990–1990 (Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1990), 43–44, 224. 2. Mark Greengrass, ed., Conquest and Coalescence: The Shaping of the State in Early Modern Europe (London: E. Arnold, 1991), vii, 1–2, 3.

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The process of state building during the early modern era resulted in the creation of the first large nation states, in Portugal, England, Spain, France, Sweden, and the Netherlands. It proceeded in two ways: either through voluntary agreements such as dynastic marriages or defensive confederations or, much more rarely, through conquest; and it took two principal forms: either amalgamation, as happened with Spain, or incorporation, as was the case in England (with regard to Cornwall and Wales) and France (with regard to Toulouse, Champagne, Brittany, Gascony, Burgundy, and Flanders). As yet, monarchs lacked the fiscal, administrative, and coercive resources necessary to achieve centralized and integrated polities through either coercive or administrative means. For that reason, coalescence, however it happened and whatever its form, invariably involved negotiation, or what Tilly has called bargaining, “between the crown and the ruling class[es] of their different provinces.” As J. H. Elliott explains, the arrangements worked out through these negotiations almost always, even in cases of conquest, ensured the survival of provincial “customary laws and institutions,” “allowed for a high degree of continuing local self-government,” and left considerable authority in the hands of local magnates.³ “The effectiveness of any pre-modern regime,” John Miller observes, “depended as much on the subject’s acceptance as on the monarch’s power of coercion.”4 The result was a system of “composite monarchies” or “multinational states” in which, notes H. G. Koenigsberger, the “constituent parts . . . always antedated their union” and “therefore had different laws, rights, privileges, and traditions.” “With this multiplicity of jurisdictions,” writes Miller, “went a multiplicity of laws, especially in those areas, mainly in the northern half of Europe, where law was based on custom.” By this system, observes Koenigsberger, “a prince could add province after province, kingdom after kingdom to his realm and rule each as its own prince under different laws, and with varying powers.”5 These new national entities involved some concentration of power in agencies of the central state but also left considerable authority with the principal holders of power in the peripheries. “Peaceful coexistence . . . depended on the king, who resided in the bigger kingdom, governing [each] . . . smaller one in the way it had been used to, that is respecting the rights of its ruling elite, especially in the matter of religion, and, in the absence of an effective civil 3. J. H. Elliott, “A Europe of Composite Monarchies,” Past & Present, no. 137 (1992): 52–53, 57, 69. 4. John Miller, “Introduction,” in Miller, ed., Absolutism in Seventeenth-Century Europe (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1990), 13. 5. H. G. Koenigsberger, “Composite States, Representative Institutions and the American Revolution,” Historical Research 62 (1989): 135–36; Miller, “Introduction,” 3–4.

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service,” acknowledging the country’s privilege of jus indigenatus, by which only natives of the province could be appointed to public office, and “running the country with that elite’s advice and cooperation.”6 To paraphrase Elliott, these composite states were thus founded on mutual compacts between the prince and the ruling class of each of his (or her) different provinces, compacts that displayed “a profound respect for [existing] corporate structure[s] and for traditional [provincial] rights, privileges and customs.”7 Nor did this “dispersal of authority” stop at the provincial level. Within the several components of most early modern colonies, the principal magnates also had to negotiate the terms of their governance with various local jurisdictions and corporate groups—with regions, towns, communities, and other organized social, economic, and religious groups and institutions. In such negotiations, these corporate and territorial bodies effectively traded allegiance and resources for corporate privileges that guaranteed them extensive rights of selfgovernment within their respective spheres.8 By thus ensuring that each province enjoyed its “existing privileges” and a large “measure of self-government,” this widespread distribution of authority, Elliot writes, left local power holders “without any urgent need to challenge the status quo” and thereby “gave even the most arbitrary and artificial unions a certain stability and resilience.”9 In the absence of a well-developed conception of unitary sovereignty before the middle of the seventeenth century, composite monarchies were thus characterized by indirect rule, consultation, and, at least initially, fragmented sovereignty. Especially in the conditions that obtained throughout most of the early modern era, this type of polity contained a fundamental structural weakness. This weakness lay in a built-in tension between centripetal impulses toward centralization and centrifugal tendencies toward localism. For princes confronted with major challenges to their regimes, including war and the suppression of religious dissent, the loose and decentralized character of most early modern polities posed a major problem. Whether they were offensive, in pursuit of dynastic, territorial, or religious ambitions, or defensive, wars were ubiquitous from the late fifteenth century through the early nineteenth century, and the steady increase in the cost and scale of warfare over time required vast fiscal resources for which princes had to seek the consent of statewide or provincial representative bodies. If the emerging nation states of Europe “were still marginal to their domestic social [and political] environments,” the 6. Koenigsberger, “Composite States,” 136, 143, 149–50. 7. Elliott, “Europe of Composite Monarchies,” 57, 68–69. 8. Miller, “Introduction,” 3–4. 9. Elliott, “Europe of Composite Monarchies,” 57, 68–69.

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Dutch historian Marjolein C. t’Hart writes, they were nevertheless “central in wars.”¹0 Confronted with the need to mobilize more and more men, ships, and other war materials, princes became increasingly impatient with the local-mindedness of statewide and provincial estates and local magistrates and scornful of the various systems of local law, privileges, rights, and constitutions that required the consent of such bodies for all taxes. They responded to this situation by endeavoring to find ways to enhance royal authority and to subordinate or bypass altogether the hodgepodge of obstructive local and representative institutions that prevented their efficient acquisition of the resources they needed. Moving powerfully in the direction of trying to achieve “a more unitary state structure, with union conceived [of ] primarily in terms of uniformity of religion, laws and taxation,” writes Miller, they came more and more to regard the “institutional and legal diversity” that was characteristic of early modern composite polities as “an intolerable impediment” to their “plans to maximize resources and ensure the military co-operation” of all the constituent parts of their polities.¹¹ As an ideological justification for these efforts, princes and their spokespeople elaborated an ideology of what would later be called “absolutism.” This emerging ideology stressed the superiority of the monarch or prince. Drawing upon an analogy between state and family, it emphasized the Crown’s role as the patriarch of his peoples and his duties as the defender of the polities over which he presided, duties that required him to override the particular privileges and interests of the several component parts of the state and of representative institutions in pursuit of the security and welfare of the state as a whole. This ideology also stressed the religious dimensions of kingship, elaborating the old notion of the divine right of kings and the godly origins of monarchical power that provided the king “with an authority which transcended that of [the] customary constitutions and local privileges” that were the essence of the early modern composite state.¹² “Hampered,” in the words of Miller, “by poor communication, insufficient financial resources,” “personnel limited in numbers and proficiency,” a “view of office as private property,” and a “well-entrenched habit of putting local interests first,” advocates of “a more unitary state structure” everywhere encountered considerable resistance, and they made little headway in these projects. Representative bodies and local authorities became increasingly proficient in 10. Marjolein C. t’Hart, The Making of a Bourgeois State: War, Politics and Finance during the Dutch Revolt (Manchester: University of Manchester Press, 1993), 6. 11. Miller, “Introduction,” 4; also Elliott, “Europe of Composite Monarchies,” 62–63. 12. Miller, “Introduction,” 5.

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the “techniques of evasion, obstruction, and manipulation.” Nevertheless, the centralizing activities of the state provoked widespread fear of the loss of national, provincial, and local liberties. Subordinate kingdoms and provinces and, where they existed, central representative institutions regarded any steps toward the enhancement of central authority as innovations and, as Elliot writes, “scrutinized every move by royal officials which might be interpreted as a violation of their laws” and sought to amplify and fortify “their constitutional defenses whenever possible.”¹³ In an effort to provide protection against such intrusions of central power, jurists and other representatives of “the dominant social and vocational groups” in states and provinces—“nobles and gentry, urban patriciates, the lawyers, the clergy, the educated”—threw themselves into projects for “rediscovering or inventing customary laws and constitutions.” In turn, these projects stimulated an enormous “enthusiasm” for “legal and historical research” and gave rise to a substantial increase “of interest in the customary law,” an interest symbolized by the works of van Wesembeeke in the Netherlands, Bodin and Hotman in France, and Coke in England. Such works “not only provided new defences against arbitrary power . . . but also helped to establish the idea that each nation [or each subordinate kingdom or province] had a distinct historical and constitutional identity,” an identity “founded on history, law and achievement, on the sharing of certain common experiences and certain common patterns of life and behaviour.” The result of this linking of ancient privilege with national and provincial identity was “a new sophistication and a new awareness” of the constitutional foundations of the community, an enhanced emphasis upon the “constitutional and contractual character” of the polity, and a far more determined insistence upon the importance of retaining those communal rights and liberties that, embodied in statutes, customary laws, charters, and written and unwritten constitutions and “kept alive in the corporate memory,” everywhere provided the essence of the distinctive identities of states and provinces.¹4 As Elliott points out, the “corporate or national constitutionalism” on which these identities were based could “provide both a program for action and theoretical justification for movements of [resistance and] revolt.” In several instances during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, in the 1560s and 1570s in the Netherlands and in the 1630s and 1640s in Spain, France, and England, exponents of this ideology of constitutionalism, anxious over repeated infringements of their rights and liberties, believing the historical identities of their corporate or national communities to be in jeopardy, and expressing their 13. Miller, “Introduction,” 17, 19; Elliott, “Europe of Composite Monarchies,” 62–63. 14. Elliott, “Europe of Composite Monarchies,” 60–61; Elliott, “Revolution and Continuity in Early Modern Europe,” Past & Present, no. 42 (1969): 48–50.

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discontent through their representative institutions, eventually, in response to the monarch’s efforts to override their liberties in the pursuit of necessities of state, through either the suppression of religious dissent, new and “illegal” fiscal exactions, or both, withdrew their allegiance and led large-scale revolts or revolutions.¹5 In these events, opponents of centralization were not much concerned with either structural innovations in the state or explicit projects of nation building. Anxiety about the preservation of the old constitutional order sometimes stretched downward into the lower social orders, and these early modern revolts occasionally generated popular movements demanding abolition of existing aristocratic or corporate privileges, but they mostly remained firmly under the direction of the dominant power holders in the state. Similarly, although these power holders almost always spoke in terms of the defense of the ancient rights, liberties, and constitutions of their patrias or fatherlands, they were relatively little concerned about creating or consolidating the nation, defined as those who shared a broad sense of commonality and patriotism as members of the same territorial, linguistic, or political entity. Students of the emergence of early modern states are careful to distinguish between state formation and nation building, insisting that, while these two processes may coincide, they are separate and analytically distinct, the latter often being the unintended consequence of confl icts over the latter. In any case, as Elliott noted almost thirty years ago, the “concept of patria was hesitant and uncertain in sixteenthand seventeenth-century Europe. The word was probably more often used” to refer to “a local than a national community; and, insofar as it betokened a national community, its command over loyalties was insecure.” A focus on the patria was most prominent in those separatist revolts that occurred in polities—Scotland, Catalonia, and Portugal—with long and relatively recent experiences as “historical, national, and legal entities” that had always been suspicious of the intentions of the dominant partner in the composite monarchies to which they belonged.¹6 Leaders of early modern revolts were, rather, “obsessed by renovation—by the desire to return to old customs and privileges, and to an old order of society.” Their principal objective was the preservation of a constitutional heritage against the demands of the central state as represented by the monarch and his ministers. This heritage was sometimes closely tied to religious, linguistic, 15. Elliott, “Revolution and Continuity,” 48–49, 54; J. H. Elliott, “Revolts in the Spanish Monarchy,” in Robert Forster and Jack P. Greene, eds., Preconditions of Revolution in Early Modern Europe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1970), 119, 126. 16. Elliott, “Revolts in the Spanish Monarchy,” 114–15; Elliott, “Europe of Composite Monarchies,” 64.

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or ethnic commonalities, but, Elliot insists, it invariably “outweighed every other cause, including that of religion, in its appeal to the majority of the ruling nation.” In early modern Europe, revolts “originally sparked by religious protest, or sectional discontents” usually coalesced around an ideology of “the constitutionalism of the privileged classes.”¹7 III This general pattern can be seen in all the great revolts and revolutions of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe. The Netherland Revolt in the 1560s and 1570s, arguably the first of the great revolutions, provides a case in point. The Netherlands consisted of seventeen distinct provinces which, though under the jurisdiction of the Habsburg monarchy, had no formal union until 1548–49. Though they met together in a common Estates General beginning in the middle of the sixteenth century, each province was essentially self-governing, and most had their own provincial representative assemblies. Many town and local corporations also enjoyed self-governing privileges founded on “a diversity of charters acquired or extorted by cities, guilds, crafts, clergy and nobility from [the] imperial princes, vassals, dukes and counts, who had ruled the Netherlands during the late medieval period.” As Martin van Gelderen writes, these privileges—provincial, local, and corporate—both “restricted central power” and supported “claims to participation in the decision-making process” on the part of the “provinces, towns and inhabitants of the low countries.”¹8 When King Philip II of Spain became monarch of these provinces in the 1560s, he was appalled by both their religious heterodoxy and their fissiparous autonomy, regarding the Estates General and the provincial estates as serious threats to royal power. In the 1560s, he and his military governor, the Duke of Alba, provoked “a spirit of opposition in the provinces by pursuing to their logical conclusion” his “fiercely orthodox religious” policies, which he endeavored to enforce with a special inquisition. Considering “the growing activities of the inquisitors an important threat to their autonomy and privileges,” especially the “right to be put on trial only by the Court of Aldermen in one’s own town,” many low-country provinces and localities vigorously opposed these measures. In the 1570s, Philip II and his representatives further inflamed local notables and representative bodies by proposing a series of new taxes, and the Estates General and provincial estates, knowing that he could levy no taxes without their consent and fully “conscious of their fiscal and institutional strength, 17. Elliott, “Revolution and Continuity,” 44, 51–52. 18. Martin van Gelderen, ed., The Dutch Revolt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), xiii–xiv.

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rallied behind the great nobles of the realm in a national campaign against” these measures. During the succeeding struggle, the large provinces of Holland and Zeeland, in 1572, “launched a Revolt that gained the support of five other northern provinces and eventually culminated in” the abjuration of the king in 1581, the achievement of de facto independence from Spain in the 1590s, and Spain’s eventual “recognition of the United Provinces, or Dutch Republic, as an independent nation” by the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648.¹9 The “defence of local privilege against the encroachments of the new central power” was thus, in Geoffrey Parker’s words, “the mainspring” of the Dutch Revolt. The “threat to their corporate ‘liberties’ posed by the ‘novelties’ introduced by Philip II and his ministers”—the “Spanish garrisons, the control of policy” by the king’s minions, the “rigorous persecution of heretics by a special inquisition,” and the threat of new taxes—drew together the “various provinces, and the different social groups within them.” The same threats produced a rich literature of protest. In pamphlet after pamphlet, Van Gelderen explains, opponents of Philip II elaborated a complex ideology of resistance. Arguing that “the Dutch people . . . had esteemed . . . and cherished liberty throughout the centuries,” they contended that the Dutch political order “had originally been created with the deliberate aim of protecting liberty,” an objective that had been achieved “by means of a constitutional framework consisting of a set of fundamental laws, the privileges, rights, freedoms and old customs” of the provinces, towns, and other corporate bodies, “and a number of institutions, in particular the States” that served as guardians of this ancient constitutional inheritance. In their view, the Dutch “value par excellence” was liberty, “the ‘daughter of the Netherlands,’ the source of prosperity and justice,” and they over and over again emphasized “the intrinsic connection between the liberty of the country and the personal liberty and welfare of the inhabitants.”²0 This ideology of revolt stressed the common constitutional traditions of the Dutch provinces and the virtues of uniting against the centralizing ambitions of Philip II, it appealed to the “instinctive antipathy to outsiders” that helped to animate many provincial revolts against the center in early modern Europe, and the Dutch Revolt led both to the achievement of aspirations for national freedom and to the establishment of a national republic with a national parliamentary regime centered on the Estates General in The Hague; nevertheless, in the short run it did little to stimulate the development of a 19. James D. Tracy, Holland under Habsburg Rule, 1506–1566: The Formation of a Body Politic (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1990), 2–3, 8; Van Gelderen, ed., Dutch Revolt, xii. 20. Geoff rey Parker, The Dutch Revolt (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977), 13–14; Van Gelderen, ed., Dutch Revolt, xiii, xvii–xviii, xxxii.

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Dutch nation with an overriding sense of national consciousness. Because “the Dutch Republic was only weakly integrated,” national feeling remained “quite problematic for the history of the Low Countries.” All the “ ‘privileges’ or ‘liberties’ of each town and province” actually “predated the “state, ” and for that reason “local loyalties were . . . tenaciously defended,” and “particularism was more potent than patriotism.” Indeed, the revolt seems actually to have “reinforced centrifugal tendencies, reviving the powers and privileges of former communities” and thus “intensifying borders and boundaries that made it extremely difficult to ‘think’ of the Dutch as a nation.” Nor did this situation of “cultural fragmentation” change quickly. “Despite many long and expensive wars, despite a hegemonic position in the world of the seventeenth century, and despite advanced methods in military organisation and finance,” ‘T Hart writes, the Hague, “the meeting place of the representatives of the seven provinces of the Estates General,” imposed “no powerful structures” on the provinces, and until the French Revolution the Netherlands remained a loosely organized federal republican state.²¹ The abortive revolts known as the Fronde in mid-seventeenth-century France followed a similar trajectory and generated a similar ideology. Although France may have been the most successfully absolutist state in seventeenthcentury Europe, it remained a composite monarchy with the Crown sharing power with a wide variety of people and institutions: with “princely and ducal families at court and in the provinces,” with “representative estates on the pay d’états,” with “municipal councils and guilds in the towns,” with “seigneurs in the countryside,” with “the church throughout the kingdom,” and with “financiers who kept the monarchy solvent.” When, on the assumption that France was a unified state, Cardinal Mazarin acted “arbitrarily” and “illegally” without consultation, local power holders charged the ministers with “illegal [constitutional] innovations.” Citing law, “privilege, tradition and numerous precedents to justify their” resistance, they insisted that, if ministers would “return to traditional ways of governing, all would be well.”²² IV The great revolutions that occurred in England during the seventeenth century—the revolution associated with the English Civil War and Interregnum in the 1640s and 1650s and the Glorious Revolution of 1688–89—represent a 21. Van Gelderen, ed., Dutch Revolt, xxiii; ‘T Hart, The Making of a Bourgeois State, 5–6; Parker, Dutch Revolt, 13–14; Elliott, “Revolution and Continuity,” 48–49. 22. Roger Mettam, “France,” in Miller, ed., Absolutism, 43, 51–52. See also Orest Ranum, The Fronde: A French Revolution (New York: Norton, 1993).

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significant variation on the pattern exhibited in the Dutch Revolt, the Fronde, and several revolts that occurred against the Spanish monarchy in Catalonia, Portugal, Sicily, and Naples in the 1640s, of which only the Portuguese was successful. In contrast to the Netherlands, France, and Spain, England had already under the Tudors developed many of the political administrative, social, and cultural institutions characteristic of a unified national state. As John Morrill observes, Thomas Cromwell’s work in the 1530s created the “unitary realm” of England, with the incorporation of the Palatinates, the extinction of [many local provincial] liberties, the establishment of the ubiquitous royal writs, the establishment both of a veritable conciliar argus at the centre of government and of the characteristic institutions that replaced the noble household by the county courts and administrative offices where government business was effected. The reforms of 1536–43 both systematized and standardized the legal and social institutions of Cambrian Englishries and Welshries alike and also made Wales part of England for all purposes of government.²³

Through these measures, Tudor monarchs had been able to expand “the crown’s functions and powers” and to achieve “many of the aims of absolutism— above all the mobilisation and resources for war—without recourse to authoritarian methods and [without] sacrifice of traditional liberties of local self-government.”²4 But the Stuarts, who succeeded to the English throne in 1603, had a much more “authoritarian view of monarchy.” Drawing upon and contributing to the emerging body of absolutist thought, they and their ministers emphasized the divinity of kingship, the superiority of the royal prerogative over constitutional privileges and liberties, and the preeminence of necessities of state in the conduct of the state. They made much more extensive use of prerogative courts, including especially the Court of Star Chamber, than had their predecessors and imprisoned people without due process of law. Endeavoring to “break out of the financial straightjacket imposed by the need to seek Parliamentary consent to taxation,” they “exacted money without Parliament’s consent.” While their use of prerogative courts “seemed to threaten personal liberty,” writes Miller, their efforts to raise money without the consent of Parliament appeared “to threaten the future of Parliament.”²5 As Stuart spokesmen sought to justify such expansions of royal power, 23. John Morrill, “The Fashioning of Britain,” in Steven G. Ellis and Sarah Barber, eds., Conquest and Union: Fashioning a British State, 1485–1725 (London: Longman, 1995), 22. 24. John Miller, “Britain,” in Miller, ed., Absolutism, 195. 25. Ibid., 198, 204, 206; Miller, “Introduction,” 14.

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English jurists and other political leaders and writers appealed, like their Dutch counterparts had done just a few decades earlier, to “ancient” political and constitutional traditions. In the process, they elaborated what scholars have subsequently labeled the English jurisprudential tradition of political thought, which emphasized the role of law as a restraint upon the power of the Crown. By law, the exponents of this tradition meant not only statutory law as formulated by Parliament but, more particularly, the common law, that complex bundle of customs and judicial decisions which was the result of centuries of working of the English legal system. Presumably embodying the collective wisdom of the ages, the common law, in the view of the articulators of this tradition, was the chief guarantor of the Englishman’s celebrated right to security of life, liberty, and property through such devices as trial by jury, habeas corpus, due process of law, and representative government. This tradition considerably antedated the English Reformation. Rooted in such older writings as Sir John Fortescue’s De Laudibus Legum Angliae (written about 1470 and always familiar to the English law community, though not published until 1616), it was fully elaborated during the early seventeenth century in a series of works by several of the most prominent judges and legal thinkers of the era. Most prominent among these was Chief Justice Sir Edward Coke, whose Institutes of the Laws of England, published in four parts in London between 1628 and 1644 and frequently issued in new editions thereafter, became the principal foundation for the English jurisprudential tradition during the early modern era. This tradition represented an effort to erect legal and constitutional restraints that would ensure security of life, liberty, and property against the sorts of extensions of royal power as those pursued by the Stuart monarchy. Accordingly, they invented the tradition of an “ancient” English constitution that, antecedent even to the common law itself and finding expression through that law, could be appealed to by public leaders as justification for an expanded governmental role by Parliament as protector of the rights of the people and guarantor of their security against arbitrary government by the Crown.²6 Despite the fact that monarchs had frequently ignored or violated it since the Norman Conquest, this ancient constitution, Coke and his colleagues contended, provided the context for legal government in England. Composed of a variety of maxims, precedents, and principles that these writers traced back through Magna Charta to the ancient Saxon era and that included freedom from arbitrary imprisonment, due process, trial by jury, and no taxation without consent, this ancient constitution, English jurisprudential writers said, at 26. See J. G. A. Pocock, The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987).

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once served as the foundation for all governmental authority in England; confined the scope of the discretion, or “will,” of the Crown within limits specified by the higher, fundamental, or natural laws it expressed; and, in particular, prevented the Crown from governing without Parliaments. From the perspective supplied by this tradition, Charles I’s entire reign seemed by 1640 to have involved “a systematic assault on English liberties and religion,”²7 and confrontations between Parliament and the king over the latter’s efforts to raise taxes without Parliament’s consent produced a major constitutional crisis in the English state, followed by civil war, the execution of Charles I in 1649, and the adoption of a republican regime under Oliver Cromwell. “Having taken up arms to defend the traditional order against arbitrary taxation and religious innovation,” Miller writes, England’s parliamentary champions eventually found “that Parliament’s radical supporters (in the streets of London, in the New Model Army, among the Levellers and separatist sects),” with their proposals for electoral reform and frequent elections and their claims for popular sovereignty, also posed a formidable threat to the traditional order they claimed to be defending, a threat that, in the eyes of some, “raised the spectre of the total expropriation of the propertied by the propertyless.”²8 Fears of such a development lay behind the rapprochement with the Stuart family and the Restoration of the monarchy in 1660. But the new regime involved not just the reimposition of monarchy but also a renewed commitment to the consensual mode of governance for which England had long been famous. To a greater extent than the first two Stuarts, Charles II accepted the fact that his regime depended on consent, not just in Parliament but also in the localities. Not professional magistrates but “leading members of the local community, country gentlemen or urban bigwigs: much the same sort of people as sat in the Commons” enforced the laws and handled administration in the localities. With “very few professional officials in the provinces” and not many more at the center, the king had little choice but to rely on such unpaid officials to uphold the royal writ in the peripheries.²9 When James II, a professed Catholic, succeeded to the throne in 1684 after Whigs and Dissenters had failed in a bitter campaign to exclude him from the kingship in 1679–80, his “conduct created fears of a sweeping extension of royal power and of the emasculation of the Commons.” In response to these efforts at exclusion, Charles II and his Tory supporters had already undertaken a variety of authoritarian measures in the early 1680s, including direct attacks 27. Miller, “Britain,” 208. 28. Ibid., 199. 29. Ibid., 202.

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on the rights of various corporations dominated by Whigs and Dissenters, including the city of London, many provincial towns, and the colonies in New England, instituting quo warranto proceedings against their charters in the court of common pleas. James II not only continued these measures but also, as Lois Schwoerer has explained, intensified his brother’s recent efforts to turn the courts into an instrument of the royal will by packing them with judges he could control, confining judicial tenure to the king’s pleasure, and influencing jury selection. He also dispensed with laws on religion that discriminated against Catholics and Dissenters. A “much more sweeping and radical assault on the old constitution than” any of his Stuart predecessors had undertaken, James II’s “misuse of law raised unpleasant echoes of the 1630s.” Invoking and expanding upon the still vibrant ideas of Coke and other early seventeenthcentury jurisprudential thinkers, a new generation of advocates for England’s ancient constitution depicted his efforts “as part of a wicked design . . . to establish absolutism” by rendering the laws uncertain and Parliament subordinate to the royal prerogative. As Schwoerer suggests, this ideology provided the justification for James’s displacement during the Glorious Revolution of 1688–89 and dictated that the principal statement of revolutionary ideology, the Declaration of Rights of 1688, would be, in a characterization Schwoerer does not endorse, “a conservative restatement of existing rights.”³0 The Glorious Revolution thus became what Miller has called “England’s definitive escape from [royal] absolutism.” It put a stop to executive interference with the judiciary and the rule of law, seriously limited the Crown in its use of prerogative powers within Britain itself, and, by raising Parliament to an equivalency with the Crown, ensured that the power of the English or, after 1707, British state would never be under the “unfettered control of the monarch.” In the wholesale expansion of the British fiscal-military state after 1688, Crown and Parliament would be equal partners. With “Parliament’s active support, the armed forces and revenues—above all the excise—became the most technically proficient (and closely supervised) in Europe.”³¹ Notwithstanding this expansion of state power, Britons yet held on to their “ ‘negative liberties’ against the state, as protected by law.” Indeed, as Lawrence Stone points out, the Glorious Revolution and its aftermath in the 1690s and early 1700s effectively put a stop to most central encroachments on local authority. Both Parliament and local government remained where they had 30. Ibid., 211–14; Lois G. Schwoerer, “Law, Liberty, Juries, and the Bill of Rights, 1689: English Transatlantic Revolutionary Traditions,” in Michael A. Morrison and Melinda Zook, eds., Revolutionary Currents: Nation Building in the Transatlantic World (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2004), quotation on 49. 31. Miller, “Britain,” 214–16; Miller, “Introduction,” 14.

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long been, “in the hands of independent-minded squires and aristocrats, most of whom were deeply suspicious of armies, resented taxation and insisted on their own control of all aspects of local government, including the mobilization of manpower and the assessing and raising of taxes. Moreover, a powerful private corporation like the East India Company acted almost like a mini-state, with its own large army. Power certainly flowed from the centre, but,” Stone writes, “the flow had to pass through local, independent, channels in order to reach the population at large.” In Stone’s words, the eighteenthcentury British state was “a uniquely decentralized political system in which local government, law enforcement, tax collecting, supervision of the militia, drafts into the armed forces and so on were largely left to the discretion and loyalty of amateur local landed gentlemen and clergy, acting in their capacities as Justices of the Peace, Collectors of Taxes, Colonels of local Militia, and so on.” And recent research has shown that this devolution of authority and power “increased as the century wore on, as” Parliament, by statute, shifted “more and more responsibilities . . . to local volunteer authorities.” Thus did Britain manage to increase taxes and its naval and military capacities without losing “its parliamentary control of finances, its decentralized government and its ideology of liberty and property.” The rule of law and the traditions of legislative consent and decentralized government had survived Stuart efforts to transform the English state into a unitary state with power centered in the royal monarch.³² Like the Dutch Revolt of the sixteenth century, the English revolutions of the seventeenth century were thus revolutions in behalf of ancient privileges and expressive of an ideology of local corporate as well as personal rights. They reaffirmed the integrity—and even extended the jurisdictions—of the ancient localities that composed the national state and thereby produced a national political regime marked by the wide dispersal of authority that was characteristic of the early modern European state. Although they appealed to and manifested the strong sense of English national distinctiveness that, fully articulated in the generations just before the revolutions,³³ emphasized the uniqueness of the English system of law and liberty with its consensual institutions of juries and parliaments, its traditions of the subordination of the monarch to the law, and its commitment to due process of law, the English revolutions did not extend to the broader population the full rights of civic participation, and 32. Lawrence Stone, “Introduction,” in Stone, ed., An Imperial State at War: Britain from 1689 to 1815 (London: Routledge, 1994), 5, 7–9. 33. See Richard Helgerson, Forms of Nationhood: The Elizabethan Writing of England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992); and Liah Greenfeld, Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992), 27–87.

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the postrevolutionary English/British state continued to be dominated by the propertied independent class. For this reason, the English revolution, again like the Dutch, did not facilitate the development of an inclusive idea of the nation as the repository of sovereignty and the foundations of a unitary state. V If the Glorious Revolution saved Britain itself from the centralizing aggrandizement of absolutism, its implications for the British colonies turned out to be less salutary. The American Revolution occurred in a minority of the colonies that composed the early modern empire, and that empire, like the state to which it was attached and, incidentally, like all early modern European American empires, was characterized by indirect governance, dispersed authority, an inchoate theory of imperial sovereignty, and limited fiscal, administrative, and coercive resources on the part of the metropolitan center. The new extended transatlantic polity that eventually would come to be called the British Empire was not characterized by a devolution of authority outward from an imperial center to new American peripheries. Rather, authority in that empire was constructed from the peripheries outward, in two phases. The first involved the creation in America, through the activities of participants in the colonizing impulse, of new arenas of local and individual power. The second involved the actual creation of authority through negotiation between these new arenas of settler power and the metropolitan representatives of the center that aspired to bring them under its jurisdiction and to which they desired to be attached. Throughout early modern English/British America, independent individual participants in the colonizing process, English and other Europeans, were thus engaged in what can only be described as a deep and widespread process of individual self-empowerment, and this development gave rise to strong demands on the part of the large empowered settler populations for the extension to the colonies of the same rights to security of property and civic participation that appertained to the empowered, high status, and independent property holders in the polities from which they came. In their view, colonial government, like metropolitan government, should guarantee that men of their standing would not be governed without consultation or in ways that were patently against their interests. Combined with the scarcity of fiscal and coercive resources and the reluctance of the metropolitan government to spend money for imperial purposes, settler expectations inevitably meant that authority in the early modern British Empire would not be concentrated at the center but, instead, distributed between the center and the peripheries. More specifically, these conditions meant that the metropolitan government would lack the means unilaterally to enforce

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its will and authority in distant peripheries, that central direction in the British Empire would be minimal, that metropolitan authority in the colonies would be consensual and heavily dependent upon provincial opinion, and that effective power in distant colonial polities would be firmly situated in provincial and local governments that were widely participatory and solidly under the control of large, broadly based, and resident property-owning settler classes. The early modern British Empire was thus a consensual empire composed of a loose association of essentially self-governing polities in which authority and effective power were distributed between the center and the peripheries. What was legal, what was constitutional, was determined not by fiat but by negotiation. Predominantly reflecting a respect for the extensive empowerment and high degree of corporate and individual liberty of landowning classes, British imperial governance, like British internal governance, functioned in the colonies to preserve that empowerment and the liberty and the property on which they were founded.³4 From the perspective of the political revolutions that preceded it, the American Revolution that occurred in this particular empire on the part of these particular societies was not distinctive.³5 Like those revolutions, it was not the result of internal, social, religious, or political tensions. Although the southern and middle colonies were wealthier than New England and although high military expenditures during the Seven Years’ War created short-term economic problems for some colonies, all of them were broadly prosperous on the eve of the American Revolution. Throughout the 1760s and 1770s the colonies continued to exhibit the territorial expansion, the economic and demographic growth, and the social elaboration that had long characterized them. Like earlier revolutions, the American Revolution was principally a consequence of the consolidating efforts of the central state to which the colonies were attached. As metropolitan officials increasingly began to appreciate the growing economic and strategic importance of the colonies to British prosperity and national power in the 1740s and 1750s, they more and more began to worry lest the weakness of metropolitan authority and the extensive autonomy enjoyed by the colonies might somehow lead to their loss. Moved by such fears and developing a new sense of imperial order that 34. Jack P. Greene, Peripheries and Center: Constitutional Development in the Extended Polities of the British Empire and the United States, 1607–1788 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1986), deals at greater length with these issues. 35. The interpretation advanced here is developed more fully in Jack P. Greene, “Empire and Identity from the Glorious Revolution to the American Revolution,” in P. J. Marshall, ed., The Eighteenth Century, vol. 2 of The Oxford History of the British Empire, ed. William Roger Louis, 5 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998–2001), 208–30 (see chap. 11 in this volume).

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would only reach full flower in the nineteenth century, they undertook a series of measures, the combined effects of which would have been to change the British Empire from the loose federal polity it had long been into a more unitary polity with authority more clearly fi xed at the center. Such measures directly challenged the autonomy of colonies over their local affairs. By subjecting the colonies to legislation and other directives to which the settler populations of those colonies had not given their consent, those measures also called into question settler claims to a British identity, the central element of which was the capacity of colonists, as Britons, to enjoy the traditional rights of Britons. Not surprisingly, these measures immediately became what H. G. Koenigsberger has called “a flashpoint for rebellion, repression, and war.”³6 Interpreted by the vast majority of the broad empowered settler populations in the colonies as an effort to subject them to a far more intrusive imperial order, they elicited a powerful defense of the local corporate rights of the colonies and a rising demand for explicit metropolitan recognition of settler demands for the British liberties and the British identity settlers associated with those rights. Of course, this quarrel was complicated by changes in the internal governance of Great Britain following the Glorious Revolution. Koenigsberger has recently analyzed the composite monarchies of early modern Europe in terms of a distinction he borrowed from the medieval English legal theorist Sir John Fortescue between dominium regale, a condition in which “the ruler could legislate and tax his subjects without their consent,” and dominium politicum et regale, a situation in which “the ruler needed such consent and” in which that “consent usually had to be given by the representative assembly.” Before 1688 the English had had a regime of dominium politicum et regale. But the Glorious Revolution and its attendant developments changed that regime “into something quite different, parliamentary government . . . in which there” was “no longer a balance between the monarchy and parliament as two basically independent authorities.” As the repository of sovereign authority within Britain, the King-in-Parliament now became, Koenigsberger persuasively suggests, “an absolutist parliamentary regime,” while the colonies and Ireland retained dominium politicum et regale regimes. Parliament’s efforts to tax the colonies for revenue directly in the 1760s and 1770s and the colonists’ refusal to accede to such taxation pointedly raised the fundamental theoretical problem of how to reconcile the sovereignty of the King-in-Parliament with the colonial demand for limitations on metropolitan political authority in accordance with their long “experience of dominium politicum et regale and . . . their mythology of liberty” arising out of their by then ancient claims to identities as British peoples 36. Koenigsberger, “Composite States,” 147, 151.

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who enjoyed British forms of governance. In this situation, as Koenigsberger points out, the colonists were inevitably “driven back to the traditional solution of the composite monarchy made up of states with equal rights and held together only by a common allegiance to the crown.”³7 Along with the intense settler resistance to these new measures, the stridency of settler demands in turn wounded metropolitan pride and provoked counter and highly condescending assertions of metropolitan superiority that suggested that colonists were, so far from being true Britons, a kind of others whose low characters, rude surroundings, and barbarous cruelty to their African slaves rendered them, on the scale of civilization, only slightly above the native Amerindians they had displaced or the Africans among who they lived. Such attitudes powerfully informed the measures that elicited the broad-based and extensive settler resentment and resistance of 1774–75 and the decision for independence in 1776. The American Revolution can thus best be understood as a settler revolt that was a direct response to centralizing metropolitan measures that seemed both to challenge settler control over local affairs and to deny settler claims to a British identity. As such, it fits comfortably with the pattern of early modern revolutions earlier exhibited in the Netherlands and England. In rejecting monarchy and the British connection and adopting republicanism, the leaders of these settler revolts did not have to preside over a wholesale, much less a violent, transformation of the radical political societies that colonial British Americans had constructed between 1607 and 1776.³8 In every state, peculiar social, religious, economic, and political tensions shaped the course of revolutionary development. Indeed, these local tensions primarily account for the substantial differences in the revolutionary experiences from one state to another. Wherever during the late colonial era there had been abuses of executive authority, judicial or civil corruption, unequal representation, opposition to a state church, or other political problems, the new republican state constitutions or later legislation endeavored to address those problems. Against the background of the deepening political consciousness generated by the extensive political debates over the nature of British imperial constitution after 1764, the creators of those state constitutions also experimented, in limited ways, with improvements to their existing political systems. The widespread political mobilization that occurred after 1764 and especially in 1775–76 also resulted, in many states, in an expansion of legislative seats and public offices and a down37. Ibid., 136, 149, 150, 152. 38. For a contrary view, see Gordon S. Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution (New York: Knopf, 1992).

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ward shift in political leadership that brought more settlers of somewhat less, though still substantial, property into active roles in the public realm. With astonishingly few exceptions, however, leaders of late colonial regimes retained authority through the transition to republicanism, and the republican regimes they created in 1776 and after bore a striking resemblance to the social polities they replaced. Everywhere, political authority remained in the hands of the predominant groups among the existing settler population. As during the colonial period, the central government, an unintended consequence of the union of colonies that had come together to resist metropolitan aggression, was weak. Effective power remained in the states, even, for a century or more, after the strengthening of the national government with the federal Constitution in the late 1780s. The election of Thomas Jefferson in the so-called revolution of 1800 effectively brought to an end whatever nationalizing and centralizing tendencies Federalist leaders had brought to the project of creating a more unitary national state during the 1790s. For at least another century, provincial or state identities remained more powerful than the continental, or American, identity that only began to develop during the 1760s and 1770s. At the state and local levels, government remained an instrument of settler desires. Although it was somewhat more broadly participatory, it continued to rest on a limited conception of both civic competence, which extended only to independent people, and equality, that is, civil or religious equality among such people. The exigencies of war stimulated an extraordinary expansion of the public realm, and, at least during the earliest decades, republican government turned out to be far more intrusive than colonial government had ever been. Yet, settler leaders continued to prefer inexpensive and small government. As during the colonial era, they kept bureaucracies small, refused to pay for permanent peacetime military and naval establishments, and were cautious in supporting public works. Like their colonial counterparts, these republican polities everywhere continued to be instruments of the predominant settler classes, principally concerned with the maintenance of orderly social relations, the dispensing of justice, and, most important of all, the protection of private property. Nor did the new republican regimes preside over a large-scale social reconstruction. The pursuit of individual domestic happiness in the private realm remained the central cultural imperative. The social order continued to be open, social relations continued to be fundamentally egalitarian, wealth remained the primary criterion for social standing, and aspiring elites continued to decry the absence of deference from those of less wealth. With no restraints upon the accumulation of private wealth, social differentiation continued unabated. Despite their own frequent, albeit often unintentional, transgressions

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against private property, republican state settler regimes continued to reaffirm the sanctity of private property. Land titles remained secure, except for those who opposed the Revolution, some of whose land was confiscated and sold to pay public expenses. Next to land, slaves were the most valuable form of property in the states as a whole, and notwithstanding the emergence of a powerful antislavery movement after 1760, the institution of slavery persisted in every state in which it retained its economic viability and represented a substantial investment. In effect, the decision to retain or abolish slavery was, like so much else in the new American state, a matter for local option. So intent have some scholars been upon assimilating the American Revolution to the great European revolutions that followed it, upon emphasizing its revolutionary character and radical discontinuity with the American past, that they have by and large neglected to explore the bearing of earlier American political and social experience upon the events and developments of the American Revolution. A comprehension of the important implications of American social experience upon contemporary understandings of that experience powerfully suggests that the colonial and revolutionary eras were much of a piece. The most radical result of the Revolution was the profound reconception of political and social relations that occurred over the following half century and the emergence and endorsement of the idea of popular sovereignty, an idea that, as John Murrin has written, “took hold as the underlying myth that still organizes public life in the United States.”³9 In my view, however, this conceptual discontinuity needs to be understood for what it was: an elaborate working out of the logic of some of the tendencies long characteristic of the loose imperial polity of the early modern British Empire and the radical political societies of colonial British America, societies that, precisely because of their radical character, could make such a profoundly conservative revolution. During the early modern era, in America as in Europe, no movement toward the consolidation of power in the central state failed to generate resistance, and in the cases examined here such movements led to revolt and revolution. Before 1789 the direction of state development was thus toward, not the centralization of state power, but its dispersal. To the considerable extent that the American Revolution was a response to the centralizing efforts of the metropolis, was animated by an ideology obsessed with the protection of personal and corporate rights, produced a highly decentralized political regime characterized by the dispersal of authority, and, notwithstanding the emergence of the concept of popular sovereignty as the foundation for the state, developed only 39. Ibid.; John M. Murrin, “1776: The Countercyclical Revolution,” in Morrison and Zook, eds., Revolutionary Currents, 81.

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a rudimentary conception of the people as a nation, it was emphatically not, as Murrin asserts, a “countercyclical event,”40 at least not within the history of early modern revolutions. Rather it represented another example of the decentralizing revolutions that had earlier occurred in the Netherlands and England. VI Indeed, as William H. Sewell suggests, the countercyclical event in the history of early modern revolutions was not the American but the French Revolution. Sewell’s interpretation demonstrates the best command of the new literature on state formation and its relation to our understanding of the various early modern revolutions and revolutionary ideologies. As he explains, Old Regime France, like the France of the sixteenth and seventeenth century, was a composite monarchy divided into provinces of varying size and importance that had come under the king at different times “and had different relationships to the crown. The provinces were of two types: the pays d’état and the pays d’élection,” and the former, “generally more distant from Paris and more recently joined to the kingdom,” usually had “more extensive and advantageous privileges” than the latter. Indeed, the pays d’état “had managed to retain Provincial Estates with significant powers of local government and usually also had provincial Parlements—high courts that governed the administration of laws in the region.” Nor were provinces “the only territorial units that possessed privileges. Many cities, towns, and even some rural districts had their exclusive powers, jurisdictions, and forms of government, many of which depended on individual charters or letters patent granted directly by the king.” Under the Old Regime, France thus had “not one system of territorial divisions, but several different non-congruent systems”: “military divisions called ‘governments’; judicial divisions known as ‘baillages’ or balliwicks; fiscal and administrative divisions known as ‘generalities’; and religious divisions, the dioceses.”4¹ In addition, Old Regime France, Sewell reports, had a corporate and hierarchical social order organized as a complex set of relatively bounded units known variously as corps, communatés, ordres, or états. These units were very diverse in scale and function, ranging from the French state, the church universal, or the three estates of the realm at the large end to guilds, academies, bodies of magistrates, village communities, parishes, families, or confraternities at the small end. 40. Murrin, “1776,” 81. 41. William H. Sewell Jr., “The French Revolution and the Emergence of the Nation Form,” in Morrison and Zook, eds., Revolutionary Currents, 103–4.

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Such bodies varied greatly in organization and character, but most were largely self-regulating within their particular sphere.

This social order, Sewell observes, “assumed differences in quality, precedent, rank, and honor, both between persons and between corporate units.”4² In this diff use political and social order, much authority rested with the provinces, communities, and corps, and in disputes between the center and the provinces about raising taxes and implementing new edicts, provincial états and local magistrates, in Roger Mettam’s words, “were often on the side of provincial elites in resisting these innovations of a distant central government” in Paris.4³ For this reason, as Sewell explains, in disputes between the central government and the peripheries, “the higher unit would have some degree of power over the lower, but in practice the relative powers were variable and negotiated, and much was left to local decision.”44 When indebtedness, partly owing to the French government’s support of the American Revolution, forced Louis XVI in 1789 to call together the Estates General for the first time since the seventeenth century, various members, following their Dutch, English, and American predecessors, protested the king’s recent policies, expressed the local patriotism of their provinces, and called for the restoration and updating of the ancient French constitution. But such impulses, Sewell writes, rapidly gave way to the desire to construct an entirely “new kind of state and society around the key legitimizing concept of ‘The Nation.’ ” Over the previous two centuries, a well-articulated sense had emerged that the French people were bound together not only by a common language and their residence in a distinct territory but by “a putatively distinctive set of manners and morals,” and the term nation had come to distinguish the broader population of France from the state or the king. But when the Estates General transformed itself into the National Assembly in June 1789 and began drafting a new constitution for the country, it established “the nation as the principle of sovereignty,” thereby profoundly changing “the relationship of ‘the nation’ to the king and to the state or the government.”45 Indeed, by making the nation, of which it was to be the embodiment, “a kind of sacred center of political life” in the state, the National Assembly effectively expropriated the ideals of absolutism and put them at the service of the nation. The new national state that it constructed, Sewell observes, “proved 42. Ibid., 98–99. 43. Mettam, “France,” 57. 44. Sewell, “French Revolution,” 98. 45. Ibid., 95–99. See also J. F. Bosher, The French Revolution (New York: Norton, 1988), 51–54.

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itself to be immensely more powerful than its old regime predecessor,” and the revolutionaries immediately embarked upon a course of trying to achieve many of the objectives of absolutism, carrying out “far-reaching” and centralizing and unifying “reforms touching all spheres of life.” “In the course of providing the nation with a new constitution,” he writes, “the revolutionaries systematically destroyed the old corporate bodies, sweeping away the legal supports of the old regime’s highly elaborated hierarchical and corporate system.” With the twin goals of instituting “a society composed of rights-bearing individual citizens who were equal before the law and who were governed by a legislature made up of their elected representatives” and providing all French citizens an equal share of “ ‘public liberty’ regulated by ‘a law common to all Frenchmen,’ ” it created a unified legal system, replacing the “geographically diverse systems of law” that had obtained under the Old Regime with “a single, unified, national legal code.”46 By abolishing all existing jurisdictions and substituting for them a uniform system of territorial divisions consisting of more or less equal-sized departments divided into communes, the revolutionaries, as Sewell tellingly remarks, were endeavoring to create new kinds of spaces that owed their existence to the national state. The nation was thenceforth “to take primacy over all other solidary bonds.” The revolutionaries intended for the new units of provincial government to provide “the framework for all the functions of state: taxation, administration, the army, the church, the courts, and political representation.” Although these new territorial units were to be self-governing, they were “emphatically not [to] be privileged corporations, divided from others by their particular immunities, peculiar laws, and private advantages.” In the process of making these fundamental changes, the revolutionaries also “abolished all sorts of previously sacrosanct personal, political, and pecuniary privileges,” expanded “the state’s administrative personnel,” “reformed its fiscal system,” and “established new, wide-ranging citizenship rights.”47 Sewell compellingly points out the many ways in which the French Revolution had a profound impact on the history of the nation state. In redefining the nation form, French revolutionaries elaborated “a new framework of institutions, laws, modes of behavior, and cultural assumptions that would henceforth be the hallmarks of a fully constituted nation.” “By striking down all the intermediate forms of identity and mutual recognition,” they effectively “absolutize[d] the nation as the supreme site of solidarity” and thereby, it should be added, fostered an absolutism that was infinitely more powerful 46. Sewell, “French Revolution,” 95, 100–101, 104. 47. Ibid., 95, 100, 105–6.

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than that sought by Philip II, the early Stuarts, or even Louis XIV. By selfconsciously remaking France “over as a nation,” they “tapped into an astounding source of power,” stimulating the enormous upsurge of nationalism that during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries would, in J. H. Elliott’s words, “give a greater impetus to the creation of a unitary state than the royal decrees and the actions of bureaucrats had given it over” the previous three centuries.48 In all these respects, the French Revolution marked a radical departure from earlier revolutions. Like the American Revolution, it produced a republican political regime. However, in major part because Old Regime France had no active tradition of broadly participatory provincial and local self-government of the sort that had existed throughout colonial British America, the French republican regime was far more unitary and far more tightly integrated under the aegis of the central state than the loose federal structure established in the United States. Unlike the Dutch Revolt, the English revolutions of the seventeenth century, or the American Revolution, it did not, for long, proceed from demands for the preservation of local and provincial authority and the restoration of the ancient constitution. Rather, it represented a wholesale assault on the special rights and privileges that had sustained the old constitution, the elimination of existing subordinate political units, and the subordination of the localities to a unitary state representing the nation. Without a substantial number of inhabitants whose status as unfree people seemed to be vital to the economic health of many areas, the French Revolution, in contrast to the American, generated a political and social regime that was much more fully participatory, inclusive, and egalitarian than that implemented in North America. In all these ways, the French Revolution represented both a crucial redirection in the history of earlier political revolutions and revolutionary ideologies and a foundational event in the development of the modern nation state. VII Of all the revolutions that occurred in the Americas in the decades following the French Revolution, the one that appeared in the rich slave and sugarproducing French colony of St. Domingue in the 1790s was certainly the most radical and in many respects one of the most interesting. Although this Haitian Revolution began, like the American Revolution, as a protest by white settlers against the centralizing policies of the Bourbon imperial state and a demand for greater colonial autonomy, it quickly generated a movement by an 48. Ibid., 96–97, 108; Elliott, “Europe of Composite Monarchies,” 70.

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extensive free colored population for the liberty and equality of all free people in the colony and, as the American Revolution did not, ultimately generated a massive, and successful, uprising of slaves determined to gain their freedom. The result, as Franklin Knight writes, was “a complete metamorphosis in the social, political, intellectual, and economic life of the colony,” as the slaves overturned the existing planting society, established a peasant economy, and created the independent black republic of Haiti, “the second independent state in the Americas” and “the first independent non-European state to be carved out of universal European empires anywhere.” This achievement, Knight adds, provided an alternative “model of state formation [that] drove fear into the hearts of all whites from Boston to Buenos Aires.”49 The Hispanic American wars for independence that occurred during the first quarter of the nineteenth century stretched over a much larger and politically and socially more complex area than the American War for Independence. During the years from 1808 to 1826, similar and related movements occurred in all of Spain’s vast possessions on the North and South American continents. Like the American Revolution, these movements occurred in political societies that, under the domination of creole Spanish or Amerindian elites, had long enjoyed considerable self-government and were used to being consulted and to participating in negotiations over imperial decisions that affected them. While the vast number of Amerindians that formed a majority of Spanish American populations “enjoyed rights to lands, language, culture, laws, and traditions under” semiautonomous republics of Indians “popularly known as repúblicas,” the equivalent republics of Spaniards “possessed countless representative corporate bodies,” including, in the words of Jaime Rodríguez, “municipal councils that governed provinces (ayuntamientos), universities, cathedral chapters, convents, confraternities, mining and merchant organizations, and numerous craft guilds,” all of which “enjoyed a large measure of self-government.” Like the British Empire, the Spanish Empire was thus a consensual empire in which the various American political entities were explicitly not colonies but “kingdoms in the world wide Spanish Empire.”50 Although, in contrast to colonial British America, Spanish colonial America had by the late eighteenth century everywhere evolved into “a multiracial society whose members were integrated culturally and economically, to varying degrees, into a hybrid mestizo society that was neither Indian nor Spanish,” the Spanish creole leadership that dominated public life in all Spanish 49. Franklin W. Knight, “The Haitian Revolution,” American Historical Review 105 (February 2000): 105. 50. Jaime E. Rodríguez O., “The Emancipation of America,” American Historical Review 105 (February 2000): 135–36.

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American polities, like the American revolutionaries, took pride in its metropolitan heritage and identity and in their polity’s status as an “integral and component” part of the Spanish monarchy.5¹ Like the American Revolution, the Hispanic American wars for independence were rooted in a protest against the centralizing tendencies of an aggressive imperial state. Like Great Britain, Spain tried to “reorganize its empire during the last years of the eighteenth century.” In a series of measures known as the Bourbon reforms, it “established a small standing army and a large force of provincial militias, formed new administrative boundaries, introduced a different system of administration—the intendancies—restricted the privileges of the clergy, restructured trade,” and drastically curtailed the access of Americans to administrative and clerical office in their patrias. Charging that Spain intended to transform its American possessions from the kingdoms they had always been into mere colonies and “convinced that an unwritten constitution required that royal authorities consult the King’s New World subjects” on any major changes in their status or administration, Spanish American leaders vigorously opposed “these innovations,” and “massive opposition” flared up all over Spanish America. In the words of Rodríguez, “tax increases, the expulsion of the Jesuits, and other changes led to protests and to violent riots in Quito in 1765, in central New Spain the following year, and in Upper Peru during the years 1777 to 1780,” and Spain had to employ considerable force to overcome the “most serious upheavals, the Túpac Amaru revolt, which threatened to engulf the entire Viceroyalty of Peru during 1780–1783, and the Communero revolt in New Granada in 1781.” Although these protests did lead to the widespread articulation of demands for autonomy within the composite worldwide monarchy of Spain, they did not result in a movement for independence from that monarchy.5² What did ultimately lead to such a movement was the French Revolution, which, Rodríguez writes, “unleashed twenty years of war in which Spain became an unwilling participant.” In particular, the collapse of the Spanish monarchy in 1808 as a result of the French invasion of Spain and the abdication of its rulers “triggered a series of events that culminated in the establishment of representative government throughout the New World,” events that in America encountered serious opposition from metropolitan supporters. Nevertheless, in 1810 the American kingdoms sent delegates to the Cortes, the Spanish national assembly, and American deputies “played a central role” in drafting the Constitution of Cadiz in 1812, a constitution intended for the entire empire. In imitation of the French Revolution, that constitution, Rodríguez explains, 51. Ibid., 138. 52. Ibid., 136, 142–43.

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“created a unitary state with equal laws for all parts of the Spanish monarchy.” It “abolished seigniorial institutions, the Inquisition, Indian tribute, [and] forced labor,” asserted the “state’s control over the church,” and “enfranchised all adult men, except those of African ancestry.” It also “dramatically increased the scope of representative government” at the imperial, provincial, and municipal levels. By encouraging towns “to form ayuntamientos, it transferred [much] political power to the local level and incorporated vast numbers of people into the political process.”5³ Except for Peru, the Spanish American kingdoms “established local government juntas in 1810 which assumed authority in the name of the imprisoned king and sought to dominate their regions,” but they experienced great difficulties in doing so. Confl ict and civil war soon erupted, pitting “supporters of the Spanish national government against the American juntas, the capitals against the provinces, the elites against one another, and the towns against the countryside.” As Eric Van Young makes clear for Mexico, at least two wars were going on, “one anti-colonial, the other intestine,” with the former involving “a frontal assault against the colonial regime and its predecessors” and the latter constituting an “ethnic confrontation between colonially dominated indigenous peoples and descendants of settler colonists.”54 When Fernando VII returned from captivity in 1814 and resumed the Spanish monarchy, he abolished the Constitution of Cadiz, restored absolutism, and urged “royal authorities in the New World to crush” all autonomy movements. These actions only served to intensify movements for home rule in America, convincing many Spanish Americans “that it was prudent to establish an autonomous government within the Spanish monarchy.” When, however, the Spanish Cortes rejected a proposal that “would have granted Spanish Americans the home rule they had been seeking since 1808,” Spanish American leaders, Rodríguez notes, operating on an ideology that whenever the compacts, the “unwritten American constitution[s],” between the individual kingdoms and the monarch were severed, “nothing bound an American kingdom to Spain or to any other New World realm,” opted for independence.55 In an important case study, Van Young stresses the fissiparous nature of the Mexican war for independence. In particular, he contrasts the focus of the creole white and mestizo elite on the issues of political autonomy and Mexican nationhood with the orientation of the rural masses toward the “defense of community.” Notwithstanding the country population’s occasional “attacks 53. Ibid., 143–45. 54. Ibid., 145; Eric Van Young, “ ‘To Throw Off a Tyrannical Government’: Atlantic Revolutionary Traditions and Popular Insurgency in Mexico, 1800–1821,” in Morrison and Zook, eds., Revolutionary Currents, 132. 55. Rodríguez, “Emancipation of America,” 145–47.

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on local systems of privilege and property,” “localocentrism and the integrity of the community,” he reports, “were features of village riot and protest right through the colonial era and into the internal war period of 1810–1821 and beyond.” During the popular insurgency in 1820–21, popular leaders espoused a “communalist view” that was “fragmented, feudalized, and localized—often looking more like a clan feud than mass mobilization.” Thoroughly “in keeping with the deep conservatism of popular rebellion,” the ideas they used “to justify the insurgency” were “of a notable traditionalist stamp” that looked “backward to illegitimate conquest” and to “the impious motives of Cortes and his sponsors.” Popular leaders were far more interested in carving “out for themselves their own spheres of dominance in the countryside” than in creating an independent state. If “the issue of state building was of considerable importance to the directorate of the independence movement,” he concludes, “there is little evidence to indicate that it mattered a fig to their popular following.” In these divergent views, Van Young writes, the Mexican war for independence “encapsulated many of the social contradictions and resultant strains within the Spanish American colonial regime as a whole—of race and class, wealth and poverty, center and periphery, authoritarianism and political opening, tradition and modernity.”56 As Van Young also suggests, however, the impulse toward building a nation, in the postrevolutionary French sense of that word, was relatively limited, even among the advocates of creole patriotism. Creole leaders certainly used the new representative institutions as a forum for their expression of that patriotism, often evoking the idea that Mexico was an ancient nation “whose rightful monarchs and people had been usurped and subjugated illegitimately,” and they called for the recovery “of its usurped sovereignty.” Yet, “even while many creole thinkers” were attempting “to appropriate a noble indigenous past for purposes of state-making and nation-building,” they displayed a deep “ambivalence about indigenous Mexicans.” Rooted “in the attempt of creole ideologues to distance themselves from the stain of metizaje and the prevailing negative concepts about the nature of man in the New World,” this ambivalence betrayed a latent racism concerning the “indigenous peoples of New Spain and their [allegedly] ‘degraded’ condition at the close of the colonial period” that prevented serious efforts to found, in the manner of French revolutionaries, the Mexican state on the concept of an inclusive nation. In Van Young’s view, creole patriotism only “began developing into a genuine nationalism in the decades after independence.”57 Indeed, like the Dutch Revolt, the English revolutions of the seventeenth 56. Van Young, “ ‘To Throw Off a Tyrannical Government,’ ” 131, 137, 145–46, 148–49. 57. Ibid., 138–39.

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century, and the American Revolution and unlike the French Revolution, at least in the short run, the Hispanic American wars for independence and the regimes they produced seem to have been principally oriented toward the preservation of the existing social and political establishment. Certainly in Mexico, at least on the national level, “the ‘political nation’ ” underwent only a modest expansion in numbers, and the “huge majority of Mexicans long remained in a political shadow.” In social and political terms as well, Mexico’s mostly rural, peasant, and nonwhite population gained little after 1821 from “the separation of colony from metropolis. Fundamental property relations, for example, were not really on the agenda of the creole rebel leadership, who were quite socially conservative for the most part, and it would take the Revolution of 1910 and the regimes after 1920 or so substantially to dismantle the traditional Mexican latifundium.” The “critique of the late Bourbon state fashioned by the creole directorates of the independence struggles” and “the project of a national state experimented with in the decades following independence from Spain,” Van Young concludes, “were artifacts of elite, essentially urban culture” with little regard for the vast rural masses.”58 VIII So what of a general nature can we conclude about the early modern revolutions and the traditions that animated them? What I have tried to argue is that these revolutions have to be seen as a function of the process of state formation and of the tensions between centralization and dispersion that characterized that process. Resistance or revolution was mostly a response to the centralizing activities of royal monarchs and imperial states. It rallied around the defense of existing (or invented) local privileges and liberties and was informed by an ideology of constitutionalism and rights that by no means extended to the entire population. In all but one case, revolution led, not to a strengthening of the central regime, but to the perpetuation and even, in the English, American, and possibly Mexican cases, to an expansion of the dispersed system of governance that characterized the composite monarchies and extended imperial polities in which they occurred. The grand exception to this pattern was the French Revolution. Similar in its origins, it was dramatically different in its impulses and results. By doing away with existing corporate privileges and provincial rights and creating, in the name of an inclusive nation, a unitary state, it produced an entirely new genre of political revolution, a radically new kind of revolutionary tradition, and a strikingly modern form of the nation 58. Ibid., 133, 156.

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state. The conventional scholarly definition of political revolution as an event that breaks sharply with the past and produces a wholesale transformation of the political and constitutional order in behalf of a nation and a unitary state representing that nation seems to fit only one of the revolutions discussed here, the French Revolution.

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— four —

Colonial History and National History Reflections on a Continuing Problem

F

or more than a century, the relationship between colonial history and national history has been a problematic one for professional historians of both eras. Since at least the 1890s, colonial historians have been acutely aware that the old-fashioned nineteenth-century conception of American history as the history of the United States and its antecedents is thoroughly anachronistic and insufficiently attentive to the larger contexts in which developments in America took place. Over the past generation, the thrust of historical studies has significantly enhanced this awareness. As Michael Warner has noted, a preoccupation “with the localism of early modern colonists, on the one hand, and the transatlantic contexts of empire and trade, on the other,” has meant that colonial scholars are now much less likely “to assume that colonial history had an inner propulsion towards modern nationalism.”¹ Yet, the same is

This chapter had its origins in a paper entitled “Extending Colonial History: Some Remarks” for the session “The State of the Field: Colonial North America,” at the annual meeting of the Organization of American Historians in Boston, March 26, 2004. Soon thereafter, it was offered at the session “The State of the Field: Social and Economic Dimensions,” at the National Endowment for the Humanities’ Forum on American History, Culture and Ideas in the Colonial and Founding Period, Washington, D.C., April 30, 2004. It was also given as a keynote address entitled “Refashioning the American Past: The Implications of the New Colonial History for Understanding the History of the American Nation,” Mid-American Conference on History, Lawrence, Kansas, September 23, 2005; and under the title “Colonial History and National History: Reflections on a Continuing Problem,” presented at a seminar at the Early Modern Studies Institute, The Huntington Library and Art Gallery, San Marino, California, January 31, 2006, and at the symposium “The Higginbotham Affair,” in the Curriculum in Peace, War, and Defense and the Department of History, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, March 24, 2007. It is here republished with permission from “Colonial History and National History: Reflections on a Continuing Problem,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 64 (April 2007): 235–50. 1. Michael Warner, “What’s Colonial about Colonial America?” in Robert Blair St. George, ed., Possible Pasts: Becoming Colonial in Early America (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000), 50.

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hardly true for national historians, including many early Americanists who concentrate on the American Revolution and the creation of the American nation, many of whom continue to operate within the traditional conception, in which colonial histories are subordinate to national histories and are useful principally for the light they can shed upon emergent national institutions and cultures. But this subordination of the colonial to the national era parochializes and trivializes the history of periods before the adventitious rise of national states, and I have always thought that it exacted a huge price, from national, as well as colonial, histories. What I want to suggest in this brief chapter is that the time is right for colonialists to become more imperial by using what we have learned—and are learning—to suggest directions for a massive reshaping of what we call American history. My starting point will be with two bodies of theoretical literature that so far have not had wide impact on colonial historians: postcolonial theory and the new literature of state formation, specifically early modern state formation. Postcolonial is a term that over the last fifteen years has come to be “widely used to signify the political, linguistic and cultural experience of societies that were formerly European colonies.”² Although postcolonial theory has been broadly influential among literary scholars, some of whom work in early modern colonial American contexts,³ colonial North American historians have neither used it extensively nor systematically tried to relate their findings to the large body of theoretical literature in postcolonial studies.4 This neglect may be explained by the early and almost exclusive fi xation of postcolonial theorists upon non-settler colonialism. Emerging out of an impulse to challenge the universality of the colonialist perspective constructed to justify Western colonial schemes during the era of high imperialism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, postcolonial studies initially concentrated upon the colo2. See the entry “post-colonialism/postcolonialism” in Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin, Key Concepts in Post-Colonial Studies (London and New York: Routledge, 1998), 186–92, a recent lexicography of postcolonial terminology; quotation on 186. Although Edward Said, Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient (London: Penguin, 1991), originally published in 1978, is the foundational text for postcolonial studies, Said did not use the term postcolonial. One of the earliest uses of the term was Gayatri Spivak, The Postcolonial Critic: Interviews, Strategies, Dialogues (New York: Routledge, 1990). Robert J. C. Young, Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2001), provides a detailed and thoughtful history of the development of postcolonial studies. 3. An early and still one of the most thoughtful and contextually grounded examples is Peter Hulme, Colonial Encounters: Europe and the Native Caribbean, 1492–1797 (London: Routledge, 1986). 4. A notable exception is St. George, ed., Possible Pasts, in which several of the essays, including St. George’s introduction, make explicit use of postcolonial theory.

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nial process as it operated in the heavily peopled worlds of the Middle East, Africa, and Asia. With the few exceptions of Algeria, South Africa, Kenya, and Rhodesia, colonies in this era were colonies of exploitation or occupation or domination, in which the central objective was to mobilize land and labor to produce profitable raw materials for export. The colonizers were relatively small and transient cadres of managers, bureaucrats, merchants, and soldiers whose principal functions were to maintain order and to facilitate the process of resource extraction by outside businesses, and few if any Europeans settled on the land or took up permanent residence. Largely ignoring settler colonies of the sort that developed throughout the Americas in the early modern era and in Oceania and parts of Africa in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the earliest iterations of postcolonial theory tended to suggest either that colonialism, as the anthropologist Nicholas Thomas has complained, was “peculiarly modern—and hence did not exist, for example, in the period of the conquest of America—or that . . . the logic” behind it was “equally applicable to that case, as in others.”5 The result, as the literary scholar Peter Hulme noted, in one of the first works to apply postcolonial insights to the study of the early modern Americas, has been that “the relevance of postcolonial theory to the Americas is . . . not yet well established.”6 Over the last decade, a few postcolonial scholars have sought to move beyond this concentration on “conventional colonies.”7 In a move intended to illustrate the extraordinary “diversity of colonialism” and the wide “range of different forms and practices carried out with respect to radically different cultures, over many different centuries,” these analysts have called for a consideration of the place of settler societies within an enlarged history of colonialism that stretches back to the beginnings of European overseas expansion in the fifteenth century.8 Defining settler societies “as societies in which Europeans 5. Nicholas Thomas, Colonialism’s Culture: Anthropology, Travel and Government (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 49. 6. Peter Hulme, “Postcolonial Theory and Early America,” in St. George, ed., Possible Pasts, 33–48; quotation on 35. 7. See esp. Daiva Stasiulis and Nire Yuval-Davis, eds., Unsettling Settler Societies: Articulations of Gender, Race, Ethnicity and Class (London: Sage Publications, 1995), 1–38, a collection of ten essays, plus an introduction, covering aspects of New Zealand, Australia, Canada, the United States, Mexico, Peru, South Africa, Zimbabwe, Algeria, and Israel; Jürgen Osterhammel, Colonialism: A Theoretical Overview, 2nd ed. (Princeton: Markus Weiner Publishers, 2005), a brief and thoughtful introduction to the complex history of modern colonialism that was fi rst published in 1995 and fi rst translated into English in 1997; and the fi rst six chapters of Young, Postcolonialism. 8. Young, Postcolonialism, 17. Indeed, in her essay “Imperium Studies: Theorizing Early Modern Expansion,” in Patricia Clare Ingham and Michelle R. Warren, eds., Postcolonial Moves: Medieval through Modern (New York: Palgrave, 2003), 71–90, Barbara Fuchs has per-

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have settled, where the descendants have remained politically dominant over indigenous peoples, and where a heterogeneous society has developed,” these studies have taken pains to make two general points. First, they have emphasized the distinctiveness of settler colonies, identifying a number of features that they did not share with exploitation colonies. These included the extent, relative gender balance, and permanence of the settler population; the extensive transplantation of European institutions and cultural and social forms; the wide latitude enjoyed by settlers in shaping economic, social, and political structures; the ambiguous status of settlers as both colonizers, in relationship to indigenous people, and colonized, in relationship to the metropole to which they were attached; the emergence of provincial polities that became “cores of neo-European nation-building”; and the production in those polities of historical constructs justifying settler activities that were subsequently “absorbed within the political and legal-juridical institutions, ‘myths of origin’ and national metaphors” of the states that grew out of them.9 In further contrast to exploitation colonies, most settler colonies, with the major exception of Algeria, did not couple independence with decolonization. Far from being “primarily fought by people who were colonized against the people who had colonized them,” most movements for independence and separation in settler colonies “were in fact settler rebellions” that left settlers in full control and the colonial situation of the colonized unchanged.¹0 Notwithstanding the many distinctive features of settler colonialism, however, the second major point made by scholars seeking to include settler colonies within the broader history of colonialism is that they meet the principal criteria that define modern colonialism. That is, to one degree or another, they exhibited a willingness “to make ‘peripheral’ societies subservient to the ‘metropolises,’ ” they involved “a relationship of domination between an indigenous (or forcibly imported)” group “and foreign invaders,”¹¹ and they practiced “varying levels of physical and cultural genocide, alienation of indigenous land, disruption of indigenous societies, economics, and governance, and movements of indigenous resistance.”¹² Indeed, because the polities in settler colonies were “little more than . . . instrument[s] of the settlers,” they represented, in the suasively suggested that the processes associated with colonialism were at work throughout the late Middle Ages and early modern era within Europe. She refers to the study of these processes within Europe and then their expansion overseas as “imperium studies.” 9. Daiva Stasiulis and Nire Yuval-Davis, “Introduction: Beyond Dichotomies—Gender, Race, Ethnicity and Class in Settler Societies,” in Stasiulis and Yuval-Davis, eds., Unsettling Settler Societies, 3, 4, 8, 10; Osterhammel, Colonialism, 7; Young, Postcolonialism, 19. 10. Hulme, “Postcolonial Theory and Early America,” 37; Young, Postcolonialism, 79. 11. Osterhammel, Colonialism, 15–16. 12. Stasiulis and Yuval-Davis, “Introduction,” 7.

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judgment of Jürgen Osterhammel, “the most violent form of European expansion.” Land hunger, indifference to indigenous land titles, and insensitivity to the lives of indigenous people and imported slaves, in his view, “create[d] an explosive propensity for violence”¹³ and, as other postcolonial writers have underlined, a legacy of racial subordination that was largely unrestrained by imperial supervision and continued unabated into the postcolonial era. In the case of the United States, Dolores Janiewski has remarked, “from the American Revolution to the ‘Indian wars’ in the 1880s, one Native-American nation after another found its territory invaded by the expansionist republic that had established its independence in a treaty that ignored the claims of indigenous inhabitants.”¹4 But these scattered efforts to add settler colonialism to the range of concerns covered by postcolonial studies have not so far had much of an impact on postcolonial scholarship. For instance, only one of twenty-nine articles in a leading reader on postcolonial studies published in 2000 treats settler colonialism, and it focuses on nineteenth-century settler colonies.¹5 However little postcolonial scholars have looked at settler colonies like the colonial Americas, the potential relevance of this evolving body of theory for students of all areas of the early modern Americas is obvious, and in combination with other developments, the emerging discourse of postcolonialism has had a subtle yet profound effect upon the way we think about the concepts of colonial or, to use the postmodern idiom, colonialism. Emphasizing the systematic subjugation of some peoples to another in the colonial process, postcolonial scholars have underlined the ubiquity of the colonial process in the modern world system. No longer can we think of colonial as something exclusively pre-national. Rather, we now must recognize that this process has been fundamental to early modern and later state building and that it continued long after the initial formation of national states.¹6 Students of the colonial Americas scarcely need to be told about the deleterious effects of colonization upon the colonized, for this reconception of the concept of colonial and colonialism has coincided with a dramatic thrust toward the production of a fuller and more inclusive history. Inspired by the demands for an histoire totale articulated by Marc Bloch, Lucien Febvre, and other members of the Annales School in France as early as the 1920s, as well as by post–World 13. Osterhammel, Colonialism, 42, 75; see also Young, Postcolonialism, 20. 14. Dolores Janiewski, “Gendering, Racializing and Classifying Settler Colonization in the United States,” in Stasiulis and Yuval-Davis, eds., Unsettling Settler Societies, 141. 15. Anna Johnston and Alan Lawson, “Settler Colonies,” in Henry Schwartz and Sangeeta Ray, eds., A Companion to Postcolonial Studies (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2000), 360–76. 16. For its earlier European manifestations, see Fuchs, “Imperium Studies,” 71–90.

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War II social and political changes, historians of colonial British America have been at the forefront of the effort, emerging in the 1960s and still going strong, to recover the histories of those peoples—Amerindians, Africans, and people of mixed race—whose stories had largely been neglected in the construction of the grand narratives of the development of colonial British America and the emergence of the American nation. As these histories revealed and focused attention upon the degree to which colonization had exacted a high toll on the cultures, land rights, and numbers of indigenous people in the Americas and upon the centrality of black slavery to the colonizing process, the forefathers and -mothers whom previous generations of historians had admired for carving out settlements and creating viable socioeconomic and political systems in the wilderness lost more than a little of their luster. This expanding body of work provides abundant evidence that the expropriation of lands, the destruction of cultures, and the subjugation and exploitation of peoples emphasized by postcolonial scholars applied to early modern settler colonies as well as to the modern extractive colonies of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.¹7 Nor did this colonial process by any means end with the formation of national entities in the Americas. Indeed, in the United States and Canada, to take two examples, it actually intensified with the colonization of vast new areas of the continent, as swarms of settlers brought new areas under their hegemony and in the process pushed out or confined to unwanted catchment areas thousands of indigenous peoples and in the United States, wherever it was legally possible and profitable, made extensive use of enslaved African Americans in doing so. From this broad postcolonial perspective, it seems, the national story merely represented an extension of the colonial story. We will consider some of the implications of this possibility below. By problematizing and historicizing the rise of national states during the early modern era and later, recent literature on state formation provides a complementary perspective to the work of postcolonial scholars.¹8 Among other things, it has shown how varied this process was from one state to another, how often it involved the coalescence or amalgamation of many kingdoms or 17. Excellent brief analyses of the findings of this literature may be found in James H. Merrell, “Indian History during the English Colonial Era,” in Daniel Vickers, ed., A Companion to Colonial America (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2003), 118–37; and Philip D. Morgan, “African Americans,” in ibid., 138–71. 18. The foundational texts in early modern state-formation theory are Charles Tilly, Coercion, Capital, and European States, AD 900–1900 (Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1990); and Mark Greengrass, ed., Conquest and Coalescence: The Shaping of the State in Early Modern Europe (London: Edward Arnold, 1991). But see also the important article by J. H. Elliott, “A Europe of Composite Monarchies,” Past & Present 137 (1992): 48–71.

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other types of polities, how often and to what extent those entities were able to retain high levels of local peculiarities and self-government, how powerful the local magnates and other possessing populations remained, even in the face of the centralizing tendencies inherent in state building, how long it took to forge national—as opposed to provincial—identities, and to how great an extent the authority of emerging national states depended upon a more or less continuous process of negotiation with their constituent polities. This literature strongly suggests that not just early modern states but also early modern empires were similarly loose and coalescing entities, a reflection of the states with which they were associated. We used to think of empires as authoritative polities in which authority and power emanated from the center, but from the new perspective supplied by state-formation studies, we can begin to appreciate that most of the agency in the construction of the new polities that made up early modern empires rested in the hands of the colonizers or settlers themselves.¹9 In settling, reconstructing, and developing the new spaces they occupied, these people saw themselves as agents of the European polities to which they were connected, exhibiting both a powerful desire to retain their connection with those polities and a deep attachment to their metropolitan legal and cultural inheritance.²0 In the English case, the flexibility of common law culture enabled colonials to adapt it to local conditions while retaining its quintessential Englishness.²¹ In the process of constructing polities for themselves, of course, settlers in every English colony were engaged in a process of state building,²² and by the middle of the eighteenth century, each colony had developed a distinctive, 19. This subject, as applied to all early modern American empires, is treated at greater length in Jack P. Greene, “Negotiated Authorities: The Problem of Governance in the Extended Polities of the Early Modern Atlantic World,” in Greene, Negotiated Authorities: Essays in Colonial Political and Constitutional History (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1994), 1–24. 20. For a study of the English case, see Jack P. Greene, Peripheries and Center: Constitutional Development in the Extended Polities of the British Empire and the United States, 1607–1788 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1986). See also Christine Daniels and Michael V. Kennedy, eds., Negotiated Empires: Centers and Peripheries in the Americas, 1500–1820 (New York and London: Routledge, 2002). 21. See Jack P. Greene, “ ‘By Their Laws Shall Ye Know Them’: Law and Identity in Colonial British America,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 33 (Autumn 2002): 247–60 (see chap. 12 in this volume). To avoid repetition of material in chap. 2, several sentences from this paragraph have been eliminated from the original published version of this chapter. 22. Alexander Haskell, “ ‘The Affections of the People’: Ideology and the Politics of StateBuilding in Colonial Virginia, 1607–1754” (Ph.D. diss., Johns Hopkins University, 2005), is the fi rst to interpret the history of any colonial British American polity in terms of stateformation theory.

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functional, and authoritative polity with its own peculiar system of laws and its own particular constitution, a settled structure of leadership, a broad popular base among the free segments of society, a well-articulated sense of corporate identity, and an astonishing amount of autonomy in all internal provincial matters. Combined with the scarcity of fiscal and coercive resources for imperial management in Britain, these developments inevitably meant that authority in the early modern British Empire would be distributed between the center and the peripheries, that central direction of the empire would be minimal, that metropolitan authority in the colonies would be consensual and heavily dependent on provincial opinion, and that effective power in distant colonial polities would be firmly situated in provincial and local governments. Despite some casual and desultory administration from London, the early modern British Empire was thus a loose association of largely self-governing polities. The selfmade, possessing settler classes of these polities acknowledged metropolitan authority, not because it was imposed upon them, but because it incorporated them into a larger system of national identity that guaranteed their Englishness, their inheritance in the form of English legal and constitutional traditions, and their continuing control over the polities they helped to create and maintain over several generations. The new metropolitan measures undertaken in the wake of the Seven Years’ War signaled an intention to change the British Empire from the loose federal polity it had long been into a more unitary polity with authority fi xed more clearly at the center. Such measures both directly challenged the autonomy of the colonies over their local affairs and, by subjecting the colonies to legislation and other directives to which the settler populations had not given their consent, called into question settler claims to a British identity, and rights, as Britons, to enjoy Britain’s traditional liberties. Unsurprisingly, those measures elicited a powerful defense of the local corporate rights of the colonies. In the first instance, then, colonial resistance constituted a settler revolt against measures that both challenged settler control over local affairs and denied settler claims to a British identity. The driving concern within the colonies that participated in this resistance movement was to preserve the principle of consent in relation to all matters involving taxation and internal governance. The adoption of a republican form of government and the formation of a national union were unintended consequences of their efforts to achieve this objective. Once they had declared independence from the monarchy of Great Britain, formal republican government was simply their only viable option, and a union was an obvious necessity if they were to have any chance of success against the most powerful military and naval establishment in the Western world at that time. As they transformed

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themselves from colonies to states, however, their integrity as separate polities with full authority over their internal affairs was never in doubt. David Hendrickson has recently decried the tendency of modern historians “to exaggerate the significance of the national idea in the era of revolution and constitution-building.” Assuming the “hegemonic status” of that idea, “most historians,” he notes, “have treated ‘the new nation’ born in 1776 as a kind of fi xed and unchallengeable essence.” “The customary way of writing about the era,” he complains, “sees a structure of identities that has made loyalty to ‘the nation’ primary.” As Hendrickson makes clear, however, this strategy does considerable violence to the facts of the case. “At the beginning, in 1776,” he writes, “Americans constituted not a body politic but an association of bodies politic” that was “far from constituting a unified nation.” While the “terms of the colonial dispute with the mother country had made each colony hostile to central control and intoxicated [them] with the idea of their [own] sovereignty,” the “liberty they wished to preserve was not simply individual liberty, though that was recognized by nearly all as a fundamental political value, but the ‘liberty of the states,’ ” and “the colonies launched their experiment less as one people than as free and independent states, with all the rights and powers thereunto appertaining.” If the demands of war and a common enemy helped to create a rudimentary sense of nationalism, moreover, the experience of the war, Hendrickson argues, “also confirmed the distinctive interests and deeprooted particularism of the several states.” Throughout the war and confederation eras, he suggests, the “multiplicity of loyalties to and identities with particular colonies and states” was one of “the most potent factors in explaining the trajectory of American politics” at the national level.²³ In this situation, it is scarcely surprising that the union—one cannot yet call it a country—founded during the Revolution should be little more than a league of states, that the Congress should have such enormous difficulties in mobilizing an effective war effort, that the states resisted efforts to extend the taxing power to the national government, that the centrifugal tendencies within the United States should emerge so strongly after the immediate objective of the war—independence of the several states—had been established, or even that the state governments, bowing, as their colonial predecessors had always done, to the demands of their constituents, should behave in ways calculated to put the interests of the states and their free inhabitants above those of the nation as a whole. The architects of the constitutional settlement of 1787–88, which represented one logical culmination of the American Revolution, were principally 23. David C. Hendrickson, Peace Pact: The Lost World of the American Founding (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2003), ix, xii, 26–27, 35, 257–58, 297.

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nationalizers who feared that the fissiparous tendencies within the existing union under the Articles of Confederation would lead to disunion and the evaporation of the military and diplomatic achievements of the long and expensive War for Independence. Hendrickson describes that settlement as a “peace pact” designed to head off confl ict among the states.²4 It was also, as Max M. Edling has shown in his recent effort to apply state-formation theory to the analysis of the settlement, an exercise in state building that would provide the national government with the same sort of control over finances, defense, and trade enjoyed by all the contemporary national states in Europe.²5 The framers and implementers of the 1787 Constitution certainly intended to give vastly more energy to the national government. Yet, as Edling also shows, their success was always predicated upon an overwhelming consensus about the importance of keeping authority over internal matters—that is, in the conditions operative at the end of the eighteenth century and for long thereafter, most matters—in the hands of the state governments. Not even the most radical nationalizers among the Framers wanted to dispense with the states or saw the Constitution as an instrument to do so. They virtually all saw the states as the proper venue for most governance that would occur in the United States. They made no effort to deprive the states of the taxing power or to prevent them from exercising virtually total authority over their internal affairs, albeit the states now had to operate within new guidelines with respect to money emissions and contractual obligations. This division of authority into external and internal spheres was precisely the distribution they had in 1776 revolted to maintain. Notwithstanding the Framers’ decision to bypass the states and go directly to the people in the adoption of the Constitution, the state legislatures were intimately involved in the entire process. They selected the delegates who went to Philadelphia in 1787, and the Convention sent its work to Congress, certainly a creature of the states, which in turn sent it on to the state legislatures, each of which authorized the calling of a state convention to ratify it. It is important that the sovereign people in these state conventions gave their consent to the new Constitution and signified their approval of vesting some powers in a national government as citizens of particular states acting in state ratifying conventions. There was no national ratifying convention to adopt the new Constitution. Once the new national government was up and running, moreover, it rarely transgressed or showed any inclination to set further limits upon the power 24. Ibid., xi. 25. Max M. Edling, A Revolution in Favor of Government: Origins of the U.S. Constitution and the Making of the American State (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003).

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of the states. The Senate continued to represent the states. The national government used its taxing power in limited ways, raising money principally by imposts and excises of the sort imposed by the metropolitan government during the long years of empire. What one of the writers of The Federalist Papers called “feudal baronies” in the states remained intact, and state courts continued to hand down the overwhelming majority of judicial decisions issued in the United States. In pointed contrast to French revolutionaries, the national government made no effort to interfere with the integrity of the states or to adopt a uniform code of laws. Every state continued to operate within its own peculiar legal and judicial system. Surely, the important point about the Tenth Amendment is that it left the line between national and state authority to be negotiated—and renegotiated. How much energy the national government was able to muster during the 1790s is open to question. Whenever the legislature endeavored to expand national power or the executive displayed too much pretentiousness, they encountered enormous opposition, even when, as with Hamilton’s financial program, they were successful. Some of this opposition was on republican grounds, but some of it also reflected the widespread preference for a system of governance in which most authority lay within the individual states. The national government, even at the height of its power in the early 1790s, remained distant, small, and unobtrusive, and the experience of most United States residents with governance continued to be at the state and local levels. Jefferson’s election in 1800, with its emphasis on limiting the scope of national authority, provides strong testimony to the contention that the constitutional settlement worked out in the late 1780s and 1790s was less a national than a federal settlement, in which both national and state governments, each operating within its respective sphere, would be powerful. If there was a broadly shared “original intent” in this era, it was an intent to create for the United States a federal polity that was neither completely state-centered nor national. As for the national judiciary, it did little for the next century and a half. As Edling emphasizes, the limited centralization of authority in the national government meant that no “powerful centralized state” would “develop in America after the ratification of the Constitution” and that the states would continue “to be the most important element in the federal structure.” For the next seventy years, the United States remained “only a small national state” that used its fiscal and military powers sparingly and “never captured the hearts and minds of its citizens.” As a result, Edling concludes, “popular identification with the nation never challenged loyalty to state and sectional identity.”²6 As 26. Ibid., 223–24, 227–29.

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the international law scholar James Brown Scott remarked in a 1918 volume, the “delegates in Federal Convention did not merge the States in a union, but formed a union of the States.”²7 Perhaps because they have only the most general unifying narrative with which to work during the long era before the Seven Years’ War and the American Revolution, historians of colonial British America have always focused intently on the local or the provincial. Even when they were trying to invent general events, such as the Great Awakening, on which to hang their stories, they have insisted on the integrity of local and provincial developments and the significance of local distinctions. The combined implications of postcolonial and state-formation studies as elaborated above powerfully suggest that this localist perspective should be extended into the national era. Such an exercise might begin with an analysis of expansion, certainly, as historians have long appreciated, one of the most important developments during the first half of the national era. The postcolonial perspective suggests that the character of expansion did not change much in the wake of the creation of the United States and that national expansion merely represented an extension of colonial expansion with a weak American state, instead of a weak British state, presiding over it. Indeed, it may even be misleading to use the term national just because it occurred during the national era. Such usage can be taken to suggest that the nation qua nation was the important actor in the story, but that only gives rise to the questions that postcolonial theory opens up: Did the colonial process operate much differently in the United States than it had over the previous two centuries in the British Empire? Did the accelerating spread of settlement derive from some new post-Revolutionary rage to republicanize the North American continent or to extend the so-called imagined national community of the new United States? Was post-1776 expansion different in character from that which had gone before? Or, was it largely an extension of a well-entrenched colonizing process, the chief elements of which had been thoroughly worked out during the century and a half before the Revolution? Certainly, and to an extent rarely appreciated by historians of the national experience, the continuities between pre- and post-Revolutionary expansion are very impressive. After 1776, as before, settlers (including speculators, investors, merchants, and others who hoped to tap into or profit from the new markets opened up by new settlements), not governments, demonstrated the most agency in the projects of Indian clearance and settlement. They poured into new territories, took the lead in driving out the indigenous populations, 27. As quoted by Hendrickson, Peace Pact, 285.

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introduced slavery wherever legally and economically feasible, aggressively demanded the establishment of the systems of law and governance with which they were familiar, and constructed polities that were every bit as distinctive, one from another, as the early colonies. To be sure, the American national government, itself the creature of the many partially amalgamating original polities, provided more help in the colonizing process than the British state had done, and colonization after 1790 increasingly carried with it new overtones of an American national destiny. Just as the early colonizers and their immediate descendants had spoken of their achievements as contributions to the profit, strength, and greater glory of the British Empire in its struggle against what they thought of as the despotic and Catholic French or Spanish foe, post1776 settlers no doubt saw themselves as agents for enhancing the territory and might of the American republic. Yet, the spread of settlement probably had more to do with the needs, desires, and self-understandings of individual settlers and promoters than with national goals such as manifest destiny. Such goals may have given added meaning to their activities, but the vast majority of settlers seem to have been driven far less by nation-building impulses than by land hunger, profit seeking, and eagerness to exploit new resources, the same motives that had driven settlement and colony formation during the colonial era, and, like their predecessors, they principally acted not as agents for the state but for themselves. So strong was the desire for land and hegemony over it in the expansion process that it scarcely needed a national component to make it go. What could have been more thoroughly colonial than the extension of this aggressive colonizing process into the new lands claimed by treaty or purchase by the new national state? Similarly, national-era, like colonial-era, settlers operated immediately within local and provincial contexts, now called territories or states, and deeply engaged themselves in the process of community building and polity formation that would provide them with the protections associated with the British legal system, which, notwithstanding their new republican status, continued to be an important part of their legal and political heritage. Just as in the original states that formed the union of 1787, in the new states the establishment of settler hegemony over each territory shifted “power and ownership from the original inhabitants to the settlers and the governments they created.”²8 At the same time, the new states imported the colonial system of racial subordination even where slavery was prohibited by national law. Settlers in new states constructed after 1776, like their colonial predecessors, exhibited a massive heedlessness about the lives and rights of those who 28. Janiewski, “Gendering, Racializing and Classifying,” 132, 136.

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did not share their culture and did not look like them, and they used the same already deeply internalized ideology to justify their dispossession of indigenous peoples. Indeed, to the extent that they had any qualms about what they were doing to local indigenous peoples and to Africans, settlers justified their behavior in terms of the story they constructed to explain the larger meaning of their lives. According to that story, which was the same throughout the English and many other parts of the newly colonized worlds of the Americas and in national as well as in colonial America, they were engaged in a noble enterprise: bringing previously improperly exploited territories into a cultivated state, rendering their resources productive, and reorganizing the wilderness into settled and bounded spaces where property and labor could be acquired and secured by local political and judicial institutions designed and implemented to achieve these ends. They were constructing outposts of Western civility and thereby contributing to the grand project of bringing civilization to a vast new world. This enabling—and ennobling—story provided the rationale for the wholesale expansion of settlement throughout the colonial era, as settlers rushed to establish new political units to bring law and governance wherever they went. The spread of settlement thus represented an astonishing spread of culture, as frontiers rapidly became backcountries and backcountries quickly developed into forecountries. Just as their forefathers had done with each new colony, they turned each new state into a settler republic that did their bidding. In every way, they were replicating the behavior of their predecessors in earlier generations. Even as the new national state, like the British Empire before it, laid out broad guidelines for them to follow in this process, they enjoyed enormous flexibility in constructing polities that would reflect their interests, protect their rights and property, and fit their own designs to the nature of the territory they occupied. As the new states, like the original ones, over time constructed a distinctive corporate identity appropriate to their geographical situation, the nature of their economy and social system, and the collective experiences of the inhabitants, they took their places as equal members of the American national union, with equally pervasive and independent control over their internal affairs and equal protection for their own social and political peculiarities. What sorts of polity and social systems they developed, what sorts of laws they lived by, were largely a matter of local option. Over the past three or four decades, historical scholarship has moved decisively to reverse the traditional neglect of women, children, Indians, African Americans, people of mixed race, ethnic minorities, and socioeconomic subaltern groups in American history, but has done relatively little to redress what may arguably be an even more distorting omission: the neglect of the states as

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the arenas in which most governance, most public life, and the domestic life of most Americans was principally centered. In the construction of the American past, what Hendrickson calls the “the national idea” has ruled and continues to rule virtually without challenge.²9 What I have been suggesting here is that the combination of insights from postcolonial and state-formation studies opens up the possibility for a fundamentally different approach, one built upon a recognition of the profound continuities between the colonial and national segments of the American past. What I have been recommending is a massive extension of the colonial perspective into the national era, a colonization, as it were, of American national history. This perspective would begin with the recognition that Kentucky, Ohio, Iowa, Texas, California, Oregon—and all the other post-1776 states— were the products of an ongoing colonizing process. Second, it would conceive of these new states, less as the creatures of the United States, than as colonies of settlers not dissimilar from the colonies that became the original states. Third, it would reconceptualize and stress state history and acknowledge that the new states, like the original colonies, were the sites in which the real work of settlement and polity building was mostly done, that settlers had extraordinary agency and wide latitude in the process, and that collective and individual aspirations were realized or disappointed through the creation and operation of local legal structures. This approach has the potential to reshape our understanding of American history. It would raise state and provincial history to the same level as national history. It would acknowledge that, at least in the area of territorial expansion and state construction, the transformative power of the American Revolution was far weaker than many students of the Revolution have acknowledged. It would focus attention on the important questions of how, when, and why the states came to be subordinated to the national project and state history came to be thought of as a peripheral or inferior, rather than a central, part of the American story. This reshaping, I suggest, could produce a much more complicated—and interesting—history, a history that would focus, not just upon the few collective activities of Americans at a national level, but upon developments within an astonishing variety of distinctive and largely selfgoverning polities and their relationships to the weak federal state. Instead of the nationally focused, textbook-driven history in which we are currently entombed, it might produce a genuinely federal history, a history that would recognize the centrality of the states during the first century of the American republic, that would make it clear that the sum of the parts is far greater and 29. Hendrickson, Peace Pact, ix.

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infinitely richer than the whole, that would acknowledge that, even with (perhaps even because of) its formal republican structure, the American state, no less than other early modern states, was a tenuous amalgam of diverse parts, each of which enjoyed a vast amount of self-government and largely pursued its own course as locals defined it, and that would present the American experience, like the colonial experience before it, as principally a collection of local experiences played out in a variety of similar but distinctive polities. How precisely to produce such a history, one in which the many historical arenas represented by the states would be given their just due, I will have to leave to those who have vastly more knowledge about the nineteenth and twentieth centuries than I do. One key entry point for testing this line of argument could be through governance and law. What legal structures were created, by whom? How did people in these new societies create authority and use it to shape the societies and cultures they wanted to create? When they encountered already functioning systems of (European-style) law in polities with long histories of attachment to different national cultures with different legal systems, what did they do?³0 What were the nature and variations among the collective local identities formed through the process of living in the same polity under the same distinctive local laws? What did it mean for people to have parallel collective identities, state as well as national? These are just a few of the hard and therefore deeply engaging questions that might come to the fore if we began to give the states more weight in the construction of a more fully inclusive national history. In this enterprise, early Americanists will have to take the lead. We are the only ones who have looked closely, if by no means yet closely enough, at the beginning of the story and the only ones who have the perspective to appreciate the powerful continuities between the colonial and national eras. 30. See the excellent works by George Dargo, Jefferson’s Louisiana: Politics and the Clash of Legal Traditions (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1975); and Stuart Banner, Legal Systems in Conflict: Property and Sovereignty in Missouri, 1750–1860 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2000).

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part t wo

Governance •

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— five —

Transatlantic Colonization and the Redefinition of Empire in the Early Modern Era The British-American Experience

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or more than a century past,” Adam Smith remarked in 1776 in the conclusion to An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, the “rulers of Great Britain have . . . amused the people with the imagination that they possessed a great empire on the west side of the Atlantic. This empire, however, has hitherto,” Smith lamented, “existed in imagination only. It has hitherto been but the project of an empire; not a gold mine, but the project of a gold mine.” By this passage, Smith was not suggesting that the colonies that composed the British Empire had not been successful. Indeed, the Wealth of Nations included a long section entitled “Causes of the Prosperity of new Colonies,” in which he revealed an informed appreciation of the extraordinary growth and development of many of those colonies. Rather, Smith’s remarks, written nearly three hundred years after Columbus’s first encounter with America and at a moment when the British government had already had nearly a century and three-quarters’ experience with overseas empire, expressed the continuing frustration of metropolitan observers and representatives at the inability of metropolitan governments to impose their definitions of

This chapter was written for the conference “The Americas in European History from the XVI to the XX Century,” Fondazione Einaudi, Turin, Italy, May 25, 1995. It was also presented at a seminar at the Department of History, University of Canterbury, Christchurch, New Zealand, July 23, 1996; at the First Annual Jack and Margaret Sweet Symposium, Michigan State University, East Lansing, November 22, 1997; at the Early Modern History Seminar, Department of History, National University of Ireland, Dublin, March 5, 1999; at the Early Modern History Seminar, Department of History, National University of Ireland, Maynooth, March 8, 1999; at the Early Modern History Seminar, Department of History, National University of Ireland, Galway, March 10, 1999; and as a lecture at the Department of History, American University, Washington, D.C., October 30, 2000. It is here republished with corrections from “Transoceanic Colonization and the Redefinition of Empire in the Early Modern Era,” in Christine Daniels and Michael Kennedy, eds., Negotiated Empires: Centers and Peripheries in the Americas, 1500–1820 (New York and London: Routledge, 2002), 267–82.

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empire upon the extended transatlantic polities created by Europeans during the early modern era.¹ By no means new, such frustrations had been present from the beginning. Throughout the early modern era, what might be called the centrifugal forces of imperial construction had repeatedly prevented metropolitan states from bringing the many transatlantic polities established in and across the Atlantic under levels of supervision that would enable them to realize what Smith called “this golden dream” of empire.² The fragmented and loose character of these polities did not conform to metropolitan visions of imperial organization, and the resulting disparity between structure and theory stimulated periodic demands on the part of metropolitan agents and exponents for the redefinition and reconstruction of empire. The recurrence of such demands registered a deep and abiding unease about the ultimate consequences of the failure of metropolitan efforts at centralization and betrayed a mounting conviction that the future viability of empire depended on tighter metropolitan controls. Without such controls, valuable colonies might fall into the hands of rival powers or confederate together and set up for themselves. Using the British Empire as an example, this chapter examines the extended transatlantic polities of the early modern era. It analyzes the major variables that affected their structure and definition and explores the pattern and timing of the recurring confl icts over their shape and character. Until relatively recently, most historians of early modern empire used the coercive and centralized model of imperial organization derived from late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century empires. In this conception, empires were political entities in which colonies were presided over by powerful nation states with vast administrative and coercive resources to enforce their claims to sovereignty. In these coherent entities, authority did not flow upward from colonial populations, most of which, even in colonies with substantial numbers of European settlers, were disenfranchised subject populations, but downward from distant centers. The very concepts of colony and colonial were freighted with powerful overtones of subjection, subordination, dependence, domination, inferiority, incapacity, and alterity. Colonies were places and colonials were peoples over whom national states exercised hegemonic control. But early modern transatlantic empires do not fit this model. Rather, they were very much reflections or logical extensions of the states to which they were symbolically attached. As explained in chapter 3, recent literature on state 1. Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776), ed. R. H. Campbell and A. S. Skinner, 2 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976), 2:946. 2. Ibid.

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formation has shown that those states were not modern states.³ Rather, they were all lacking in the fiscal, administrative, and coercive resources necessary to achieve centralized and integrated polities through either coercive or administrative means, presiding monarchs usually depending for their authority over amalgamating or conquered provinces on negotiations between the Crown and dominant power holders in those provinces. The result was a system of composite monarchies that, at least before the middle of the seventeenth century, were characterized by indirect rule, consultation, and fragmented sovereignty. The nature of these composite monarchies was one of the principal variables in determining the character of the extended transatlantic polities constructed under their sponsorship beginning at the end of the fifteenth century. Unlike the respective parts of any composite European monarchy, the many colonial entities Europeans established in the New World were new polities, even when, as in the case of Mexico and Peru, they arose out of conquests of places that were, in European terms, recognizably states at the time they were conquered. Yet, the actual process by which these new polities took shape effectively replicated, in very brief compass, that by which composite monarchies had formed in Europe. Traditionally, historians have depicted the establishment of early modern European empires in America as the result of a devolution of authority outward from old European centers to new American peripheries. As I have argued elsewhere,4 however, even a casual inspection of the subject reveals that this conception seriously distorts the process by which authority was created in these new entities. Far from having been carried by would-be colonizers from Europe to America, authority in these empires seems rather to have been constructed in a process characterized by two phases. The first involved the creation in America, through the activities of the participants in the colonizing process, of new arenas of individual and local power. The second involved the actual creation of authority through negotiation between those new arenas and the European centers that aspired to bring them under their jurisdiction and to which those arenas desired to be attached. Four major factors affected this process. First was the limited resources available to the several states involved in the colonizing process. Just as no 3. For references to and a fuller description of the findings of this literature, see the discussion in chap. 3. To avoid repetition, several paragraphs on this subject have been eliminated from the original published version of this chapter. 4. Jack P. Greene, “Negotiated Authorities: The Problem of Governance in the Extended Polities of the Early Modern Atlantic World,” in Greene, Negotiated Authorities: Essays in Colonial Political and Constitutional History (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1994), 1–24.

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prince had the administrative and fiscal resources necessary to hold a composite monarchy together in Europe, so no early modern European government had either the coercive resources necessary to establish its hegemony over portions of the New World or the financial resources to pay the high costs of creating them. Second was the enormous distances involved. In Europe, the various parts of each composite monarchy did not always directly adjoin each other: some were even separated by sea. As Adam Smith noted, however, the “European colonies in America” were considerably “more remote” from the seat of government “than the most distant provinces of the greatest empires, which had ever been known before.”5 Third was the economic orientation of the colonizing process. Although the saving of Amerindian souls became a major objective of both Spanish and French colonization, and the goal of establishing the New Jerusalem in America was a prominent aspiration for the settlers of the orthodox Puritan colonies of Massachusetts and Connecticut, economic motives—on the part of sponsors and participants—always predominated, except in missionary enclaves. Fourth and finally, participants in colonial enterprises everywhere revealed a profound desire to retain a connection to their respective metropolitan heritages. As a consequence of their limited resources, all the nation states that participated in the colonization of America farmed out, during the early stages of European expansion, the task of colonization to private groups organized into chartered trading companies or to individuals known, in the case of the Spanish, as adelantados, and as donatarios, proprietors, patroons, and seigneurs, respectively, in the cases of the Portuguese, English, Dutch, and French.6 In return for authorization from the ruler and in the hope of realizing extensive economic or social advantages for themselves, such people agreed to assume the heavy financial burdens of founding, defending, and succoring beachheads of European occupation in America. In effect, European rulers gave these private agents licenses with wide discretion to undertake activities in areas that were often extensive and contained aboriginal populations of varying numbers, areas to which those rulers had only a highly tenuous claim and over which they had no effective control, much less authority. In this way European rulers sought to secure at least nominal jurisdiction over American territories and peoples at minimal cost to royal treasuries. Some of these early private agents of European imperialism, especially the trading companies operating under the aegis of the Portuguese and Dutch, 5. Smith, Wealth of Nations, 2:586. 6. This and succeeding paragraphs are adapted from Greene, “Negotiated Authorities,” 12–15.

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enjoyed considerable success in establishing trading entrepôts to tap the economic potential of the new worlds they encountered not just in America but in Africa and Asia as well. However, unless they encountered wealthy native empires to plunder, rich mineral deposits to exploit, or vast pools of native labor that could relatively quickly be turned to profit—something that during the early modern era in America happened on a large scale only in Mexico and Peru—few private adventurers could marshal the resources to sustain for long the high costs of settlement, administration, and development of colonies. Lack of resources to finance such activities early forced those who presided over them to seek cooperation and contributions from settlers, traders, and other individual participants in the colonizing process. These efforts to enlist such cooperation acknowledged the fact that the actual process of establishing effective centers of European power in America was often less the result of the activities of colonial organizers or licenses than of the many groups and individuals who took actual possession of land, built estates and businesses, turned wholly aboriginal landscapes into partly European ones, constructed and presided over a viable system of economic arrangements, created towns or other political units, and subjugated, reduced to profitable labor, killed off, or expelled the former inhabitants. Making up for their scarcity of economic resources, thousands of Europeans, including large numbers of Spaniards and English, substantial numbers of Portuguese and French, and significant numbers of Dutch and other Europeans, created, by dint of their initiative and the industry and expertise of whatever laborers they could command, social spaces for themselves and their families in America and thereby acquired or, one might better say, manufactured for themselves status, capital, and power. Throughout the new European Americas during the early modern era, independent individual participants in the colonizing process were thus engaged in what can only be described as a deep and widespread process of individual self-empowerment. In contemporary Europe only a tiny fraction of the male population ever managed to rise out of a state of socioeconomic dependency to achieve the civic competence, the full right to have a voice in political decisions, that was the preserve of independent property holders. By contrast, as a consequence of the easy availability of land or other resources and high wages for labor, a very large proportion of the adult male white colonists acquired land or other resources, built estates, and achieved individual independence or competence. This development gave rise to strong demands on the part of the large empowered settler populations for the extension to the colonies of the same rights to security of property and civic participation that appertained to the empow-

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ered, high-status, and independent property holders in the polities from which they came. They regarded such rights as an essential mark of their Spanishness or Englishness, an acknowledgment of their continuing connection to the principal elements of the specific European inheritance of which they professed themselves to be the agents. In their view, colonial government, like metropolitan government, should guarantee that people of their standing should not be governed without consultation or in ways that were patently against their interests. Along with continuing limitations on fiscal resources and the vast distance of the colonies from Europe, these circumstances nudged those who were nominally in charge of the colonies toward the establishment and toleration of political structures that involved active consultation with, if not the formal consent of, local settlers. Consultation meant that local populations would more willingly acknowledge the legitimacy of the authority of private agencies of colonization and contribute to local costs. The earliest stages of colonization thus resulted in the emergence in new colonial peripheries in America of many new and relatively autonomous centers of European power effectively under local control. Once these local centers of power became established, agents of metropolitan centralization found it exceedingly difficult to bring them under regulation. The discovery of precious metals and other riches in Hispanic America during the first half of the sixteenth century provided the Spanish monarchy with the resources slowly to reduce the several enclaves of private power earlier established by its agents in America to some semblance of effective control. Thenceforth, Spain’s rulers could purchase and man the ships needed to defend its colonies and shipping against foreign interlopers, pay for troops and missionaries to bring new areas under its hegemony, and support a growing bureaucracy of royal officials from Spain to oversee the colonies and manifest in them the royal presence. Although private initiatives continued to characterize the first stages of Spanish activity in any new area of occupation, the Crown rarely delayed long in extending its authority over such enterprises. By contrast, in the case of the English or, after 1707, British American empire, the failure to find similar sources of wealth meant that the system of colonization through private agents persisted for well over a century after the first successful establishment of a colony in Virginia during the early decades of the seventeenth century. Before the 1730s all twelve of the English colonies established on the North American mainland and seven of the eight English colonies founded in the West Indies were the result of private initiatives by chartered companies or individuals or groups of landed proprietors. Only Jamaica, conquered from the Spaniards by an English force in 1655, was the result of a government effort.

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If, in contrast to the Spanish colonies, the English colonies never yielded the English state enough revenue to enable it to impose metropolitan authority over them, these still small but expanding emblems of English power did well enough to prove their value as trading partners and to suggest that they might serve as the agents through which England might become a significant player in the emerging Atlantic world. Already by the middle of the seventeenth century in both North America and the West Indies, they had become the object of trade and territorial rivalries with the French and Dutch. As Adam Smith noted in 1776, the English government had “contributed scarce any thing . . . towards . . . the establishment” of these colonies. But, he added, as soon as “those establishments had been effectuated and they had become . . . considerable,” metropolitan traders and officials began to demand regulation of their economies for the benefit of the metropolis. Hence, as Smith said, the principal view of the “first regulations” England made for the colonies in the 1650s and 1660s was “to secure to herself the monopoly of their commerce; to confine their market, and to enlarge her own at their expense.”7 Not extending beyond trade regulations, these navigation laws, similar in content to those made during the same period by the other European colonizing powers, suggested that the colonies, in the words of the colonial theorist and former governor of Massachusetts Thomas Pownall in the 1760s, were little more than “a kind of farms,” “mere plantations, tracts of foreign country” which “the mother country had caused to be worked and cultured [solely] for its own use” and whose commodities the mother country had every right to appropriate to itself.8 Colonial opposition to these laws and the intensification of international rivalry in America soon led to the articulation of demands by London officials and merchants for the imposition of metropolitan political authority over the colonies. Perhaps inspired by Colbert’s recent efforts to deprivatize the Canadian ventures and subject them to the direct authority of the French crown, English officials during the 1670s and 1680s developed a tripartite policy to achieve this end. The first part of the policy was to recall the charters that formed the legal basis for most of the colonies, bringing them under the direct administration of the Crown. The second was to reorganize the colonies into fewer, larger, and presumably more easily managed and defended polities. The third was to reduce the extensive powers of the representative assemblies that in every colony, in imitation of the English House of Commons, exercised broad legislative authority and provided a sturdy institutional base for the expression 7. Smith, Wealth of Nations, 2:590. 8. Thomas Pownall, The Administration of the Colonies, 4th ed. (London, 1768), 282–83.

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of settler interests. The high-water mark of metropolitan efforts to implement these policies came in the 1680s with the Dominion of New England, which incorporated all of the New England colonies into a single polity to be governed with no representative institutions whatever. The theory behind these measures was that the colonies were not simply commercial enterprises in the service of the metropole but also adjuncts of royal power. Politically subordinate to the parent state, they might be governed from London directly, not through local colonial institutions indirectly. Crown officials encountered broad and deep resistance to these attempts to reduce the self-governing power of the colonies and to impose metropolitan authority upon them. Having long enjoyed a large amount of political autonomy with little interference from London, colonial leaders principally conceived of the colonies, not as adjuncts of royal power, but as overseas extensions of the metropolis. Mostly English people or their creole descendants, they had constructed polities for themselves that would provide them with the fundamental guarantees of Englishmen: government by consent, rule by law, and the sanctity of private property, defined to include individual legal and civil rights as well as land and other forms of tangible wealth. As communities of English people, they furthermore expected to enjoy the traditional English legal safeguards of trial by jury and habeas corpus and “all the rights, privileges, and full and free exercise of their own will and liberty in making laws.”9 Reinforced by the intensive constitutional discussion in the colonies about their relationship to England, the tenacity with which colonial leaders asserted and acted on these views largely frustrated metropolitan efforts at centralization. Over time, most colonists came to accept, at least outwardly, the principle of commercial monopoly explicit in the Navigation Acts, if such was to be the price of a metropolitan navy to protect their trade and of access to a legal and constitutional tradition that would ensure the security of their rights as English people. By 1730 London officials had also managed to bring fifteen of nineteen American colonies under direct royal control. But their attempts to reorganize the colonies and diminish the authority of the colonial assemblies were demonstrable failures. New Englanders seized upon the occasion of the Glorious Revolution to overthrow the Dominion of New England in 1689, and the metropolis never again during the early modern era sought to combine existing colonies or to govern a colony with a large settler population without benefit of representative institutions. Although the British state spent considerable and slowly increasing sums to defend the colonies after 1680,¹0 and 9. Ibid., 69. 10. See Kurt William Nagel, “Empire and Interest: British Colonial Defense Policy, 1689– 1748” (Ph.D. diss., Johns Hopkins University, 1992).

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although it assumed substantial portions of the direct costs of the establishment of Georgia in 1732 and the expansion of Nova Scotia in 1748, it was always reluctant to lay out funds sufficient to support the bureaucratic, military, and naval resources that might have enabled it to impose central authority without the consent of the dominant possessing classes in the colonies. To obtain that consent, metropolitan authorities had no choice but to negotiate. In these negotiations, the colonists frequently acted as if, in Koenigsberger’s perceptive comment, “their association with England was essentially similar to that of states which had entered a union voluntarily or through heredity.”¹¹ Repeatedly, the assemblies used their power of the purse to thwart metropolitan initiatives and to retain power in local hands. In this situation, royal officials, as Colin M. MacLachlan has said of the contemporary Spanish Empire, largely “served as agents regulating and monitoring, rather than directing.”¹² If throughout the years after the earliest interventions of the English state into colonial affairs in the middle of the seventeenth century its relationship with the colonies was thus, as C. A. Bayly has observed, “largely . . . mediated through groups of complaisant mercantile elites and creoles,”¹³ that relationship remained highly problematic and subject to persistent controversy. What colonial status meant, and what the nature of the empire was, remained questions to which metropolitans and colonials had very different answers, and metropolitan authorities continued to exhibit profound unease over their inability to impose metropolitan conceptions on the colonies.¹4 Notwithstanding these continuing problems with the administration of the empire, the English enjoyed phenomenal success as a nation during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century. The Glorious Revolution in 1688–89 prevented the establishment of an absolute monarchical regime. The union with Scotland in 1707 created the new and greater entity of Great Britain. Naval successes during the wars of 1689–1713 established Britain as the dominant sea power in the Atlantic, and Britain’s performance in those wars marked, as Lawrence Stone has noted, Britain’s “dramatic return to the European stage as a major player in the game of power politics—after 250 years of 11. H. G. Koenigsberger, “Composite States, Representative Institutions, and the American Revolution,” Historical Research 62 (1989): 145. 12. Colin M. MacLachlan, Spain’s Empire in the New World: The Role of Ideas in Institutional and Social Change (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1988), 125. 13. C. A. Bayly, Imperial Meridian: The British Empire and the World, 1780–1830 (London: Longman, 1989), 5. 14. On this subject, see Jack P. Greene, Peripheries and Center: Constitutional Development in the Extended Polities of the British Empire and the United States, 1607–1788 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1986).

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virtual absence, ever since the battle of Agincourt.”¹5 Britain’s status as a great power was vividly confirmed by its sweeping victories in the Seven Years’ War. “The sudden emerging of Britain from the contemptible figure she made, to its present astonishing power,” declared the polemicist Robert Wallace in 1764, “fi lls all Europe with amazement and jealousy.”¹6 In trying to explain Britain’s rapid rise to national greatness, many contemporary commentators pointed directly to the American colonies. If the metropolitan-colonial relationship continued to be a significant source of tension within the British Empire throughout the first six decades of the eighteenth century, the colonies themselves, most observers agreed, had done brilliantly. “Nothing in the history of mankind is like their progress,” Edmund Burke announced in 1774. “I never cast an eye on their flourishing commerce, and their cultivated and commodious life, but they seem to me rather antient nations grown to perfection through a long series of fortunate events, and a train of successful industry, accumulating wealth in many centuries, than the Colonies of yesterday; than a set of miserable out-casts, a few years ago, not so much sent as thrown out, on the bleak and barren shore of a desolate wilderness three thousand miles from all civilized intercourse.”¹7 To explain the phenomenal prosperity and development of the British colonies, observers pointed to two factors: their extensive commercial activity and their form of governance. In his impressive treatise on the colonies, Thomas Pownall was only one of many writers to hail the operation of “the spirit of commerce” in raising “these plantations to become objects of trade” at levels well “beyond what the mother country or the colonists themselves ever thought of, planned, or even hoped for.” This development, as Pownall never tired of pointing out, was of enormous value to the parent state. By extending British commerce “through every part of the Atlantic Ocean,” it at once “established the British government on a grand commercial basis” and contributed to the transformation of the British Empire into “a grand marine empire.”¹8 But the expansion of commerce and empire celebrated by writers such as Pownall also characterized France and the Netherlands during the same 15. Richard Koebner, Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1961), 70–71, 77; Lawrence Stone, ed., An Imperial State at War: Britain from 1689 to 1815 (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), 2. 16. Robert Wallace, A View of the Internal Policy of Great Britain (London, 1764), 159, as quoted by Peter N. Miller, Defining the Common Good: Empire, Religion and Philosophy in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 179. 17. Edmund Burke, Speech on American Taxation, Apr. 19, 1774, in The Writings and Speeches of Edmund Burke, vol. 2: Party, Parliament, and the American Crisis, 1766–1774, ed. Paul Langford (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981), 429. 18. Pownall, Administration of the Colonies, 282–83.

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period, if to a smaller extent, and when analysts sought to explain the superior achievements of the British colonies and the British Empire, they pointed to the extraordinary liberty that British people enjoyed in the colonies. What “distinguished the English colonies” and what accounted for their impressive growth, said Montesquieu, was their “system of self-government.”¹9 In the British tradition, self-government meant representative government. “From the earliest and first instance of the establishment of a british senate,” wrote Pownall, “the principle of establishing the Imperium of government, on the basis of a representative legislature” had been the defining feature of British governance.²0 By extending “this beautiful part of our constitution” to the colonies, George Dempster told the House of Commons in October 1775, “our wise ancestors have bound together the different and distant parts of this mighty empire” and “diff used in a most unexampled manner the blessings of liberty and good government through our remotest provinces.”²¹ “In every thing, except their foreign trade,” elaborated Adam Smith, “the liberty of the English colonists to manage their own affairs is complete and is in every respect equal to that of their fellow-citizens at home.” Possessed of “the sole right of imposing taxes for the support of the colony government,” colonial assemblies everywhere were able to provide the same security for liberty and property and the same protection against official misconduct as people enjoyed in the home islands.²² “The annual meetings of their little assemblies,” said Dempster, “have constantly restrained the despotism, and corrected the follies of their governors; they watch over the administration of justice, and from time to time enact such salutary regulations as tend to promote their happiness and well being.”²³ “The government of the English colonies is perhaps the only one which, since the world began,” said Adam Smith, “could give perfect security to the inhabitants of ” such “very distant . . . province[s].”²4 By thus permitting the colonies to adopt “the form of . . .[their] own government,” Montesquieu observed, Britain had effectively ensured that the colonies would prosper, that “great peoples” would “emerge” from the “forests to which the nation sent them,” and that the colonies would be able to think of themselves and be thought of by others as “intrinsically British.”²5 19. As quoted by Koebner, Empire, 92. 20. Pownall, Administration of the Colonies, 175. 21. George Dempster, Speech, Oct. 27, 1775, in Richard Simmons and P. D. G. Thomas, eds., Proceedings and Debates of the British Parliaments Respecting North America, 1754–1783, 6 vols. (White Plains, N.Y.: Kraus, 1982–87), 6:140. 22. Smith, Wealth of Nations, 2:584–85. 23. Dempster, Speech, Oct. 27, 1775, 6:140. 24. Smith, Wealth of Nations, 2:586. 25. As quoted by Koebner, Empire, 92, 297.

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As they pondered the imperial system that had developed on the ground in colonial British America as a consequence of an ongoing process of bargaining between colonies and metropolis, a system defined, not by ex post facto theories, but by a century and a half of empirical relations, analysts decided that that system represented something without historical precedent. Unlike the Greek colonies, which, as early modern Europeans understood them, had been autonomous settlements by surplus population in previously unoccupied lands, they did not have de jure autonomy. Unlike the Roman colonies, which, as one eighteenth-century commentator remarked, had been “planted among vanquished nations to over-awe, and hold them in subjection,” they were not primarily concerned with “keep[ing] conquered Countries in Subjection.”²6 Rather, like most of the early modern European colonies in America, they were groups of people who, with the authorization of the monarch, settled in what were alleged to be vacant, lightly settled, or underutilized places for the specific purposes of cultivating the land and promoting trade “for the good of themselves and that [of the] state they belong[ed] to.” Thus “intended to increase the Wealth and Power of the[ir] native Kingdom,” these “Colonies of Commerce,” people gradually came to realize, were an entirely “new species of colonizing, of modern date, and differing essentially from every other species of colonizing that is known.”²7 To try to understand British colonization by searching “the most respectable authorities, antient and modern,” for parallels in “the experience of other states and empires,” Burke declared in 1769, would only produce “the greatest errors imaginable.” The British Empire, he insisted, was “wholly new in the world. It is singular: it is grown up to this magnitude and importance within the memory of man; nothing in history is parallel to it. All the reasonings about it, that are likely to be at all solid, must be drawn from its actual circumstance. In this new system,” he contended, “a principle of commerce, or artificial commerce, must predominate,” along with a recognition that, as “descendants of Englishmen” and themselves “men of free character and spirit,” they had to be governed “with, at least, some condescention to this spirit and this character.”²8 As Burke’s remarks suggest, implicit in British colonization were two new 26. Samuel Estwick, A Letter to the Reverend Josiah Tucker, D. D. (London, 1776), 92–93. 27. John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon, Cato’s Letters, 4 vols. (London, 1724), 3:283–84; William Douglass, Summary, Historical and Political, of the first Planting, progressive Improvements, and present State of the British Settlements in North-America, 2 vols. (Boston, 1749–51), 1:205–7; Malachy Postlethwayt, The Universal Dictionary of Trade and Commerce, 2 vols. (London, 1757), 2:471; Estwick, Letter to Josiah Tucker, 92–93; Anthony Stokes, A View of the Constitution of the British Colonies (London, 1783), 1–3. 28. Edmund Burke, Observations on a Late State of the Nation (London, 1769), in Writings of Edmund Burke, 2:194.

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“principles of policy.”²9 The first involved the primacy of commerce. The central objective of empire, as Daniel Baugh has noted, “was not territorial colonization or domination, but trade.”³0 So long as the metropolis “pursued trade, and forgot revenue,” Burke declared in 1774, the empire worked to Britain’s enormous benefit. “You not only acquired Commerce,” he told the House of Commons, “but you actually created the very objects of trade in America; and by that creation you raised the trade of this kingdom at least four-fold.”³¹ “The true connection between the Colonies and Great Britain,” averred Charles Pratt, 1st Baron Camden, in the House of Lords, “is commercial.”³² The second new principle was the distribution of authority between the metropolis and colonies through an implicit process of negotiation that left colonials with not just the “image” but the “substance” of the British constitution, with, in Burke’s words, “every characteristick mark of a free people in all [t]he[i]r internal concerns.”³³ Indeed, the absence of metropolitan coercive force in the colonies during its first century and a half powerfully and correctly suggested to many contemporaries that informal economic and cultural ties and shared traditions were more than sufficient to hold the British Empire together. Not fear or force, but consensus and accommodation, the experience of the early modern British Empire seemed to show, were the foundations for successful imperial governance. Fear, Richard Jackson advised the House of Commons in 1769, was a “poor engine of government.” Especially at so great a distance, he was persuaded, laws could “not be carried into execution” and countries could “not . . . be governed” when there was “an universal discontent among the people.”³4 “A system of force over the minds of free people,” asserted General Henry Seymour Conway in the same forum a year later, could “never be a successful system.”³5 “The immutable condition, the eternal Law of extensive and detached empire,” Burke observed, was that “the circulation of power must be less vigorous at the extremities.” “All Nations, who have extensive empire,” he said, found that the authority of the center “derived from a prudent relaxation in” the peripheries 29. Miller, Defining the Common Good, 199. 30. As characterized by Lawrence Stone, “Introduction,” in Stone, ed., An Imperial State at War, 25. 31. Burke, Speech on American Taxation, Apr. 19, 1774, in Writings of Edmund Burke, 2:429. 32. Lord Camden, Speech, Mar. 11, 1766, in Simmons and Thomas, eds., Proceedings and Debates of the British Parliaments, 2:342. 33. Burke, Speech on American Taxation, Apr. 19, 1774, 2:429. 34. Richard Jackson, Speech, Apr. 19, 1969, in Simmons and Thomas, eds., Proceedings and Debates of the British Parliaments, 3:153. 35. Henry Seymour Conway, Speech, Mar. 5, 1770,in Simmons and Thomas, eds., Proceedings and Debates of the British Parliaments, 3:224.

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and that to govern distant areas of empire at all it was necessary to govern them “with a loose rein.”³6 In the early modern era, viable imperial governance had to be consensual governance. However well the British Empire may have functioned for the enrichment and self-esteem of its members, metropolitan authorities and their associates in London and the colonies exhibited throughout the first half of the eighteenth century a persistent concern about what appeared to them to be severe and highly undesirable defects in its form and dynamics. Regarding the empire as severely “underorganized,”³7 they often deplored the continuing failure of the metropolis “to furnish [the] colonies with a clearly defined legal and civil status”³8—without ever endeavoring to do much about it. However, by midcentury, the growing populations and wealth of the colonies and intensifying rivalries with France and Spain led to a significant deepening of such concerns. For the first time, metropolitan analysts engaged in intensive, elaborate, and systematic constitutional discussions about the nature and workings of the empire. Between 1748 and 1765, several men with experience in colonial governance, including James Abercromby, Henry McCulloh, Archibald Kennedy, William Bollan, William Douglass, Malachy Postlethwayt, Thomas Pownall, Francis Bernard, Henry Ellis, and John Mitchell produced a large literature on these questions.³9 Starting from the assumptions that the very “word ‘colony’ ” implied “subordination”40 and that the “first principle in Colony Government” had “ever been . . . to make . . . Colonies . . . Subservient to the Interest of the Principal State,”4¹ these writers mostly contended that the colonies had been initiated and established by the metropolitan state for the purpose of furthering state policy. For that reason, they argued, in Abercromby’s words, that the colonies 36. Edmund Burke, Speech on Conciliation, Mar. 22, 1775, in Burke, Selected Writings and Speeches on America, ed. Thomas H. D. Mahoney (Indianapolis: Bobbs Merrill, 1964), 136–37. 37. J. G. A. Pocock, The Politics of Extent and the Problems of Freedom (Colorado Springs: Colorado College, 1988), 10. 38. J. G. A. Pocock, “Empire, State and Confederation: The War of American Independence as a Crisis in Multiple Monarchy,” in John Robertson, ed., A Union for Empire: Political Thought and the British Union of 1707 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 343. 39. The fullest treatment of this literature is Miller, Defining the Common Good, 195–213. 40. Charles Townshend, Speech, Feb. 6, 1765, in Simmons and Thomas, eds., Proceedings and Debates of the British Parliaments, 2:13. 41. Jack P. Greene, Charles F. Mullett, and Edward C. Papenfuse Jr., eds., Magna Charta for America: James Abercromby’s “An Examination of the Acts of Parliament Relative to the Trade and the Government of our American Colonies” (1752) and “De Jure et Gubernatione Coloniarum, or An Inquiry into the Nature, and the Rights of Colonies, Ancient, and Modern” (1774) (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1986), 45.

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always had to be assessed not merely from “a Mercantile View” but “through the Eyes of State.”4² They needed, said another writer, to be considered in terms of “power and dominion, as well as trade.”4³ From this perspective, in their view, there could be no doubt that the original purpose of colonization was to “add Strength to the State by extending its Dominions,” and, to that end, emigrants to the colonies always “remain[ed] subject to, and under the power and Dominion, of the Kingdom” whence they came. So far, then, from being in any sense equal to the parent state, colonies were nothing more than “Provincial Governments . . . subordinate to the Chief State.”44 To explain why British colonists did not behave like residents of “provinces of the British empire,”45 these writers developed the myth—directly the reverse of the process by which imperial governance actually had developed within the empire—that the metropolitan government had originally exerted widespread authority over the colonies but had subsequently permitted it to slip into the hands of the colonial assemblies. They traced this development to various sources, including the prevalence of self-interested behavior among the colonists, the size and diversity of the empire, the growing wealth and populations of the colonies, and, most important, metropolitan neglect. They protested against the “loose” manner in which the metropolis had governed the colonies,46 complained about the tendency of the colonists to act as if, in the words of Thomas Hobbes, their obligation to “their Metropolis or Mother” required “no more of them, than Fathers require of the Children, whom they emancipate and make free from their domestique government,”47 and expressed alarm that the colonies often acted independently, not just of the metropolis, but of each other, in the process behaving “as if they thought themselves so many independent states, under their respective charters, rather than as provinces of the same empire.”48 If successful empire was “the means through which national power and 42. Ibid. 43. John Mitchell, The Contest in America between Great Britain and France (London, 1757), xvii, as quoted by Miller, Defining the Common Good, 170. 44. Greene, Mullett, and Papenfuse, eds., Magna Charta for America, 26. 45. Smith, Wealth of Nations, 2:946. 46. Alexander Wedderborne, Speech, May 2, 1774, in Simmons and Thomas, ed., Proceedings and Debates of the British Parliaments, 4:363. 47. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, Or the Matter, Forme and Power of a Commonwealth, Ecclesiastical and Civil (London, 1651), 131, as cited by J. M. Bumstead, “ ‘Things in the Womb of Time’: Ideas of American Independence, 1633 to 1763,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser., 31 (1974): 536. 48. State of the British and French Colonies in North America, 57, as cited in Miller, Defining the Common Good, 168.

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ascendancy could be proved and demonstrated,”49 then these problems were indeed serious. Not just the security and survival of the empire but the international prestige of Britain itself, they suggested, demanded a deep reform of imperial governance. Frequently quoting a remark by the political economist Charles Davenant from early in the century that colonies were “a strength to their mother kingdom, while they are under good discipline, while they are strictly made to observe the fundamental laws of their original country, and while they are kept dependent on it,”50 they pointed to the French as “paragon[s] of imperial management” who had proven “thoughtful and efficient in every respect in which the British proved wanting.”5¹ They called for the implementation of an imperial system that, like the contemporary Bourbon reforms in the Spanish Empire, would be “uniformly structured, depoliticized, and subject to rational direction,” one that “demanded conformity and ruled out compromise,” one in which political considerations would be “subordinated . . . to rational criteria” and “objectives and goals” be formulated “in advance of a crisis.”5² In the name of turning back the clock to a golden age of imperial governance in which the metropolis enjoyed its proper authority, they proposed to substitute a new directive mode of imperial governance for the traditional consensual one and thereby to reduce the colonies to a degree of economic and political subordination that few of them had ever experienced and those few only for a brief period during the 1680s under the reign of James II. The successful conclusion of the Seven Years’ War provided the occasion for a “policy revolution” involving a shift from “a focus on commerce to a focus on control of territory and its inhabitants.”5³ This “new Colony System,” as Burke called it,54 that British authorities endeavored to implement both tried to overturn the “ancient system of governing the colonies”55 and ignored the most important principles on which the empire had been constructed: that “Liberty

49. Kathleen Wilson, “Empire of Virtue: The Imperial Project and Hanoverian Culture c. 1720–1785,” in Stone, ed., An Imperial State at War, 155. 50. Charles Davenant, “On the Plantation Trade,” in Political and Commercial Works, 5 vols. (London, 1771), 2:10, as quoted by Jack P. Greene, “Metropolis and Colonies: Changing Patterns of Constitutional Confl ict in the Early Modern British Empire, 1607–1763,” in Greene, Negotiated Authorities, 57. 51. Miller, Defining the Common Good, 167; Koebner, Empire, 103. 52. MacLachlan, Spain’s Empire in the New World, 89, 103, 127. 53. Stone, “Introduction,” in Stone, ed., An Imperial State at War, 26. 54. Burke, Speech on American Taxation, Apr. 19, 1774, 2:431. 55. Dempster, Speech, Oct. 27, 1775, in Simmons and Thomas, eds., Proceedings and Debates of the British Parliaments, 6:139.

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and Commerce” were “the true Basis of its Power.”56 This “new-fangled system”57 involved direct metropolitan taxation of the colonies to help pay debts accumulated during the Seven Years’ War and a variety of other measures that, as Burke subsequently complained, had the objective “of rendering government powerful and paramount over the several dependencies of the British Empire.”58 This “political offensive” immediately became what Koenigsberger has called “a flashpoint for rebellion, repression, and war.”59 Of course, this quarrel was complicated by changes in the internal governance of Great Britain following the Glorious Revolution. Koenigsberger has recently analyzed the composite monarchies of early modern Europe in terms of a distinction he borrowed from the medieval English legal theorist Sir John Fortescue between dominium regale, a condition in which “the ruler could legislate and tax his subjects without their consent,” and dominium politicum et regale, a situation in which “the ruler needed such consent and” in which that “consent usually had to be given by the representative assembly.” Before 1688 the English had had a regime of dominium politicum et regale. But the Glorious Revolution and its attendant developments changed that regime “into something quite different, parliamentary government . . . in which there” was “no longer a balance between the monarchy and parliament as two basically independent authorities.” As the repository of sovereign authority within Britain, the King-in-Parliament now became, Koenigsberger persuasively suggests, “an absolutist parliamentary regime,” while the colonies and Ireland retained dominium politicum et regale regimes. Parliament’s efforts to tax the colonies for revenue directly in the 1760s and 1770s and the colonists’ refusal to accede to such taxation pointedly raised the fundamental theoretical problem of how to reconcile the sovereignty of the King-in-Parliament with the colonial demand for limitations on metropolitan political authority in accordance with their long “experience of dominium politicum et regale and . . . their mythology of liberty” arising out of their by then ancient claims to identities as British peoples who enjoyed British forms of governance.60 In this situation, as Koenigsberger points out, the colonists were inevitably “driven back to the traditional solution of the composite monarchy made up of 56. Burke, Speech on the Repeal of the Stamp Act, Feb. 21, 1766, in Writings of Edmund Burke, 2:56. 57. Dempster, Speech, Oct. 27, 1775, 6:139. 58. Burke, Speech on Irish Trade, Feb. 15, 1779, in The Writings and Speeches of Edmund Burke, vol. 9, ed. R. B. McDowell (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), 527. 59. Koenigsberger, “Composite States,” 147, 151. 60. Ibid., 136, 149, 150, 152.

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states with equal rights and held together only by a common allegiance to the crown.”6¹ Building upon the old idea that, as Henry Fox declared in the House of Commons in 1754, the “colonies are more immediately under the eye of the crown than any other part of the British dominions,”6² colonial spokesmen argued that the colonies had “never [been] thought to be within the realm of England, any more than Scotland or Ireland,” and were not therefore “subject to England.” So far from being a unified entity, the British Empire, they declared in articulating a century and a half of experience, was a polity composed “of different realms, subject to the same king.”6³ The American withdrawal from the British Empire neither settled this controversy over the nature of the empire nor put an end to British efforts to enhance metropolitan authority over the colonies. Despite a temporary loosening of metropolitan controls in and the extension of a large measure of selfgovernment to Ireland in the early 1780s, British colonial policy after the American War for Independence involved, in general, according to C. A. Bayly, “a systematic attempt to centralize power within colonial territories, to exalt the executive above local liberties and to remove non-European and non-British from positions of all but marginal political authority.” As Bayly assesses them, these measures represented a bald “attempt to establish overseas despotisms which mirrored in many ways the politics of neo-absolutism and the Holy Alliance of contemporary Europe.”64 Such efforts derived from an old impulse. In one sense, they were merely continuations of the ongoing project referred to by Adam Smith, in the passages quoted at the beginning of this chapter, to turn the British Empire into an entity that would be tightly controlled from the center. In another sense, however, these post-1783 measures were also quite modern. They occurred in a new era when state power was expanding, and they represented an effort to create an imperial version of the centralized national state that would become the norm in the West following the French Revolution. Early modern empire, as defined by imperial organization and practice and as exemplified by the British Empire, had been something quite different. 61. Ibid., 152. 62. Henry Fox, Speech, Dec. 16, 1754, in Simmons and Thomas, eds., Proceedings and Debates of the British Parliaments, 1:36. 63. Joseph Priestley, “Address to Protestant Dissenters,” 1774, in Works of Joseph Priestly, ed. J. T. Rutt (London, 1823), 22:493, as quoted by Miller, Defining the Common Interest, 239. 64. Bayly, Imperial Meridian, 8.

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— six —

Traditions of Consensual Governance in the Construction of State Authority in the Early Modern European Empires in America

I

n every thing except their foreign trade,” observed Adam Smith in 1776, dilating upon the causes of the rapid development of new colonial societies in the Wealth of Nations, “the liberty of the English colonists is complete. It is in every respect equal to that of their fellow-citizens at home, and is secured in the same manner, by an assembly of the representatives of the people.” “The government of the English colonies,” he observed, “is perhaps the only one which, since the world began, could give perfect security to the inhabitants of so very distant a province.”¹ In these passages, Smith called attention to the most prominent feature of early modern English colonial governance: the transplantation of parliamentary institutions to Ireland and America. Wherever English settlers went in large numbers, English political and legal institutions went with them. By the time Smith wrote, and by the time thirteen of Britain’s American colonies seceded from the British Empire in 1783, this This chapter was written for the conference “Parliaments, Peoples, and Power, 1603–1800: An International Conference,” at Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut, April 7, 2005, and was also presented with a Portuguese title, “Tradiçôes de governo consensual na construçâo de autoridade do Estado na América dos impérios europeus da época Moderna,” at the “Seminario Internacional, Na Trama das Redes: Politica e negócios no império português, séculos XVI–XVIII,” Universidade Federal Fluminense, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, June 1, 2006. It has been published in English as “Traditions of Consensual Governance in the Construction of State Authority in the Early Modern Empires in America,” in Maija Jansson, ed., Realities of Representation: State Building in Early Modern Europe and European America (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 171–86, and in Portuguese as “Tradiçôes de governança consensual na construçâo da jurisdiçâo do Estado nos impérios europeus da Época Moderna na América,” in João Fragaso and Maria de Fatima Gouvêa, org., Na Trama das Redes: Política e negócios no império português, séculos XVI–XVIII (Rio de Janeiro: Civilizaçâo Brasileira, 2010), 95–114. It is here reprinted in a shorter form, with permission, from the English version. 1. Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776), in The Glasgow Edition of the Works and Correspondence of Adam Smith, ed. R. H. Campbell and A. S. Skinner, 6 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976–83), 2:572, 583–85.

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practice was so fundamental a feature of British overseas colonization that it was virtually unthinkable that any polity that included a substantial number of property-owning British settlers could operate without British representative institutions. Over the nineteenth century, settler colonies in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa routinely established such institutions, and in the twentieth century, even non-settler societies with small cadres of British political and military officials presiding over large indigenous populations developed them, in what is surely one of the most enduring legacies of British overseas colonization. How, why, and by whom the foundations of this legacy were laid in colonial British America during the early modern era are the subjects of this chapter. Smith’s observations might be taken to suggest that the transfer of parliamentary institutions to the colonies was part of some master plan worked out on the eve of colonization with the objective of replicating the English polity with its division of authority between a Crown and a Parliament of upper and lower houses. But this suggestion bears little resemblance to what actually happened. As William Burke noted in 1757 in his underappreciated two-volume survey of the first two and a half centuries of European occupation of the Americas, “nothing of an enlarged and legislative spirit appears in the planning of our colonies.” Rather, he observed candidly, the “settlement of our colonies was never pursued upon any regular plan; but they were formed, grew, and flourished, as accidents, the nature of the climate, or the dispositions of private men happened to operate.”² Burke’s remarks accurately describe the ad hoc nature of the process by which the English planted colonies in America during the first three-quarters of the seventeenth century, and England’s experience was by no means extraordinary. At the beginning of the era of early modern colonization, none of the emerging nation states of Europe had either the coercive resources necessary to establish its hegemony over portions of the New World or the financial wherewithal to mobilize such resources. As a result, during the early stages of colonization, any nation state contemplating overseas ventures farmed out that task, either to private groups organized into chartered trading companies or to influential individuals. In return for authorization from the Crown and in the expectation of realizing extensive economic and social advantages, these “adventurers” agreed to assume the heavy financial burdens of founding, defending, and succoring beachheads of European occupation in America. Because few private adventurers had the resources to sustain the high costs of develop2. William Burke, An Account of the European Settlements in America, 2 vols. (London, 1757), 2:288.

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ing a colony for more than a short period, however, most of them early had to seek cooperation and contributions from settlers, traders, and other individual participants in the colonizing process. As a result, such people exerted the principal agency in establishing effective centers of European power in America, and this development produced strong demands on the part of empowered settler populations for the extension to the colonies of the same rights to security or property and civic participation that appertained to the empowered, high-status, and independent property holders in the polities from which they came and for the construction of a system of governance that involved the active consultation with, if not the formal consent of, local settlers. The earliest stages of colonization thus resulted in the emergence in new colonial peripheries of many new and relatively autonomous centers of European power effectively under local control. The English settlements established in North America, the West Indies, and the Atlantic islands of Bermuda and the Bahamas provide a case study of the way this process worked. Among the main components of the emerging identity of English people in early modern England, the Protestantism and, increasingly during the eighteenth century, the slowly expanding commercial and strategic might of the English nation were both important. Far more significant, however, were the systems of law and liberty that, contemporary English and many foreign observers seemed to agree, distinguished English people from all other peoples on the face of the globe.³ Supported by a long-developing tradition of jurisprudential political discourse that emphasized the role of law as a restraint upon the power of the Crown, this tradition stressed the process of consent as expressed through two institutions for determining and making law: juries and Parliaments. For English people migrating overseas to establish new communities of settlement, the capacity to enjoy—to possess—this English system of law and liberty was crucial to their ability to maintain their identity as English people and to continue to think of themselves and be thought of as English, and in establishing local enclaves of power during the first few years of colonization, English settlers all over America made every effort to construct them on English legal foundations. Nevertheless, as Yunlong Man has shown in his careful study of the first half century of development of provincial political institutions in England’s five most successful colonies, English authorities did not anticipate the devel3. See Richard Helgerson, Forms of Nationhood: The Elizabethan Writing of England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992); Linda Colley, The Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707– 1787 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992); and Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983).

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opment of such demands when trying to work out a mode of governance for the colonies. “During the first half of the seventeenth century, the formative years of the colonial polities,” Man finds, “English authorities never devised, or even conceived of,” an arrangement by which colonial governance would be modeled on “the national government of England.” Instead, they remained committed to a conciliar form of colonial governance of the kind they devised for Virginia during its early years. This form consisted of an appointed governor and councilors and included no formal devices for consulting the broader population, and metropolitan authorities continued for several decades to think of this conciliar form as the norm for English colonial governance.4 But several developments during the early stages of the colonizing process encouraged the development of a representative component in the emerging colonial constitutions. To entice settlers, colonial organizers early found that they not only had to offer them property in land but also guarantee them the property in rights by which English people had traditionally secured their real and material possessions. Thus in 1619 the Virginia Company of London found it necessary to establish a polity that included a representative assembly through which the settlers could, in the time-honored fashion of the English, make—and formally consent to—the laws under which they would live. Directed by company leaders “to imitate and follow the policy of the form of government, laws, customs, and manner of trial; and other administration of justice, used in the realm of England,” the new assembly, the first such body in England’s still-small American world, immediately claimed the right to consent to all taxes levied on the inhabitants of Virginia.5 The legal instruments of English colonization—letters patent, charters, proclamations—encouraged this attempt in three ways. First, they often specified that the settlers and their progeny should be treated as “natural born subjects of England” and thereby strongly suggested that there would be no legal distinctions between English people who lived on the home island and those who resided in the colonies. Second, they required that colonies operate under no laws that were repugnant to “Laws, Statutes, Customs, and Rights of our Kingdom of England” and thereby powerfully implied that the laws of England were to provide the model, and the standard, for all colonial laws. Third, beginning with the charter to Maryland in 1632, they also stipulated that colonies should use and enjoy “all Privileges, Franchises and Liberties of this our Kingdom of England, freely, quietly, and peacefully to have and possess . . . in the same manner as our Leige-Men born, or to be born within 4. Yunlong Man, “English Colonization and the Formation of Anglo-American Polities, 1606–1664” (Ph.D. diss., Johns Hopkins University, 1994), 17–61, 455. 5. Ordinance, July 24, 1621, Virginia Laws, March 1624, in Jack P. Greene, ed., Great Britain and the American Colonies, 1606–1783 (New York: Harper & Row, 1970), 28, 30.

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our said Kingdom of England, without Impediment, Molestation, Vexation, Impeachment, or Grievance,” and that no laws be passed without the consent of the freemen of the colony.6 In no case did it take more than twenty years after the founding of a colony, and it often happened much earlier, for these conditions and developments to encourage the establishment of representative institutions. Between roughly 1620 and 1660, every American colony with a substantial body of settlers adopted some form of elected assembly to pass laws for the polities they were creating: Virginia and Bermuda in the 1620s, Massachusetts Bay, Maryland, Connecticut, Plymouth, New Haven, and Barbados in the 1630s, St. Kitts, Antigua, and Rhode Island in the 1640s, and Montserrat and Nevis in the 1650s. By 1660 all thirteen settled colonies in the Americas had functioning representative assemblies. From New England to Barbados, colonial English America proved to be an extraordinarily fertile ground for parliamentary governance.7 Even in situations in which company officials or proprietors took the initiative in establishing these early lawmaking bodies, as was the case with Virginia, Bermuda, and Maryland, the representative bodies never acted as the “passive servants and petitioners of the prerogative” as had been the case with the medieval House of Commons. On the contrary, modern historians have been impressed by their “effectiveness and spirit of assertiveness.” “Usually from their very first meetings,” Michael Kammen has noted, they acted as the aggressive spokesmen for the proliferating settlements within the colonies. Claiming their constituents’ rights to the traditional English principles of consensual governance, they early insisted that no laws or taxes could go into effect without their assent, demanded the initiative in legislation, turned themselves into high courts of appeal and original jurisdiction in the manner of the medieval House of Commons, and rarely shrank from controversy with “local executives, proprietors, or the Crown.”8 To be sure, it took about twenty years for these bodies “to materialize, stabilize, and take permanent form in each colony.” During the early years, they usually did not sit as a separate body but met together with the governor’s council or even with the governor himself to hear cases and pass laws.9 But they early set course toward achieving their independence from the executive, and by the 1640s the larger colonies, each of them on its own initiative, had 6. David S. Lovejoy, The Glorious Revolution in America (New York: Harper & Row, 1972), 39; Maryland Charter, June 30, 1632, in Greene, ed., Great Britain and the American Colonies, 24. 7. See Michael Kammen, Deputyes & Libertyes: The Origins of Representative Government in Colonial America (New York: Knopf, 1969), 11–12. 8. Ibid., 7, 9, 62, 67. 9. Ibid., 11.

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all moved toward a bicameral legislature, with the lower house sitting separately from the governor and council, Virginia in 1643, Massachusetts Bay in 1644, Maryland in 1650, and Barbados in 1652. Local exigencies, not emulation, drove this development. In every case, the specific shape of a provincial polity was the product of what Yunlong Man calls an “indigenous development.” Some popular provincial governors, such as Sir William Berkeley in Virginia and Philip Bell in Barbados, fostered these developments, but in doing so they were invariably merely consolidating the political frameworks earlier worked out by emerging local leaders and acknowledging that the capacity to govern, in Man’s formulation, “compelled [Crown, company, or proprietary] recognition of the indigenous structures of colonial government that had emerged out of colonial conditions.” For its part, the Crown remained suspicious of representative government, not officially acknowledging the permanence of the assembly in Virginia until 1639, nearly fi fteen years after it had assumed direct governmental responsibility for that colony.¹0 By the end of the second quarter of the seventeenth century, the tradition of consensual governance was “firmly rooted” in colonial English America.¹¹ Moreover, once their governments had acquired a bicameral form, provincial magnates had no difficulty in noting “the remarkable resemblance” between colonial polities and the traditional form of metropolitan English governance, and they began, as did the Barbadian government in 1651, to defend the polities they had created on the grounds that they represented “the nearest model of conformity to that under which our predecessors of the English nation have lived and flourished for above a thousand years.” English officials were also impressed by the structural similarities between the colonial polities and the metropolitan government. At the same time, the enunciation and proliferation in England of the classical theory of mixed government during and after the English Civil War and its rapid installation as the official interpretation of the English constitution provided additional justification for the application of that theory to the “indigenous colonial tri-partite government of governor, council, and assembly,” and the Stuart monarchy provided “official sanction” for this “conceptual transformation” in 1661 when it “introduced just such a government in Jamaica,” recently captured from the Spanish and only the second English colony to come under royal control, instructing its new governor “to proceed ‘according to such good, just and reasonable customs and institutions as are exercised and settled in our colonies and plantations.’ ”¹² Yet, this action with regard to Jamaica did not completely settle the issue 10. Man, “English Colonization,” 232–414, traces these developments in detail; quotations on 416, 455. 11. Kammen, Deputyes & Liberties, 61. 12. Man, “English Colonization,” 15–16, 391–92.

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of the structure of English colonial governance. Most of the new proprietary colonies created during the Restoration—in the Carolinas, the Jerseys, and Pennsylvania—and the new royal colony of New Hampshire, separated from Massachusetts in 1679, quickly moved to institute the sort of tripartite polities that had developed in the older colonies, but the Duke of York, the future James II and the proprietor of the colony of New York, captured from the Dutch in the mid-1660s, resisted the creation of an assembly for nearly twenty years until 1683, and immediately reversed this concession when he became king. Moreover, James II’s attempt to consolidate the New England colonies into a single polity, the Dominion of New England, without representative institutions, deeply threatened the long-established tradition of representative government in those colonies. Such actions were part of an effort by English officials during the Restoration to impose metropolitan authority upon the local centers of power that had emerged in America. Throughout the decades from 1660 to 1690, the metropolitan government undertook a variety of measures intended to reduce the colonies to what it called “an absolute obedience to the King’s authority.”¹³ These included the subordination of the economies of the colonies to that of the metropolis through the Navigation Acts, passed between 1651 and 1696; bringing as many as possible of the still mostly private colonies under the direct control of the Crown; and curtailing the powers of colonial political institutions. As a theoretical support for these efforts, metropolitan officials in the late 1670s enunciated the new doctrine that the extension of representative government to the colonies was an act of royal grace. Everywhere in the colonies, these metropolitan intrusions into colonial affairs encountered stiff resistance. In response, provincial assemblies expressed the determination of the property holders they represented to secure both their estates and their claims to an English identity by obtaining metropolitan recognition that, as English people or the descendants of English people, they were entitled to enjoy all the rights and legal protections of English people in the home island. This determination stimulated an extensive constitutional discussion intended to identify explicit legal defenses that would put colonial claims to English rights and legal protections on a solid foundation and thereby protect the colonies from such wholesale intrusions of metropolitan power.¹4 In these discussions, colonial spokesmen articulated an elaborate argument 13. Report of the Commissioners sent to New England, [Apr. 30,] 1661, in W. Noel Sainsbury et al., eds., Calendar of State Papers, Colonial, 44 vols. (London: His Majesty’s Stationary Office, 1860–), 1661–68: 25. 14. This subject is discussed more fully in Jack P. Greene, Peripheries and Center: Constitutional Development in Extended Polities of the British Empire and the United States, 1607–1788 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1986), 12–18.

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designed to strengthen their early claims to what they thought of as their inherited rights as English people. According to this argument, the original settlers and their descendants were all equally freeborn English subjects who had left their native country to establish English hegemony over portions of the New World. Denying that they could lose any of their inherited rights simply by migrating to America, they pointed out that they had created their own civil governments with the specific purpose of securing those rights to themselves. At the same time, they argued that, so far from being a grant from the Crown, their assemblies derived from their basic English right to representative government and many decades of customary practice. Like Magna Charta itself, they contended, no charter or other instrument could grant English people a right that they already enjoyed as part of their inheritance. Such instruments, like Magna Charta, merely constituted an acknowledgment on the part of the Crown that such rights inhered in the people themselves. In the colonies, no less than in the metropolis, they thus insisted, parliaments were the bulwark of the people’s liberties and properties. Although the legal status of the assemblies remained a subject of dispute down to and after the American Revolution, the Glorious Revolution effectively ended any efforts to do away with representative government in the colonies. By the first decade of the eighteenth century, representative assemblies had become a fi xed feature of English colonial governance. Some of the earliest colonies lost their separate status over the course of the seventeenth century, Plymouth amalgamating with Massachusetts and New Haven with Connecticut, and East Jersey and West Jersey joining to form the single colony of New Jersey. Every one of the eighteen settled colonies still in existence in 1700 had its own elected legislature. Thereafter, each new British colony acquired an assembly as soon as it had sufficient settlers to support one, including the Bahamas in 1729, Georgia in 1755, and Nova Scotia in 1758. In 1749 the Boston essayist and historian Dr. William Douglass could credibly refer to those few English “Settlements with a Governor only . . . such [as] . . . Newfoundland, Nova Scotia, Hudson’s Bay, and Georgia,” as “not [yet fully] colonized.” Because they had no assembly, these plantations, according to Douglass, lacked the “Essence of a British Constitution.”¹5 With the notable exception of Quebec, whose majority French population initially showed little interest in adapting to English political institutions, all of the new colonies acquired as a result of the Seven Years’ War—East Florida, West Florida, Grenada, St. Vincent, Tobago, and Dominica—established assemblies in the 1760s and 1770s. The new colony 15. William Douglass, Summary, Historical and Political, of the First Planting, Progressive Improvement, and Present State of the British Settlements in North America, 2 vols. (London: R. and J. Dodsley, 1749–51), 1:207.

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of St. John had an assembly soon after it was established in 1773. By the time of the American Revolution, twenty-five provincial parliaments, not counting the Irish Parliament, were functioning in the British overseas world. Already by 1700, the assemblies in the older colonies had “achieved a position, if not superior to, at least parallel to and independent from” the governors and councils.¹6 In most cases, they had gained a degree of independence, customary assurances of frequent elections, and traditions of regularity of meetings that exceeded those characteristic of the House of Commons before the Glorious Revolution. As during the eighteenth century, the growing complexities of the political process made them indispensable to the functioning of the colonial polities, the assemblies met more regularly and for longer periods, passed a greater quantity of less ambiguous legislation, defined their procedures more clearly, established permanent standing committees, exhibited more continuity of leadership, developed a much more articulate sense of their corporate rights, abandoned their judicial functions in favor of executive and administrative ones, and otherwise sought to give substance to the ideal that, as the sole givers of all statutory law operating inside a colony and as the presumed equivalents of the House of Commons, they were endowed with charismatic authority and held in trusteeship all of the sacred rights and privileges of the public. Already powerful by the last decades of the seventeenth century, the assemblies got still stronger during the eighteenth century. To model themselves as closely as possible after the English House of Commons became a conscious goal. In this effort, they had many sources to draw upon, including the several parliamentary commentaries and procedural books published in the seventeenth century. Working out the logic of the analogy between the assemblies and the House of Commons, colonial legislative leaders not only copied the forms and procedures of the metropolitan body but insisted that they were constitutionally vested with the same powers and privileges in the colonies as was the House of Commons in Britain.¹7 Notwithstanding this powerful mimetic impulse, however, colonial legislative development diverged considerably from that of the parent state. Having exercised wide authority over revenues from their earliest days, colonial legislatures gradually refined and extended that authority over every phase of raising and distributing public revenue. They acquired a large measure of legislative independence by winning control over their procedures and obtaining guaran16. Man, “English Colonization,” 391. 17. See Jack P. Greene, “Political Mimesis: A Consideration of the Historical and Cultural Roots of Legislative Behavior in the Eighteenth Century,” American Historical Review 75 (1969): 337–67.

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tees of basic English parliamentary privileges, and they extended their power well beyond that of the House of Commons by gaining extensive authority in handling executive affairs, including the right to appoint most officials concerned with the collection of provincial revenues and many other executive officers and to participate in formulating executive policy. In still other ways, their development differed from that of the House of Commons. Elections were more frequent, residential requirements for legislative seats were the norm, most colonies paid their representatives for their services as legislators and endeavored, in many colonies successfully, to exclude placemen from holding legislative seats, and representatives were far more closely monitored by their constituents in electoral environments in which a vastly higher proportion of the adult male inhabitants met franchise requirements.¹8 For virtually the whole of the first 150 years of British overseas colonization in the Americas, the colonies, as Smith emphasized in the passage quoted at the beginning of this chapter, had enjoyed an astonishing measure of selfgovernment, and in the English tradition self-government meant representative government. “From the earliest and first instance of the establishment of a british senate,” declared the political writer Thomas Pownall in the mid1760s, the “principle of establishing the Imperium of government, on the basis of a representative legislature” had been the defining feature of British governance.¹9 “By extending this beautiful part of our constitution” to the colonies, George Dempster told the House of Commons in October 1775, “our wise ancestors have bound together the different and distant parts of this mighty empire” and “diff used in a most unexampled manner the blessings of liberty and good government through our remotest provinces.”²0 By such actions, observed Mon18. On these points, see Robert J. Dinkin, Voting in Provincial America: A Study of Elections in the Thirteen Colonies, 1689–1776 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1977); Edmund S. Morgan, Inventing the People: The Rise of Popular Sovereignty in England and America (New York: Norton, 1988); J. R. Pole, Political Representation in England and the Origins of the American Republic (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1966), and The Gift of Government: Political Responsibility from the English Restoration to American Independence (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1983); Jack P. Greene, The Quest for Power: The Lower Houses of Assembly in the Southern Royal Colonies, 1689–1776 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1963); and Mary Patterson Clarke, Parliamentary Privilege in the American Colonies (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1943). 19. Thomas Pownall, The Administration of the Colonies, 4th ed. (London: J. Walter, 1768), 175. 20. George Dempster, Speech, Oct. 27, 1775, in Richard Simmons and P. D. G. Thomas, eds., Proceedings and Debates of the British Parliaments Respecting North America, 1754–1783, 6 vols. (White Plains, N.Y: Krauss International, 1982–87), 6:140.

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tesquieu, Britain had effectively ensured that the colonies would prosper, that “great peoples” would “emerge” from the forests and islands to which their ancestors had migrated, and that the colonists would be able to think of themselves and be thought of by others as “intrinsically British.”²¹ Contemporary commentators had no doubt that Britain had, as Adam Smith said, “dealt more liberally with her colonies than [had] any other nation.” No other European state seemed to have extended its colonists so much “liberty to manage their own affairs their own way.”²² “The Case of a Free country branching itself out in the manner Britain has done and sending to a distant world colonies which have there, from small beginnings and under free legislatures of their own, increased and formed a body of powerful states,” echoed the philosopher Richard Price, was unprecedented “in the history of mankind.”²³ Yet, if the system of negotiated authority that characterized imperial governance in the early modern British Empire was distinctively British in its dispersal of power to parliamentary institutions, it was by no means peculiar among early modern empires. Over the past quarter century, the revival of interest in the process of state formation in early modern Europe has considerably altered the way historians think about the process of governance in early modern empires. Among other things, this literature has shown that the early modern state, always limited in its fiscal, administrative, and coercive resources, was characterized by systems of indirect governance and fragmented sovereignties. The products of a process of state building in which authority had not flowed from the center outward to the periphery but had been constructed out of an ongoing series of negotiations, of reciprocal bargaining, among the center and the peripheries, these systems involved some concentration of power in agencies of the central state but also left considerable authority in the hands of the principal holders of power in the peripheries.²4 Early modern empires in the Americas were similarly constructed. In those empires, fiscal resources were never sufficient, not even in the case of the Spanish, to support the bureaucratic, military, and naval machinery necessary to impose central authority from above without the consent or acquiescence of the 21. Quoted in Richard Koebner, Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1961), 92, 297. 22. Smith, Wealth of Nations, 2:572, 573–85. 23. Bernard Peach, ed., Richard Price and the Ethical Foundations of the American Revolution (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1979), 82. 24. The foundational works are Charles Tilly, Coercion, Capital, and European States, AD 990–1990 (Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1990); and Mark Greengrass, ed., Conquest and Coalescence: The Shaping of the State in Early Modern Europe (London: Arnold, 1991).

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dominant self-empowered possessing classes in the peripheries. To obtain the consent or cooperation of those classes, metropolitan officials had little choice but to negotiate systems of authority with them. This bargaining process, so similar to that which characterized state formation in early modern Europe, produced varieties of indirect rule that at once set clear boundaries on central power, recognized the rights of localities and provinces to varying degrees of self-government, and ensured that in normal circumstances metropolitan decisions affecting the peripheries would consult or respect local and provincial interests. Formal representative institutions of the kind that developed in the English colonies were unnecessary for consensual governance. Infi ltration of the agencies of colonial administration by members of colonial elites and the naturalization of officials sent from the center further enhanced the influence of the peripheries in imperial governance during the early modern era. So long as metropolitan officials did not violate established systems of negotiated authority and respected the delicate balance between central and peripheral interests on which those systems were based, these processes of infi ltration and naturalization could function to help hold extended polities together and even to bolster central authority within them. When, however, metropolitan officials violated those established systems of authority, as did both the British and the Spanish during the last half of the eighteenth century, they encountered the powerful resistance that between 1775 and 1825 tore those polities asunder and led to the creation of new independent states in the Americas.²5 25. For an elaboration of this argument, see Jack P. Greene, “Negotiated Authorities: The Problem of Governance in the Extended Polities of the Early Modern Atlantic World,” in Greene, ed., Negotiated Authorities: Essays in Colonial Political and Constitutional History (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1994), 1–24.

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— seven —

Britain’s Overseas Empire before 1780 Overwhelmingly Successful and Bureaucratically Challenged

I

A

s a result of the American War for Independence, the British overseas empire in 1783 lost just under half of the thirty-three Atlantic colonies it had held when war began in 1775. In addition to the thirteen that became the United States, East and West Florida were retroceded to Spain, and the French did not return Tobago, which they had captured during the war. Over the next half century, the focus of empire shifted heavily to India, which until the 1760s had been a lucrative commercial venture presided over by a publicly chartered but privately controlled company with no significant territorial jurisdiction and very little state oversight. Before 1783, however, the British Empire had been primarily an Atlantic empire divided into thirty-four separate and self-contained polities, one in Ireland, eighteen in North America, eleven in the West Indies, three in the western Atlantic, and one in Africa. Formal political connections among these polities ran through London, and, except for the African colony of Senegambia, they were all settler colonies in the sense that settlers either constituted the overwhelming majority of the population or controlled most patented land and bound labor and dominated political and economic life. Indeed, settler demand for slaves accounted for the vast majority of British activities in Africa.¹ Formal political ties among its various parts in this sprawling polity ran This chapter was written for presentation at “Empires and Bureaucracy: A Colloquium Exploring the Comparative History of European Empires from Late Antiquity to the Modern World,” at Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland, June 17, 2111, and will be published in Peter Crooks and Timothy Parsons, eds., Empires and Bureaucracy from Late Antiquity to the Modern World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013). 1. This chapter draws heavily upon the author’s ideas from earlier writings, especially Peripheries and Center: Constitutional Development in the Extended Polities of the British Empire and the United States, 1607–1788 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1986); Negotiated Authorities: Essays in Colonial Political and Constitutional History (Charlottesville: University

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through London, not laterally among overseas provinces. Although commercial exchanges and boundary issues often brought neighboring polities together and colonies were generally free to trade with one another over long distances, they had no constitutional connection to one another. From very early on, the colonies had enjoyed considerable self-government, and for most of the eighteenth century, various commentators spoke with pride of the fact that, as George Dempster put it in the British House of Commons in October 1775, Britain, in contrast to the ancient Roman and the modern Spanish, French, Dutch, and Turkish empires, had, in the best British tradition, diff used “the blessings of liberty and good government . . . through our remotest provinces.”² Yet, from the mid-seventeenth century, metropolitan authorities contested the extent of that liberty, making sporadic efforts to assert greater control over the colonies and provoking strong colonial resistance. The recurrent tensions over the extent to which British colonists might enjoy the traditional hallmarks of English liberty, specifically the right to consensual governance and the rule of law, were never resolved before the American Revolution. In addition to strong and increasing commercial ties, powerful cultural attachments and, beginning in the late 1730s, defense needs bound the provinces to the metropolis and held Britain’s loosely textured empire together. Rooted in the early colonists’ determination to re-create the Old World in the New by founding their new societies on English law and English traditions, the strength of this cultural attachment increased over time as, particularly after the early decades of the eighteenth century, the rapid development of these new societies lent plausibility to colonial elites’ mimetic aspirations to anglicize all aspects of provincial life and thereby reinforced metropolitan charisma throughout the colonies.³ Press of Virginia, 1994); “Transatlantic Colonization and the Redefinition of Empire in the Early Modern Era: The British-American Experience,” in Christine Daniels and Michael V. Kennedy, eds., Negotiated Empires: Centers and Peripheries in the Americas, 1500–1820 (New York and London: Routledge, 2002), 267–82; “Traditions of Consensual Governance in the Construction of State Authority in the Early Modern Empires in America,” in Maija Jansson, ed., Realities of Representation: State Building in Early Modern Europe and European America (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 171–86; and The Constitutional Origins of the American Revolution (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011). 2. George Dempster, Speech, Oct. 27, 1775, in R. C. Simmons and P. D. G. Thomas, eds., Proceedings and Debates of the British Parliaments Respecting North America, 1764–1783, 6 vols. (White Plains, N.Y.: Kraus, 1982–86), 6:140. 3. Jack P. Greene, Pursuits of Happiness: The Social Development of the Early Modern British Colonies and the Formation of American Culture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988), and various essays in Imperatives, Behaviors, and Identities: Essays in Early American Cultural History (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1992), address this phenomenon in detail.

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The constitutional changes associated with the Glorious Revolution, the mildness of the Hanoverian monarchy after 1717, and Britain’s growing commercial, maritime, and military strength further enhanced this charisma in the colonies. In its organization, then, Britain’s Atlantic empire resembled nothing so much as a political archipelago of disconnected, self-contained, and, at least in their internal affairs, largely self-governing polities loosely bound to one another and to a common center by mutually advantageous commercial ties and defense needs and a powerful cultural attachment to a metropolis. None of the overseas polities that composed this predominantly Atlantic and settler empire troubled themselves to incorporate indigenous peoples whose lands they had overrun or to extend civil rights to the thousands of enslaved peoples on whose labor they relied. To be sure, in the wake of the Seven Years’ War and the new acquisitions in India, Canada, the West Indies, and the trans-Appalachian west, some imperial analysts casually referred to independent Indians in the North American interior, black Caribs in St. Vincent, and the indigenous peoples of Bengal and other areas of the subcontinent under British jurisdiction as “subjects” of the British crown, but this was a term without precise legal meaning, connoting nothing more than mere residency in territories claimed or, in the case of India, administered by Britain. Amerindians could be allies and trading partners, but not fellow subjects. From the point of view of both metropolitans and colonials, this empire was an overwhelming success and, following some early problems with the first large-scale colonial venture in Virginia, was so at every stage of its development. By 1660, just a half century after the founding of Virginia in 1607, the English Empire consisted of substantial beachheads of settlement and activity in the West Indies, in Bermuda, in Newfoundland, and, on the North American mainland, in the Chesapeake and New England, which, along with trading factories in India and on the west coast of Africa, contributed to the commercial well-being of the English nation without substantial cost to the English state. A measure of the importance that metropolitan interests attached to this commerce was the dispatch of a military force to the West Indies and the Chesapeake in the early 1650s, an unprecedented expenditure of state funds in overseas activities to make sure that royalist sympathizers in Barbados and Virginia yielded allegiance to the Commonwealth. Also extraordinary was Cromwell’s Western Design in 1655, an expedition that, while failing to capture Hispaniola, did manage to drive the Spanish out of Jamaica. A half century on, by the conclusion of the War of the Spanish Succession in 1713, the British Empire in America had spread considerably. The conclusion of that war brought the French half of the rich sugar island of St. Christopher and Nova Scotia into British hands, and the American empire now extended along

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the North American coast from the Strait of Canso south to the Savannah River. Joined by other European immigrants and enslaved Africans, British settlers and traders had pushed settlement to the fall lines of the Chesapeake’s major rivers, throughout most of southern New England, well up the valleys of the Hudson and Delaware Rivers, and into much of the Carolina low country. In the West Indies, they had fully settled the Leeward Islands and partially settled Jamaica, and in the Atlantic, they had begun to occupy the Bahamas. Overseas trades—to America, India, and Africa—had increased substantially. By the 1690s, England’s most important economic writers, including Sir Josiah Child and Charles Davenant, were producing learned treatises touting the importance of these overseas trades to English economic life, and in 1708 the historian John Oldmixon directed attention to the growing importance of the American colonies by publishing in two volumes the first comprehensive history of the British Empire in America.4 The third half century was a period of extraordinary growth throughout the overseas empire in terms of the volume and value of all colonial trades and in the territorial, demographic, economic, social, political, and cultural development of the American colonies. British subjects established new colonies in Georgia and the Virgin Islands and consolidated and extended their areas of effective occupation in all of the older colonies. A growing volume of metropolitan economic and political writing stressed the economic and strategic importance of the colonies to Britain, and their welfare became a prime consideration in the state’s decision to invest heavily in imperial confl icts with France and Spain between 1739 and 1763. Britain’s stunning and virtually worldwide victory in the Seven Year’s War drove the French and the Spanish out of eastern North America, expanded Britain’s holdings in the West Indies, and led, for the first time, to significant territorial acquisitions in India by the East India Company. Over the next two decades these conquests led to the establishment of nine new American colonies and one African one. In the wake of victory, Britons throughout all areas of the empire gloried in the success of what they said was the greatest empire since antiquity—and sought to explain it. Significantly, for the subject of this chapter, no contemporary suggested that the efforts of bureaucracy were in any way responsible.5 4. John Oldmixon, The British Empire in America, Containing the History of the Discovery, Settlement, Progress and Present State of all the British Colonies, on the Continent of America, 2 vols. (London, 1708). 5. My usage of the term bureaucracy requires qualification to distinguish among its various functions. The metropolitan bureaucracy refers to two overlapping entities: an imperial bureaucracy specifically created to deal with problems of empire, and a domestic bureaucracy consisting of those bureaucrats whose primary responsibilities antedated the creation of an empire and whose imperial duties, such as they were, represented an addition to their regular

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II This is hardly surprising, for the energy exhibited in the construction of the early modern British Empire came almost entirely from other sources. Before the middle of the seventeenth century, the English state had surprisingly little to do with the construction of overseas empire, authorizing, sometimes well after the fact, but never sponsoring or expending funds for imperial projects. England was not alone in this aloof stance. Especially during the early decades of overseas ventures, all European states engaged in overseas expansion had to overcome the problem of limited fiscal resources. Initially, none of them had the funds to pursue government-sponsored imperial projects. To resolve this problem, they all turned over the tasks of funding, organizing, and administering such projects to private adventurers, prominent merchants, mariners, or influential and well-connected political leaders, who, in the pursuit of profits or glory, were willing to venture capital and enterprise in return for royal authorization. For European monarchs, this system offered the possibility of bringing under national jurisdiction, without cost to national treasuries, new territories or trades to which they had no effective claim. In the English case, this situation meant that during the entire seventeenth century private adventurers operating as (1) chartered trading companies, (2) individual or groups of proprietors, or (3) unauthorized bodies of migrating settlers both initiated and presided over the establishment of every American colony except Jamaica as well as over the East Indian and other overseas trades, that the English state bore no immediate responsibility for overseeing them, and that private agents with Crown authorization performed the functions of initiating, succoring, and managing most overseas enterprises indirectly in the name of the state but most directly in their own behalf. Except in the case of Massachusetts Bay, which managed to transfer company government to the self-governing polity its settlers had established in America, the governing boards and their individual members remained in England and so were subject to monitoring by Crown officials and metropolitan courts, but in the main, state interference was limited to the collection of customs duties on colonial products imported into England, principally tobacco; to the judicial resolution of disputes among rival groups; and, in the case of the Virginia Company in the mid-1620s, to the forfeiture of its charter. This last development brought Virginia under the Crown’s immediate supervision. But none of these activities required the establishment of a special state bureaucracy to deal with matters concerning the overseas empire. Insofar duties. The term colonial bureaucracy refers to those officials designated by the British state to perform bureaucratic functions in the colonies.

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as metropolitan attention to the colonies was necessary, imperial affairs were handled by existing government institutions, including both the Privy Council and the secretaries of state, and were rarely of more than peripheral concern to them. In this situation, the chartered companies, proprietors, and settler-directed plantations (which by 1650 included Plymouth, Rhode Island, Connecticut, and New Haven) remained the principal agencies of English overseas expansion for most of the seventeenth century and theoretically had wide scope to establish whatever bureaucratic or governing institutions they thought necessary within the broad parameters specified by the royal charters that supplied the legal foundations for their establishments as English entities. Initially, most of these agencies relied on a few clerks in a London office to manage their enterprises at home and a small number of officers to preside over their affairs at various overseas sites. Typically, they established a conciliar form of polity consisting of an appointive governor from England assisted by a body of advisers drawn from the most prominent and successful emigrants. But these private adventurers were by no means free agents in these projects. Except for the Massachusetts Bay Company, which found no lack of recruits and investors among groups interested in establishing a model Puritan colony in New England, few of them possessed or could attract the resources to sustain the high cost of settling, administering, and developing a colony for more than a short period. As a result, most of them were quickly forced to seek cooperation and contributions from settlers, traders, and other individual participants in the colonizing process. To attract settlers, they had to offer cheap land and favorable tenures and tolerate political arrangements that, without exception, involved the active consultation and formal consent of colonial landholders. The actual process of establishing effective centers of English power in America was less the result of the activities of licensed adventurers than of the many groups and individuals who took actual possession of the land. From the beginning, these culture-bearing migrants were determinedly intent upon reproducing in their new environments the same legal and political protections that people of similar achievement enjoyed in England, including, especially, the rule of law and consensual governance. As the legal historian George Dargo has remarked, “the attempt to establish English law and the ‘rights and liberties of Englishmen’ was constant from the fi rst settlement” of the American colonies.6 Between roughly 1620 and 1660, every American colony with a substantial body of settlers adopted some form of elected assembly to pass 6. George Dargo, Roots of the Republic: A New Perspective on Early American Constitutionalism (New York: Praeger, 1974), 58.

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laws for the polities they were creating. By 1660 all thirteen settled colonies in the Americas had functioning representative assemblies. Even where company officials or proprietors took the initiative in establishing them, as was the case in Virginia, Bermuda, and Maryland, these bodies acted as aggressive spokesmen for the expanding settlements within the colonies and rarely shrank from controversy with local executives,7 and they all made the English common law the foundation of their civil polities, its indeterminacy and flexibility making it admirably suited to adaptation in a wide variety of physical environments. By the end of the second quarter of the seventeenth century, the English tradition of consensual governance was thoroughly implanted in colonial English America.8 Observing that “no colonies” had exhibited “more rapid” progress than had the English in America, Adam Smith in 1776 in the Wealth of Nations famously drew upon their experience to theorize that the “prosperity of all new colonies” could be attributed to “two great causes”: “Plenty of good land, and liberty to manage their own affairs their own way.”9 If settlers exerted far and away the largest amount of agency and power in the construction of the new societies and polities in early modern colonial America, the metropolitan mercantile community followed closely behind. America was rich in land and resources but notoriously poor in terms of capital and labor, and the necessity of supplying colonies with both provided many new opportunities for the commercial and shipping sectors of the English economy. They carried migrants to the colonies, organized first the servant trade, then, after about 1660, the slave trade, to fi ll labor needs, provided much of the credit to enable colonial producers to purchase that labor, and developed insurance practices to protect against loss. As the colonies began to produce commodities that were vendable in England and in Europe—tobacco, fish, furs, sugar products, and a host of other commodities early in the seventeenth century; naval stores, lumber, rice, wheat, iron, indigo, coffee, and dyewoods after 1690—merchants provided the ships and developed the commercial systems that would carry these products across the Atlantic and bring back the manufactured items that the colonists, focused heavily on agricultural production, did not provide for themselves. As colonial ports grew, resident colonial merchants participated in these systems, especially cultivating new intercolonial trades between North America and the West Indies.¹0 7. Michael Kammen, Deputyes & Liberties: The Origins of Representative Government in Colonial America (New York: Knopf, 1969), 7, 9, 11–12, 61–62, 67. 8. For more detail, see Greene, Peripheries and Center, 1–42. 9. Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776), ed. R. H. Campbell and A. S. Skinner (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1981), 571–72. 10. K. G. Davies, The North Atlantic World in the Seventeenth Century (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1974), provides an excellent summary of these developments.

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By no means confined within national imperial boundaries, British traders by the third quarter of the eighteenth century were operating throughout the Atlantic basin and as far east as Bengal within what the imperial analyst Thomas Pownall referred to as a “grand marine dominion” knit together and constituted by a vast, and continuously multiplying, set of separate commercial transactions and exchanges among individual producers, traders, and customers.¹¹ From the 1690s on, economic and other writers celebrated the empire for its commercial orientation and defined it primarily as a commercial undertaking. The opening of trade to the east had obviously been commercial in intent from the beginning, but, many analysts insisted, so also had the colonization of America, which as John Campbell wrote in 1774 in his massive two-volume Political Survey of Britain, was the direct result of “the Idea of Fixing Settlements in distant countries for the sake of Commerce.” This orientation, Campbell explained, had made the British Empire “a most peculiar one. Whereas other great Empires have been founded in Violence, and the Success of Armies,” the British Empire, he declared, had “been acquired and united to us” through “the influence of Commerce and maritime Power” and “the Ties of mutual Interests and a reciprocal Communication of Benefits.”¹² Of course, government-chartered trading companies such as the East India Company, the Royal African Company, and the Hudson’s Bay Company contributed to the creation of this vast trading and maritime construct, and from the 1650s the English state took measures to divert imperial trades into channels that would exclude interlopers like the Dutch, encourage colonies to develop products that were beneficial to the metropolis, and, after 1699, prohibit colonies from competing with a few itemized metropolitan manufactures. After 1690, especially during the intercolonial wars from 1689 to 1713, the government sent convoys to protect the valuable tobacco and sugar trades, and in the quarter century beginning in 1739, it spent vast sums on naval and land forces in its competition for empire with the Spanish and French. Throughout the first century and a half of English colonization, moreover, special interests within the mercantile, maritime, and manufacturing communities in Britain and among colonial producers often sought state aid for measures that would bring them benefit. But the role of the state, practically nonexistent until the 1650s, was distinctly secondary to that of independent merchants, mariners, and producers in the creation of the great commercial empire celebrated by Campbell and many other analysts in eighteenth-century Britain. 11. Thomas Pownall, The Administration of the Colonies, 4th ed. (London, 1768), 9–10. 12. John Campbell, A Political Survey of Britain: Being a Series of Reflections on the Situation, Lands, and Inhabitants, Revenues, Colonies, and Commerce of this Island, 2 vols. (London, 1774), 1:iv, 2:561.

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III To argue that private adventurers, culture-bearing settlers, licensed commercial companies, and independent traders played the primary role in constituting, constructing, and sustaining Britain’s stunningly successful overseas empire is not to suggest that the state had no part in that achievement. State involvement was, admittedly, very slow to develop. In contrast to the Spanish government, the English established no Consejo de Indias and no Casa de Contratación to deal with the governance and trade of the early empire and no Recopilación de leyes de los reynos de las Indias to provide a uniform system of law. Colonial matters fell under the purview of the secretaries of state, the Crown’s principal executive officers, and revolving committees of the Privy Council. Even after the state took over administration of Virginia from the Virginia Company in the 1620s, it showed no haste to settle on a permanent plan of colonial governance, preferring a conciliar form with a royal governor and a few councillors and taking almost fifteen years to acknowledge the utility of the provincial legislature that the Virginia Company had already established in 1619. And when the state acquired Jamaica in the mid-1650s, it had no prescribed form of colonial governance until, in 1661, metropolitan officials established for that colony the tripartite government of executive, council, and elected assembly that had already emerged in all the private colonies as well as Virginia over the previous decades, on the grounds that such an arrangement represented, as the Barbadian government declared in 1651, “the nearest model of conformity to that under which our predecessors of the English nation have lived and flourished for above a thousand years.”¹³ Not until 1660, after the Restoration of Charles II, did the administration set up two special permanent advisory councils, one for trade, and the other for foreign plantations, to oversee English overseas activities, but these bodies, consisting, respectively, of 67 and 48 members, were cumbersome and did little, and the administration superseded them in 1670 with a new Council of Plantations composed of just ten regular members with a permanent secretary and a small staff of clerks, doormen, and messengers. The earliest instance of a bureaucratic body specifically devoted to England’s overseas affairs, this body was intended to gather information on all aspects of colonial life, correspond regularly with colonial governors, prepare instructions for royal governors, and review colonial laws for confirmation or disallowance by the Privy Council. Demonstrating considerable vigor, the Council of Plantations was 13. Yunlong Man, “English Colonization and the Formation of Anglo-American Politics, 1606–1664” (Ph.D. diss., Johns Hopkins University, 1994), 15–16, 391–92.

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strictly advisory, and, as Ian Steele has remarked, was clearly intended to be no more than “an information bureau, a source of ‘intelligent advice and opinion,’ and not an executive organ of government to deal with either trade or colonial affairs.” Within less than five years, it fell victim to political change and cost cutting.¹4 Its successor, the Lords of Trade, a permanent committee of the Privy Council set up in 1675 and directed by a small core of colonial experts, marked the beginnings of what came to be known as the Plantation Office, with a permanent set of records and an office staff, including a long-serving secretary, William Blathwayt, and several clerks. For a decade, until it lost its power to the full Privy Council under James II, this body, assisted by several new Crown officers in the colonies, provided, for the first time since the beginning of English overseas colonization nearly three-quarters of a century earlier, vigorous and systematic supervision—insofar as oversight was possible for polities at such a distance. Originating in little more than an impulse to emulate Portugal and Spain in their successes in overseas ventures in the sixteenth century, English expansion overseas had developed neither a unified approach to nor a coherent theory of empire. As a result, the development of new trades and the establishment of colonies, as William Burke correctly observed in his remarkable two-volume An Account of the European Settlements in America (1757), the earliest effort to write a transnational history of early modern European colonization in America, were not “pursued upon any regular plan, but . . . were formed, grew, and flourished, as accidents, the nature of the climate, or the dispositions of private men happened to operate.”¹5 Faced with the gargantuan problem of bringing some administrative coherence to this welter of English overseas activities, the Lords of Trade made no effort to articulate an explicit theory of empire. Instead, this body endeavored to formulate a set of four long-term policy objectives or working principles designed to bring overseas polities and trading operations under some semblance of state control. The agenda it laid out continued to govern metropolitan colonial policy for the next century. Moreover the Lords’ close relationship to the Privy Council enabled it to implement, if none too perfectly, a few of these principles. First, affirming the principle articulated by the Navigation Acts passed between 1651 and 1673 that colonial economies should be subordinated to the 14. I. K. Steele, Politics of Colonial Policy: The Board of Trade in Colonial Administration 1696–1720 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968), 3–8, provides an excellent brief summary of these developments. 15. [William Burke], An Account of the European Settlements in America, 2 vols. (London, 1757), 2:288.

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English economy, the Lords of Trade for the first time put some teeth into the trade regulations contained in those acts. With the commissioners of the customs, it oversaw the appointment of royal customs collectors in most of the colonies, except those in the West Indies, where a collection system was already in place, as well as a roving surveyor to oversee them. By 1744 the American customs establishment consisted of 131 men. Of these, 85 were officeholders, including 43 collectors, 11 surveyors, and 15 comptrollers serving 63 ports in 22 colonies, plus 2 surveyor generals, one for the northern and the other for the southern district. The remaining 46 men occupied subordinate positions as landwaiters, clerks, and boatmen. Except in Barbados and the four Leeward Island colonies, which together accounted for almost half of the total number of officers and staff, this establishment, which was self-financing, was thinly distributed throughout the colonial British American world.¹6 In 1697 metropolitan authorities supplemented these officers with vice admiralty courts presided over by judges appointed by the admiralty. By 1760 there were eleven of these judges in the colonies from Newfoundland to Georgia.¹7 This establishment provided the English state with a significant presence in the American colonies, including, for the first time, the private ones, and it elicited intensive opposition and evasion among colonial producers and traders throughout the late seventeenth century. In the early eighteenth century, however, this opposition gradually declined to the point that most merchants and producers operated within the broad parameters established by the Navigation Acts. But the consensus among contemporaries and modern historians has been that, given the conditions under which it worked, the American customs system, except possibly in Barbados and the Leeward Islands, was insufficient to enforce regulations provincials did not find it in their interest to obey. It was altogether too distant, too unsupervised, and too weak, and its officers were too creolized to be able to monitor fully in the interest of the state the seething mass of commercial activity in the western Atlantic. Considerations of cost, preoccupation with domestic matters, a cumbersome administrative system, and the state’s inattention to imperial matters combined to stymie recurrent 16. A List of the Commissioners and Officers of His Majesty[’]s Customs in England & the Plantations and their Respective Salaries as they stood at Xmas 1744, Additional Manuscripts 8831, ff. 121–34, British Library, London. Thomas C. Barrow, Trade and Empire: The British Customs Service in Colonial America, 1660–1775 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1967), is the classic work on this subject, but see also the still impressive Charles M. Andrews, The Colonial Period of American History, 4 vols. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1934–38), 4:178–221. 17. Andrews, Colonial Period of American History, 4:222–71. See also Carl Ubbelohde, The Vice Admiralty Courts and the American Revolution (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1960), an excellent analysis of the changes in the colonial vice admiralty system after 1763.

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proposals for the reform and tightening of this system. In 1760 the efficient collection of customs duties and the enforcement of the laws of trade remained an incompletely realized metropolitan aspiration, and the existing system had not had a significant effect on the commercial growth of Britain’s Atlantic empire.¹8 The Lords of Trade also set in motion a second objective, the elimination of private colonies, that, over time, achieved considerable success and broadened the scope of state responsibility in colonial administration. When the Lords of Trade was established in 1675, the Crown had only seven royal colonies— Virginia, Jamaica, Barbados, and the four Leeward Island colonies. By 1730 this number had increased by legal forfeiture, conquest, or purchase to fourteen, leaving only the charter colonies of Rhode Island and Connecticut and the proprietary colonies of Maryland, Pennsylvania, and Delaware outside the royal jurisdiction. New colonies in Georgia and the Virgin Islands over the next quarter of a century raised this number to sixteen. In the wake of the conquests of the Seven Year’s War, Quebec, East Florida, West Florida, Grenada, St. Vincent, Dominica, Tobago, and St. John added eight more. This development required a considerable expansion of the royal civil bureaucracy in the colonies. With the exception of Pennsylvania and Maryland, during the brief periods following the Glorious Revolution when they were under royal control, none of the private colonies had any Crown civil officers. But each royal colony eventually required, at a minimum, a governor, a secretary, a chief justice, an attorney general, and, after 1696, at least one naval officer to keep track of incoming and outgoing shipping. Some colonies also had a receiver general, a provost marshal, and one or more clerks or registers. A few, and after 1760 many more, had lieutenant governors.¹9 With no pool of professional administrators upon which to draw and no systematic mode of impartial recruitment, metropolitan authorities filled these offices using the same criteria they employed for the domestic bureaucracy but drawing from the smaller set of those willing to serve in such remote, isolated, culturally crude, and sometimes unhealthy places. Although expertise and prior experience were not unimportant, political or kinship connections were often the key. Military and naval officers, younger sons of prominent and wellconnected families, men who had political capital that they could trade for office, accomplished clients of influential patrons, prominent colonials, and successful bureaucrats fi lled most of these positions. 18. Barrow, Trade and Empire. 19. The duties of colonial officers are most fully set forth in Leonard Woods Labaree, Royal Government in America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1930), 92–171, 373–419.

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The expansion of the civil list over the eighteenth century can be followed in a series of lists prepared by the Board of Trade or the secretary of state and scattered through various archives. The data from these lists are summarized in the table below. The earliest of these lists, prepared for a House of Lords’ investigation into colonial affairs, dates from 1730 and shows a bureaucracy of 89 civil officers and 7 military officers spread over eighteen colonies with a mean of about 5.3 officers per colony, but this figure is highly deceptive. Seven colonies registered only 1 officer and four others only 3, so that the median number was only 4.0. In fact, 73 of the 89 officers were concentrated in just five colonies: the four Leeward Islands (22), Barbados (19), Bermuda (12), Virginia (11), and the Bahamas (9). All but Bermuda and the Bahamas were colonies that had voted substantial permanent revenues to pay officers’ salaries.²0 A second list, dating from 1747–48, shows only a modest increase to 91 civil officers and 8 military officers in nineteen colonies, including Cape Breton (then temporarily in British hands), with a mean of 5.5 officers each and a median of 4.0. But the distribution among colonies was somewhat less unequal, the five colonies with the most officials—Jamaica (12), South Carolina (10), the Leeward Islands (10), Barbados (9), and Virginia (7)—having only 48, or just under half of the total. Two of the new officers—a surveyor of the woods and a commissioner of quit rents—were at-large appointments.²¹

Year 1730 1747–48 1760–61 1775 1780–81

No. of civil officers

No. of military officers

No. of cultural officers

No. of colonies included

Mean no. per colony

Median no. per colony

89 91 95 170 225

7 8 0 0 0

0 0 0 12 0

18 19 16 22 24

5.3 5.5 6.3 8.3 9.0

4.0 4.0 6.0 8.5 9.5

A third list, dating from 1760 or 1761, reveals the beginnings of a distinct new policy in regard to the colonial bureaucracy. Including no military offices, it shows a very slight rise in the total number of civil offices to 95, 2 of which were the at-large offices of Indian superintendent for the northern and southern districts of continental North America. The remaining 93 were divided 20. Colonial Establishments, Apr. 7, 1730, House of Lords Manuscripts, House of Lords, London, ff. 186–262. 21. List of Places in the West Indies in the Disposal of a Secretary of State, 1747–48, Colonial Office Papers 5/5 ff. 227–30, National Archives, London.

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among sixteen colonies, including Guadaloupe while it was under British occupation, but both the mean (6.3) and median (6.0) were larger and suggest that a consolidation and rationalization in the overall distribution of offices was underway. The four Leeward Islands (14), Jamaica (10), Virginia (10), and South Carolina (9) were still among the five colonies with the largest cadres of officials, but Nova Scotia, newly settled beginning in 1748, also had 10 officials and was the first instance of a new policy of providing new colonies from the start with a full complement of officials paid out of state funds. This policy in turn suggests that metropolitan bureaucrats were beginning to put more emphasis upon an extended colonial bureaucracy as an instrument of imperial control.²² As yet a fourth list, dated 1775, reveals, the longstanding trend toward a gradual increase in the numbers of bureaucrats in the colonies accelerated dramatically in the dozen years after the Seven Years’ War. Including only three at-large offices—the two Indian superintendencies in North America and an agent for Newfoundland and Cape Breton—this list shows a total of 182 officials distributed among twenty-two colonies, an increase of almost 100 percent. The mean number of bureaucrats per colony had risen to 8.3, and the median to 8.5. Continuing the trend first exhibited in the early 1760s list with Nova Scotia, the new colonies created out of the conquests of the Seven Years’ War—Quebec (12), East Florida (12), West Florida (12), Grenada and the Windward Islands (11), St. John (10), Dominica (6), and Senegambia (8), the first African colony to be included as part of the Crown’s overseas bureaucratic establishment—all began with a full slate of officials and accounted for 71 of the 89 new positions, just under 80 percent. Three of the older colonies with the highest numbers from the early 1760s list—the four Leeward Island colonies (17), Jamaica (13), and South Carolina (13)—registered significant increases and still had more officials than any of the new colonies. Most of the other colonies showed a modest increase. Widely perceived in Britain as the hotbed of American resistance to British measures after 1764, Massachusetts displayed an increase of 100 percent, from 4 royal officials to 8. Not all of the new officers were civil. For the first time, a few—10 clergymen for new colonies, and a schoolmaster and a secretary for Moorish affairs in Senegambia—fell into a category of cultural affairs officers. Everywhere in America, after 1765 the royal bureaucracy had become more numerous and potentially more intrusive in provincial affairs.²³ 22. List of Offices in the American Colonys the Nomination to which was vested in the Board of Trade by Order in Council of the 11 of March 1752, 1761–62, Chatham Papers, PRO 30/8/95, National Archives, London. 23. A List of Officers in the North American and West Indian Colonies, Shelburne Papers, 46, William L. Clements Library, Ann Arbor, Michigan.

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Expansion continued through the American War for Independence, although, with no new colonies being created between 1775 and 1782, at a vastly decelerated rate. A fifth list from the early 1780s reveals a total of 225 officeholders, 7 in the at-large category and 218 in twenty-four colonies for a mean figure of 9.0 and a median 9.5, both figures significantly higher than those for 1775. Quebec (18) and the four Leeward Islands (18) had the most bureaucrats, followed by South Carolina (15), New York (14), East Florida (13), and Jamaica (12). Both South Carolina and New York were occupied by British forces for long periods during the war. After the outbreak of war in April 1775, of course, few of these officers in the revolting colonies actually occupied their offices.²4 Metropolitan officials were far less successful in achieving the other objectives sponsored by the Lords of Trade during its short tenure in colonial administration and subsequently taken up by the Board of Trade following its creation in 1696. The four most important of these objectives require mention here. First, when the Crown assumed control of Barbados and the Leeward Island colonies in 1663–64, the legislatures of those colonies had all voted a perpetual revenue in the form of a 4.5 percent duty on several categories of exports to provide for the costs of their provincial civil lists and other public expenses. This duty yielded a significant annual revenue that the Crown often diverted to purposes that had nothing to do with those colonies, and it soon became a sore point with their settler leaders. For the next century, the metropolitan colonial bureaucracy endeavored to persuade the legislatures of every other royal colony to vote a similar establishment to pay the salaries of royal governors and royal officers, but it succeeded only in Virginia, where in the late 1670s in the wake of Bacon’s Rebellion the legislature granted a duty of two shillings per hogshead on exported tobacco, and, a half century later, in Jamaica, where the legislature granted a revenue in 1723 only after the Crown agreed to accept an act declaring that free Jamaicans were entitled to English laws and English rights. Elsewhere, legislatures adamantly refused to vote funds that would render royal officers independent of them.²5 The consolidation for administrative and defensive purposes of the colonies into three general governments to be presided over by representatives of the Crown unhampered by representative assemblies was a second objective that came to naught. It ended with a single experiment, the Dominion of New England, begun in 1686 after the accession of James II and including all the colonies from New York to Maine. But the Dominion evoked massive resistance, and both New Englanders and New Yorkers seized the occasion of the 24. List of Official Appointments, 1780–81, Additional Manuscripts 22129, British Library, London. 25. Greene, Peripheries and Center, 1–42.

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Glorious Revolution to overthrow it, and metropolitan officials never again revived it.²6 The result was that the empire continued to be composed, as it had been from the start, of a multiplicity of overseas polities that were connected mainly through their common association with Britain. The political organization of the English Empire resembled nothing so much as one of the contemporary composite nation states then emerging in early modern Europe. A third objective of the Lords of Trade was to reduce the extensive powers of the representative assemblies that in every colony, in imitation of the English House of Commons, exercised broad legislative authority and provided a venue for the expression of provincial, specifically settler, interests. In the late 1670s, the Lords of Trade directly assaulted the legislative powers of these assemblies by insisting that the Virginia and Jamaica legislatures agree to yield their legislative initiative by accepting Poynings’ Law, which required the Crown’s prior approval of all laws to be passed by the Irish Parliament. When neither legislature would yield, however, the Lords of Trade had to abandon that effort.²7 The Glorious Revolution effectively ended any efforts to do away with representative government in the colonies. By the first decade of the eighteenth century, representative assemblies had become a fi xed feature of English colonial governance. Thereafter, each new British colony acquired an assembly as soon as it had sufficient settlers to support and demand one, including the Bahamas in 1729, Georgia in 1755, and Nova Scotia in 1758, and all the new colonies established in the 1760s and 1770s had assemblies, with the notable exception of Quebec, whose majority French population initially showed little interest in adapting to English political institutions. But this long-term acknowledgment of the appropriateness of representative government did not mean that the metropolitan colonial bureaucracy had abandoned its efforts to curtail the authority of those bodies, a subject to which we will return shortly. The failure of the metropolitan bureaucracy in this and its other objectives also underlined its inability fully to control the behavior of the governors and other members of the provincial bureaucracies sent to represent the authority of the Crown and the state in colonial dependencies. Already in the 1670s, 26. On these developments, see David S. Lovejoy, The Glorious Revolution in America (New York: Harper & Row, 1972); A. P. Thornton, West-India Policy under the Restoration (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956); J. M. Sosin, English America and the Revolution of 1688: Royal Administration and the Structure of Provincial Government (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1982); Stephen Saunders Webb, 1676: The End of American Independence (New York: Knopf, 1984); and Richard R. Johnson, Adjustment to Empire: The New England Colonies, 1675–1715 (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1981). 27. Robert M. Bliss, Revolution and Empire: English Politics and the American Colonies in the Seventeenth Century (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1990), 182–89.

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the Lords of Trade had foreseen and tried to guard against this problem by articulating a fourth objective of colonial administration, which was to place royal governors under much tighter regulations. Not only did the Lords insist upon more frequent and fuller reports on a wide range of activities within the colonies and the submission of all journals, laws, and accounts for perusal in London, it also put the governors under more detailed and rigid directions than ever before by expanding in scope and specificity the royal instructions given to governors at the time of their appointment to guide them in their conduct of government. In effect, this was an effort to control the legislatures by controlling the governors. Colonial legislatures never acknowledged that such instructions bound them constitutionally, however, and governors who insisted upon adhering to them frequently created so much political turmoil that metropolitan authorities had to recall them.²8 The situation in Ireland was considerably different from that of the rest of the overseas empire. Ireland’s proximity to Britain meant that it was subject to much closer supervision, had considerably less political autonomy, was more thoroughly drawn into the metropolitan patronage network, contributed far more to metropolitan pension lists, and had many more absentees among its landholding population. Under Poynings’ Law, every piece of Irish legislation was vetted and re-vetted by the British-appointed Irish Privy Council and the British Privy Council, extensive patronage funds drawn out of the Crown’s hereditary revenues enabled the Crown’s representatives as lord lieutenants to build majorities in the Irish Parliament that could easily turn away demands for more economic and political autonomy, and the bureaucracy was more numerous, better paid, and more effective in achieving Crown policy objectives than was the case in any of the distant American colonies. Political discourse in Ireland and the American colonies frequently addressed the same issues, such as the initiation of money bills and the tenure of judges and thus bore some degree of similarity. But the context in which those issues were discussed and the reach of the bureaucracy were radically different.²9 IV In charge of colonial oversight from the time of its creation in 1696 to its abolition in 1782, the Board of Trade inherited both the records and, directly through the personage of William Blathwayt, who had served as secretary to 28. See Labaree, Royal Government in America, 420–48; and Greene, Peripheries and Center, 43–54. 29. The metropolitan discussion of these subjects is considered in Jack P. Greene, Evaluating Empire and Confronting Colonialism in Eighteenth-Century Britain (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013), chap. 7.

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the Lords, the policies and administrative practices the Lords had devised.³0 Composed of eight permanent members, a permanent secretary, a large number of clerks, and, after 1717, its own legal counsel to advise on the suitability of colonial laws for confirmation or disallowance, it acted with considerable diligence through most of its history, meeting two or three times a week with at least four and usually five members attending. A series of highly competent secretaries probably set the agenda for these meetings, which included reading over substantial portions of the vast literature flowing in from the colonies, corresponding with governors, evaluating petitions from colonists, merchants, projectors, or provincial civil officers, reviewing the recommendations of legal counsels, and initiating or responding to requests for detailed representations for Privy Council, administrative, or parliamentary action on colonial matters. If neither board members nor staff had the necessary expertise to make the required decisions, the board knew where to find it—from colonial agents, metropolitan merchants or ship captains trading to the colonies, or former colonial officials, all of whom were quite willing to provide information in the hope of possible favors.³¹ As C. A. Bayly has observed, British colonial affairs throughout the early modern era were “largely . . . mediated through groups of complaisant mercantile elites and creoles.”³² Unlike the Lords of Trade, which as a committee of the Privy Council had direct access to that body and was able to put its measures into effect, the Board of Trade was always a purely advisory body. Except for a brief period in the 1750s when the ambitious Earl of Halifax was its president,³³ the board could not nominate, appoint, recall, or remove a colonial governor or other officers. It could nominate people to serve on colonial executive councils, but the secretary of state often ignored its nominees. It did not command the resources to pay salaries to officials in the many colonies that refused to vote permanent revenues. It could not manage migration or regulate major trades. Indeed, ultimate authority on all matters rested with the secretary for the southern depart30. The best study of the Board of Trade is Steele, Politics of Colonial Policy, but see also the classic studies by Oliver Morton Dickerson, American Colonial Government, 1696–1765 (Cleveland: Arthur H. Clark Co., 1914); and Arthur H. Basye, The Lords Commissioners of Trade and Plantations Commonly Known as the Board of Trade 1748–1782 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1925). 31. The best work on this subject is Alison Gilbert Olson, Making the Empire Work: London and American Interest Groups, 1690–1790 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992). 32. C. A. Bayly, Imperial Meridian: The British Empire and the World, 1780–1830 (London: Longman, 1989), 5. 33. Jack P. Greene, “ ‘A Posture of Hostility’: A Reconsideration of Some Aspects of the Origins of the American Revolution,” American Antiquarian Society Proceedings 87 (1977): 27–68.

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ment, for whom colonial affairs were peripheral, and political considerations and patronage opportunities paramount. Rarely were these secretaries or the Privy Council ready to take any decisions that might provoke either a major altercation in Parliament or a serious constitutional crisis in the colonies, offend a powerful interest group, or weaken the administration’s political standing in Britain.³4 The board also sometimes found itself at odds with the Admiralty, the Treasury, or the War Department, other agencies with responsibility for special areas of colonial oversight.³5 As a consequence, as Steele has noted, the “Board’s influence, much more than its policy, was bound by politics,” and its deficiencies as an agency of “imperial control stemmed not only from the distance between London and the colonies, but also from the increasing distance between the Board of Trade and the executive power in British government.”³6 In this situation, the Board of Trade functioned principally to establish, monitor, gather information about, and make recommendations for decisions concerning the many overseas polities under its purview. It played a limited role in encouraging, reinforcing, or denying settler and mercantile impulses for developing new sectors of the economy. Through its review of colonial legislation it reinforced settler-driven efforts to ensure that locally modified versions of English common law were entrenched in all colonial legal systems, except that of Quebec. For such settler-dominated societies, metropolitan laws and institutions, as Jorg Frisch has noted, were “a concomitant of immigration” that were not “imposed upon settlers but claimed by them.”³7 Despite the small size of the colonial bureaucracy, its lack of influence in the metropolitan administration, and its overall weakness on the ground in the colonies, the metropolitan bureaucracy exerted a profound influence upon the political culture of the empire. In response to the stubborn resistance of the colonies to its efforts to bring established colonial polities under tighter metropolitan control and to undermine the systems of authority earlier established within almost all of them, the Lords of Trade during the late 1670s managed to define the framework within which fundamental questions about the nature of the empire and the relationship between the English state and its many peripheral extensions would be discussed over the following century. 34. See James A. Henretta, “Salutary Neglect”: Colonial Administration under the Duke of Newcastle (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972). 35. Dora Mae Clark, The Rise of the British Treasury: Colonial Administration in the Eighteenth Century (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1960). 36. Steele, Politics of Colonial Policy, 172. 37. Jorg Fisch, “Law as a Means and as an End: Remarks on the Function of European and Non-European Law in the Process of European Expansion,” in W. J. Mommsen and J. A. de Moor, eds., European Expansion and Law: The Encounter of European and Indigenous Law in 19th- and 20th-Century Asia and Africa (Oxford: Berg Publishers, 1992), 21.

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In response to the provincial assemblies’ determined resistance to its measures, the Lords of Trade in 1679 enunciated and elaborated a new doctrine based on the assumption that the colonies were not simply commercial enterprises in the service of the metropole, as might have been concluded from the logic implicit in the Navigation Acts, but also adjuncts of royal power that were politically subordinate to the parent state and might be governed from London directly, not simply through colonial institutions indirectly. According to this doctrine, the assemblies’ lawmaking power and indeed their very existence depended on the grace and favor of the Crown as extended to them by royal charter or some other official document such as the king’s commission or instructions to governors, and the Crown might thereafter change the constitutions whenever and however it saw fit. To reinforce this post hoc doctrine, metropolitan bureaucrats also insisted that whatever attributes of self-government the assemblies had acquired before the Crown took the colonies under its wing had been made at the expense of the Crown’s extensive prerogative powers. So far from violating any colonial rights, the Lords of Trade reasoned, the Crown was merely acting to retrieve the just prerogatives that the assemblies had unconstitutionally seized. Carried forth into the eighteenth century through governors’ instructions, the Board of Trade’s correspondence with governors, Privy Council pronouncements, and governors’ communications with colonial legislatures, this set of ideas became the centerpiece of metropolitan colonial policy. Ever after, metropolitan bureaucrats in London and the colonies identified recurrent confl icts over the distribution of authority between governors and legislatures as struggles to prevent aggressive assemblies from encroaching on the Crown’s prerogatives.³8 But the colonists flatly refused to agree that this doctrine had ever been constitutive or foundational for the English imperial state. Having long enjoyed a large amount of political autonomy over their internal affairs with little interference from the English state, colonial leaders principally conceived of the colonies not as adjuncts of royal power and not as purely commercial enterprises but as overseas extensions of the metropolis, and they rapidly and fully articulated an elaborate argument designed to counter this new metropolitan bureaucratic doctrine and to legitimate their early claims to what they thought of as their inherited rights as English people. According to this argument, the original settlers and their descendants were all equally freeborn English subjects who had left their native country to establish English hegemony over portions of the New World. Denying that they could lose any of their inherited rights simply by moving to America, they pointed out that they had created 38. Greene, Peripheries and Center, 7–18.

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their own civil governments for the specific purpose of securing those rights to themselves. At the same time, they argued that, so far from being a grant from the Crown, their assemblies derived from their basic English right to consensual governance and, by the last half of the seventeenth century, many decades of customary practice. Like Magna Charta itself, they contended, no charter or other instrument could grant English people a right which they already enjoyed as part of their inheritance. Such instruments, like Magna Charta, merely constituted an acknowledgment on the part of the Crown that such rights inhered in the people themselves. In the colonies, no less than in the metropole, they thus insisted, parliaments were the bulwark of the people’s liberties and properties. By and large, colonials did not contest metropolitan authority over their external affairs, never claiming competence on matters of general concern to the empire and, especially after 1739, regarding trade restrictions and other economic constraints as a fair exchange in return for protection from the imperial designs of France and Spain, but they had no intention of giving up their autonomy over internal affairs. Indeed, as through the middle decades of the eighteenth century colonial legislatures became more sophisticated and more adept in strategies of resistance, they became ever more determined to preserve their longstanding authority over their internal affairs.³9 Except for a short period in the early 1750s when the Board of Trade made a concerted, if almost wholly unsuccessful, effort to implement its vision for establishing metropolitan supremacy in imperial governance, the metropolitan administrations’ reluctance to push measures that would stir up trouble in the colonies or interfere with colonial cooperation during wartime, combined with the tenacity and vehemence with which colonial leaders defended their selfgoverning rights during the century after 1675, largely frustrated metropolitan bureaucratic efforts to reduce the scope of colonial lawmaking authority and self-governance. As a result, the metropolitan bureaucracy’s ideas about the political organization of the empire remained little more than a bundle of oft-asserted but rarely realized goals. Through more careful monitoring, the bureaucracy after 1750 did manage in new colonial regimes such as Nova Scotia and Georgia to limit, at least in the short run, settler demands for selfgovernment, but even there the balance of power eventually shifted in the direction of more self-government. With regard to the older colonies, however, it could show little success. In 1760, as in 1660, the overseas empire continued to be a collection self-contained and, at least in their internal affairs, largely self-governing polities tied to a 39. Ibid., 19–54.

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metropolis that had proven incapable of marshaling and deploying the fiscal and administrative resources necessary to fuse the overseas empire into a tidily organized whole under the direction of an effective bureaucracy. The result was what I have elsewhere referred to as a system of “negotiated authority,”40 whereby the metropolitan bureaucracy acceded to or winked at a functioning constitutional arrangement by which effective internal governance remained under the control of provincials while simultaneously holding fast to what one of its most successful governors referred to as its “established maxims.” Authority in the extended polity of the early modern British Empire flowed in both directions, from the center to the peripheries, and vice versa. For governors and other royal bureaucrats in the colonies to succeed in this system, they needed maximum scope for maneuver to accommodate to provincial as well as metropolitan demands, and they could obtain such latitude only by keeping their metropolitan superiors in the dark. Bureaucrats who managed to strike just the right balance could function to enhance metropolitan authority in the colonies, but those who did not, only called attention to the underlying tensions between metropolitan conceptions of colonial governance and the actual operation in the colonies.4¹ When metropolitan officials decided after 1750 that they no longer wanted to be kept in the dark, the expanded royal provincial bureaucracies tended to be both less creolized and more politicized. Alexander Dalrymple, an analyst of East Indian affairs, certainly exaggerated when he charged in 1778 that “American officers appointed in this reign” were “notoriously . . . non-residents, children, . . . unworthy persons, . . . and pack-horses, or those nominal officers, who are saddled with men whose names do not appear,” and speculated that “this abuse” was a significant “cause of American resistance.”4² Certainly, however, few provincials found their way into the royal American bureaucracy after 1760, and the British placemen who occupied those offices were expected to hue the party line of the administration that appointed them. “Those gentlemen who hold American employments,” William Burke complained in Sep40. Jack P. Greene, “Negotiated Authorities: The Problem of Governance in the Extended Polities of the Early Modern Atlantic World,” in Greene, Negotiated Authorities, 1–24. This piece also posits that this system of negotiated authority was not peculiar to the British Empire but was a feature of all early modern Atlantic empires, each of which contained a consensual dimension, and that imperial centers had little choice but to take into account the interests and wishes of provincial power holders. 41. William Gooch, “Some Remarks on a Paper transmitted into America . . . ,” in Jack P. Greene, ed., Great Britain and the American Colonies, 1606–1763 (New York: Harper & Row, 1970), 196. 42. [Alexander Dalrymple], Considerations on the Present State of Affairs between England and America (London, 1778), 8–9.

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tember 1776, had “been the most zealous of all others against the . . . claims of the Colonists.”4³ By adding to the grievances colonials had against the metropolis, the expansion of the bureaucracy had, ironically, contributed to intensify the very development its enhancement had been intended to prevent. V This chapter has employed what some may consider a narrow definition of Britain’s imperial bureaucracy. It includes those officials in England whose principal duties involved the oversight of overseas affairs, specifically the members and staff of the Board of Trade and its predecessors and those paid representatives of the state or their tenants in overseas plantations whose offices were fi lled by state officials in Britain and whose duties involved the administration or enforcement of state rules or the performance of other duties involving state service. This definition might be enlarged in several ways. For one, it could be extended to include those members of the substantial metropolitan bureaucracy that emerged during the early modern era to handle England’s increasingly complicated domestic affairs and who participated in several aspects of colonial administration, a bureaucracy that underwent further expansion after 1690 with the state’s growing naval and military activities.44 These include the customs commissioners, who monitored colonial customs officers and the collection of duties on colonial products; the Treasury, which was responsible for overseeing the collection and dispersal of Crown revenues from the colonies, including quit rents; the Admiralty, which after 1690 provided convoys for colonial tobacco and sugar products and, after 1739, organized and oversaw the many naval actions against Spain and France in the intercolonial wars; the War Office and associated offices, which, especially after 1754, provided and supplied the troops for military actions in the overseas empire; the members and staffs of the Privy Council’s Committee on Colonial Affairs; and the secretaries of state and their helpers, who bore ultimate responsibility for colonial affairs. But domestic and foreign affairs, not colonial, were the principal concern of all these officials, except, perhaps, in the case of the Admiralty and War Office during wartime.45 43. [William Burke], The Letters of Valens (London, 1777), 94. 44. John Brewer, The Sinews of Power: War, Money, and the English State, 1688–1783 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ4ersity Press, 1990), is the classic work on this subject. 45. See Kurt Nagel, “Empire and Interest: British Colonial Defense Policy, 1689–1748” (Ph.D. diss., Johns Hopkins University, 1991), on increasing government spending for colonial defense during the early eighteenth century; and Julian Gwyn, “British Government Spending and the North American Colonies 1740–1775,” in Peter Marshall and Glyn Wil-

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A second way this definition might be extended would be to include those overseas agents who administered the policies of state-authorized chartered companies, such as the East India Company. Despite the fact that they were principally engaged in company affairs, the state’s interest in those affairs also rendered them important agents in Britain’s expanding empire. A third way this definition might be loosened would be to include the dozen or fewer councilors in each royal colony who, although usually unremunerated, in other ways meet the criteria stipulated above, that is, they were appointed by the British Privy Council and were engaged in the execution, administration, and, in a few colonies, adjudication of state, as well as provincial, law. Until the very end of the period under consideration, however, most councilors were successful creoles or socialized immigrants whose commitment to provincial interests and mores often made them less than dependable defenders of metropolitan goals whenever those goals seemed to be at variance with local opinion. Indeed, except for governors, Crown officers in the colonies were also frequently drawn from the same groups and displayed the same flexibility, and many of those who were not were soon naturalized to provincial ways through marriage, political or business alliances, or successful participation in the dominant local economic enterprises. Infi ltration of the agencies of colonial administration by members of colonial elites and the “naturalization” or co-option of officials sent from Britain often functioned to mediate the application of royal authority and to inhibit the strict pursuit in the colonies of metropolitan bureaucratic goals. Indeed, the most successful and long-serving governors, men like William Gooch and Francis Fauquier in Virginia, William Trelawny in Jamaica, and James Glen in South Carolina, eschewed confrontation and accommodated to local power holders. The good will they and other naturalized bureaucrats engendered helped to reinforce metropolitan charisma in the colonies. But the important point is that, however defined, the imperial bureaucracy was thinly spread across a gigantic geographical space, was mostly confined to provincial capitals or major port towns, and did not encompass more than a fraction of the executive and judicial officials in the overseas colonies. The legislatures often appointed treasurers, collectors of provincial taxes and duties, commissioners of public works, and many other provincial officers who were largely independent of royal control and operated by virtue of provincial statutes or custom. But a much more numerous group of officials—magistrates, sheriffs, coroners, clerks, and an occasional “king’s” attorney—at the local liams, eds., The British Atlantic Empire before the American Revolution (London: Frank Cass, 1980), 74–84.

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level acted under the authority of the king’s writ to enforce provincial law, try cases, preside over elections, record wills and deeds, oversee the performance of local services, and attend to a variety of other public matters. Outside New England, where they were mostly elected by town meetings, these officers, operating through parish units in South Carolina and most of the island colonies and through county units elsewhere, were usually appointed from among local magnates by royal governors in consultation with their councils. Notwithstanding the fact that they acted under the royal writ, however, they were essentially provincial officers operating under provincial laws; they were not imperial but, if you will, provincial bureaucrats. Undermanned, underpowered, and undersupported, with its overseas representatives forced by the very structure of the empire to adapt themselves to the local conditions of the self-contained and distinctive polities in which they had to operate, Britain’s imperial bureaucracy was not central to Britain’s extraordinary success as an imperial power. It neither contributed to nor was a drag upon Britain’s overseas expansion. Although its policies operated to stimulate and keep alive the powerful tensions between center and peripheries that shaped the political culture of empire, the working system that evolved on the ground to handle those tensions, combined with the settlers’ emotional and material attachments to the metropolis, kept the imperial bureaucracy’s attempts to enforce objectionable policies from fostering the growth of colonial nationalism. It is true, however, that the revolt of thirteen mainland colonies in 1776 can be attributed to administration and parliamentary efforts to act on the widely shared post-1763 conviction that Britain’s continued dominion over its increasingly valuable empire required, as one analyst put it in 1765, that the colonies be placed under some appropriate “restraint now, while” it could still “be made binding,” and that “the loose texture of that empire” be molded “into that form which is best calculated for the . . . good” of the parent state;46 it is also true that the metropolitan bureaucracy shared and endorsed this conviction. “The board of trade and plantations has not been of any use to the colonies, as colonies,” Edmund Burke declared in a general critique of Britain’s colonial bureaucracy in 1780, when he sought as part of his economical reform bill to abolish the Board of Trade, “so little of use, that the flourishing colonies of New England, of Virginia, and of Maryland, and all our wealthy colonies in the West Indies, were of a date prior to the [creation] of the fi rst board” under Charles II. Georgia and Nova Scotia were the only colonies that owed “their origins to that board,” he pointed out, and, despite the fact that they had both 46. The Political Balance, In which the Principles and Conduct of the Two Parties are Weighed (London, 1765), 44–45. See also Greene, Constitutional Origins of the American Revolution.

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cost Britain an enormous sum, the former still carried “a dead pallid visage,” while the latter was an “ill-thriven, hard-visaged, and ill-favoured brat” that had been so unsuccessful that after thirty years it was still unable to pay its own way. By contrast, he insisted, those “colonies which have had the fortune not to be godfathered by the board of trade” had “never cost the nation a shilling, except what has been so properly spent in losing them.”47 As Burke’s remarks suggested, the development of the empire had not required an attentive metropolitan bureaucracy, a point underlined more succinctly by the agricultural writer Arthur Young in 1772. “Whether our” colonial administrators “were asleep or awake” in their handling of the colonies never made much difference, Young wrote, “because the colonies did the business for them: their increase caused the national trade to increase, and all went on silently, but prosperously.”48 Young’s words return us to where I began, with the assertion that settlers, commercial and maritime participants in the colonizing process, and private adventurers, not England’s small, tardily established, and ineffective bureaucracy, were, in that order, the principal agents in creating the early modern British Empire and contributing to its extraordinary success. To the extent that the small size and ineffectiveness of the imperial bureaucracy contributed to the enhancement of the colonial self-government that Adam Smith, in a passage quoted earlier, identified as one of the two most important reasons for the spectacular growth and development of the American colonies, it can be said that it was at least in part responsible for the early modern British Empire’s overwhelming success. VI The overseas empires sponsored by European states beginning in the fifteenth century, including the early modern British Empire, differed considerably from most of the empires of antiquity and the Middle Ages. Like them, they were of course extended polities that invited well-designed and efficient forms of administration. But, unlike them, they were widely dispersed over geographic space, being separated from imperial centers by vast oceans as well as small seas. These larger, maritime empires were subject to the vagaries of sea travel under sail and the corresponding uncertainties of communication. Effectively to administer, to police, or to evangelize such far-flung territories required vast sums, which at the time of initial encounter no European monarch possessed. 47. Edmund Burke, Speech, Feb. 11, 1780, in William Cobbett, ed., The Parliamentary History of England from the Earliest Period to the Year 1803, 36 vols. (London, 1814), 21:59. 48. Arthur Young, Political Essays Concerning the Present State of the British Empire (London, 1772), 552.

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Nor, before the eighteenth century, did imperial expansion bring the necessary fiscal resources to any of them except the Spanish, whose relatively early conquests of Mexico and Peru yielded rich mineral resources and large pools of indigenous labor to be channeled into production. All the other overseas empires were more slowly built, initially by trade with indigenous peoples and then by settler agriculture, which used imported labor and private capital and was geared, not to the production of state revenues, but to private accumulation. Settlers and merchants extended the boundaries of empire and built economies producing items to be exchanged in the European market for the manufactures, labor, and capital available to the metropolitan state. Yet, many decades would elapse before the various transoceanic economies could generate the resources necessary to underwrite either bureaucratic oversight or adequate defenses. In this situation, the less wealthy imperial states had little choice but to rely primarily upon the enormous normative resources that they all had in abundance. Along with enduring and expanding economic connections, the powerful pull of metropolitan culture in the form of political, legal, and religious traditions and other forms of social and cultural capital gave metropolitan centers a deep charismatic authority that rendered a highly bureaucratized colonial administration unnecessary. Notwithstanding the presence of substantial bureaucratic and military resources in the Spanish colonies, metropolitan charisma, not force, as I suggested in an article in the early 1990s49 and as been reaffirmed by recent analyses,50 was what principally bound colonial polities throughout the Americas to their respective European centers. Bureaucrats with the right credentials or temperament could sometimes function to enhance metropolitan charisma. But bureaucrats with unimpressive credentials and perspicuity and lacking an identity of interest with the polities in which they served could undermine that charisma and subvert the imperial project. 49. Greene, “Negotiated Authorities,” 1–24. 50. Alejandra Irigoin and Regina Grafe, “Bargaining for Absolutism: A Spanish Path to Nation-State and Empire Building,” Hispanic American Historical Review 88 (2008): 173–210; and Christopher Storrs, “Magistrates to Administrators, Composite Monarchy to FiscalMilitary Empire: Empire and Bureaucracy in the Spanish Monarchy,” in Peter Crooks and Timothy Parsons, eds., Empires and Bureaucracy from Late Antiquity to the Modern World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013).

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— eight —

“Of Liberty and of the Colonies” A Case Study of Constitutional Conflict in the Mid-Eighteenth-Century British American Empire

I

T

he early modern English/British Empire in America was a negotiated empire. From the beginning, the weakness of coercive resources in the colonies forced London officials to build metropolitan authority upon settler-created structures of power. To an important extent, therefore, metropolitan colonial authority had always coexisted with extensive local autonomy on the part of provincial governments dominated by colonial settlers.¹ Increasingly aware of the growing economic and strategic importance of the American colonies, some officials at Whitehall began in the late 1740s and early 1750s to take a deeper and more sustained interest in their affairs and governance. More than at any time since the 1670s and 1680s, metropolitan officials exhibited a growing preoccupation with the political and constitutional organization of the overseas empire, stimulating the first serious metropolitan theorizing about the nature of the empire since its inception at the end of the sixteenth century.² The same metropolitan concern manifested itself more concretely in Under the title “ ‘In Support of the Common Cause of Liberty and of the Colonies’: A Case Study of the Confl ict between Local and Metropolitan Authority in the Mid-Eighteenth Century British American Empire,” this chapter was developed out of extensive earlier research during a Liberty Fund Senior Scholars’ Summer Institute, Jesus College, Oxford University, June 1–30, 2001, and subsequently expanded into the chapter from which it is here reprinted with permission: “ ‘Of Liberty and of the Colonies’: A Case Study of Constitutional Confl ict in the Mid-Eighteenth-Century British American Empire,” in David Womersley, ed., Liberty and American Experience in the Eighteenth Century (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2006), 21–102. 1. Jack P. Greene, “Negotiated Authorities: The Problem of Governance in the Extended Polities of the Early Modern Atlantic World,” in Greene, Negotiated Authorities: Essays in Colonial Political and Constitutional History (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1994), 1–24. 2. Peter N. Miller, Defining the Common Good: Empire, Religion and Philosophy in EighteenthCentury Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 195–213.

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a variety of measures designed to bring the highly autonomous and implicitly republican regimes in the American colonies under closer London supervision. With little influence among the settler regimes that had long controlled most colonial polities, metropolitan officials more and more in the early 1750s bullied crown governors into trying to enforce London directives. Threatened with reprimands and dismissal and desperately trying to stay in favor with their London superiors, governors in many colonies in turn endeavored to enforce metropolitan directives by any means they could contrive. Where polities were deeply divided or contained latent fissures, governors sometimes managed to enlist considerable local support in these efforts, but they everywhere encountered spirited opposition from settler leaders who interpreted their actions as subversive of longstanding settler rights and liberties, both inherited and customary. Throughout the 1750s and early 1760s, Britain’s American empire was riven with confl icts of varying intensity over such issues.³ Providing occasions for the activation of ancient settler demands to spell out the precise nature of settler rights and liberties and to obtain metropolitan recognition of them, these confl icts raised again old constitutional questions of the most fundamental nature, centered on the problem of how or whether Britons overseas were to enjoy the same liberties and identities as Britons at home, questions that would lie at the heart of the great settler revolt of thirteen of Britain’s continental colonies twenty years later. So intense did these confl icts become that in many colonies neither side could sustain them, with the consequence that during the late 1750s the empire reverted, at least in the short run, to its traditional negotiated state, with the balance of political power lying in the hands of settler leaders. Seeking to illuminate this important episode in metropolitan-colonial relations, this chapter focuses on the experience of Jamaica, Britain’s most economically important and politically precocious colony. It will also use this experience to unpack the meaning of liberty among settler populations in the latent republics that had emerged out of the first century and a half of British imperial activity in the Americas. In the eighteenth century, contemporary metropolitans widely regarded Jamaica as Britain’s most significant overseas colony. Economically, it was by far the highest volume producer of sugar products among Britain’s Caribbean colonies, it took vast quantities of British manufactured goods in return for those products, and it offered the most extensive market for Britain’s profitable slave trade. Strategically, its situation in the heart of the Caribbean both provided Britain with an important forward position in the contest for empire 3. Jack P. Greene, “ ‘A Posture of Hostility’: A Reconsideration of Some Aspects of the Origins of the American Revolution,” American Antiquarian Society Proceedings 87 (1977): 27–68.

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and offered British traders, usually clandestine but sometimes legal, a base for tapping the wealth and markets of Spain’s American colonies. Like every other British colony, Jamaica had its own special character and situation. What principally distinguished it from British continental colonies was the large proportion of black slaves, who outnumbered whites by nearly ten to one. This figure was lower than that for the Leeward Island colonies of Antigua, Montserrat, Nevis, and St. Kitts but considerably higher than that for Barbados or South Carolina. What made Jamaica different from other British West Indian colonies was its size (as one of the four Greater Antilles, it was many times larger than the small island colonies in the eastern Caribbean) and its proximity to the heart of Spanish America. As Jamaican free settlers were acutely aware, these two conditions made this valuable colony especially vulnerable to attack—from its own unruly slaves and from potential foreign enemies. As a result, they solicited and received far more metropolitan naval and military aid from London than did any other British colony, at least before the late 1740s. Because it enjoyed such extensive metropolitan bounty, and because that bounty operated as a vivid illustration of the insecurity, even impotence, of its settler population, one might expect that Jamaican settler leaders would, out of gratitude and fear of losing that bounty, have been the meek adherents of metropolitan commands and the exponents of an ideology of moderation and accommodation. That this was emphatically not the case is powerfully revealed by the history of Jamaican-metropolitan interactions from 1748 through the early 1760s. That history suggests that Jamaica may well have been Britain’s politically most precocious and most militantly assertive colony in defense of what it regarded as its constitution and liberties. Repeatedly during this era, Jamaican political leaders, operating through their elected Assembly (or parliament), openly and unequivocally defied metropolitan directives, invoking what they referred to as the principles of our happy constitution, and the liberties and privileges of Englishmen in defense of local rights and liberties against metropolitan measures they regarded as efforts to subvert them. No other colony matched Jamaica in terms of its consistent and vigorous defiance of these measures.4 II When London authorities began to intensify their supervision of the colonies in the late 1740s, they paid particular regard to Jamaica, principally because 4. George Metcalf, Royal Government and Political Conflict in Jamaica 1729–1783 (London: Longman, 1965), provides an excellent general narrative of mid-eighteenth-century Jamaican politics.

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of its economic and strategic importance. They soon identified a number of problems, most of them longstanding. These included the small proportion of free people in the population, the engrossment of thousands of acres of uncultivated land by some of the principal planters, the disorganized state of the militia, the incendiary character of the island’s politics, and the strong Jamaican lobby in the city of London. They showed a special interest in its lack of white population and, reviving an older metropolitan concern, toyed with the project of forcing Jamaica’s largest landholders to relinquish title to vast tracts of lands they could not or did not cultivate. This scheme never got very far, but it remained an underlying issue throughout the third quarter of the eighteenth century. Much more important were several contested issues of governance. The Crown had long exerted authority over royal colonies to disallow colonial laws that seemed inimical to metropolitan interests or subversive of metropolitan control, and when, expressive of the new and more intense engagement with colonial administration, the British Board of Trade, the government body chiefly concerned with colonial oversight, began in the late 1740s to review Jamaican legislation more closely, it found a number of problems arising out of the weakness of royal restraints on the Assembly. One problem involved the duration of colonial laws. Because the process of legislative review in Britain was cumbersome, lengthy, and sporadic, legislatures throughout the colonies had long since learned to pass controversial laws for only short durations of one to three years so that they would expire before the review process could have any effect, and the Jamaican legislature was no exception. As early as 1747, the Board of Trade complained to Governor Edward Trelawny that many Jamaica acts had been “passed for so short a time that there” was “no room left for the Royal Assent or Disapprobation.”5 A second problem involved the colonial legislatures’ extensive control over provincial finance. In Jamaica’s case, the Board of Trade discovered that the Assembly was routinely using its financial powers to establish its jurisdiction over a wide range of activities that in Britain were the exclusive province of the Crown. These extended to the auditing of public accounts, the regulation of the militia, and even the making of orders and regulations concerning the king’s troops stationed in Jamaica.6 In his letters to the Board of Trade, Trelawny, who had been governor of Jamaica since 1738, explained how the Assembly operated. Whenever it sought his approval of a bill “of a new and 5. Board of Trade to Edward Trelawny, June 16, 1747, Colonial Office Papers (hereafter CO) 137/19, p. 70, National Archives, London. 6. See Board of Trade to Trelawny, Jan. 31, 1749, CO 138/19, pp. 103–4; royal instruction, #28, Journals of the House of Assembly of Jamaica, 7 vols. (Kingston, 1798), Apr. 27, 1748, 4:118.

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extraordinary nature,” he reported, he could do little more than protest because the members of the house invariably “made use of their old prevailing method,” keeping “back one of their Money Bills, so” that he “was forc’d to yield.”7 By such measures, the Assembly had effectively nullified the royal veto power in Jamaica and turned the colony into a self-governing polity in terms of its local affairs, a virtual settler republic. Because they had no direct control over colonial legislatures, which in every province derived their authority from an entirely independent power base, metropolitan officials had no effective devices for getting around such evasions of royal control. Indeed, their only option was to put pressure on governors to veto any laws that expanded local legislative authority. Accordingly, they began increasingly in the late 1740s to issue special and formal instructions to governors forbidding them to assent to measures through which legislatures encroached upon royal prerogative powers, chastising and threatening with dismissal any governors who violated these instructions. Trelawny was one American governor who was not so easily intimidated. Not only had he compiled a strong record as governor over the decade from 1738 to 1748, his most notable achievement being the pacification of the Maroon rebels early in his administration, but he was also extremely well connected in London. Born in 1699 to a prominent Cornish family who controlled at least three seats in Parliament, he had himself entered Parliament for the borough of West Looe in 1724 and had sat for the borough of East Looe for the next decade. He seems to have traded his family’s political patronage for office, becoming a commissioner of customs in 1733 and the governor of Jamaica four years later.8 A client of Henry Pelham, who became the head of the British ministry in 1748, Trelawny was unusually well protected against complaints from either his London superiors or political adversaries in Jamaica and England.9 Yet, not even Trelawny managed to escape the Board of Trade’s censure for failure to adhere to his instructions. In response to an early admonishment, he told the board on June 1749 that he always obeyed his instructions when he could do so “without danger or inconvenience to the Publick Tranquility.” However, he explained in justification of his repeated capitulation to the measures of the Assembly that because the Assembly paid no heed to those instructions and raised money only with the conditions that pleased it, the 7. Trelawny to Board of Trade, May 10, 1748, CO 137/26, f. 28. 8. On Trelawny’s governorship, see Metcalf, Royal Government and Political Conflict in Jamaica, 58–108. 9. Trelawny’s political clout in England may be followed in Francis Gashry to Trelawny, Feb. 3, 1750, Vernon-Wager Manuscripts, Box 15, Peter Force Papers, 8D, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

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“infallible consequence” was “that it will often happen, that either the soldiers must be without their Country Subsistence or His Majesty’s Instructions deviated from.” Requesting the board “to consider this matter, & then let me have positive Orders not to recede from my Instructions,” he declared that he would not thereafter “recede one tittle from them on any account.” But he warned that the need to provide for the soldiers gave the Assembly a powerful lever with which to disrupt the colony’s public life. Until a standing revenue was established to secure the soldiers’ payment, he predicted, the royal instructions could never be enforced against the wishes of the Jamaica Assembly.¹0 Constitutional reality in Jamaica dictated that Crown directives could not be implemented without legislative consent. Trelawny had elaborated upon this situation two months earlier in two letters to Henry Pelham. These letters constituted an elaborate critique of existing constitutional arrangements within the empire and proposed changes designed to bring the colonies under much tighter metropolitan supervision. The principal defects in British imperial governance, Trelawny wrote, were structural. The “grand error in the first decoction of Colony Government,” he declared, in echoing the complaints of virtually every governor who held office in the early modern British Empire, was in the balance of power within colonial governments. While “too great power” had been “lodged in the Assemblies,” the governors, endowed with “pompous enough” titles, effectively had very “little power.” In the specific example of Jamaica, this situation made it possible for any Assembly that was resentful of having been badly “us’d by their mother” government in London or was stirred up by “a popular Assemblyman” who was “disoblig’d by the Governor” to make sure that the government would be “without mon[e]y, however necessary it may be for the Soldiers, & forts.” With no resources to use to “perswade or terrify an assembly,” a governor, Trelawny complained, was impotent against “the great power that comes to the Assembly from the sole right they assume of framing mon[e]y-bills.” Moreover, in every colony the assembly represented the predominant property interest. For that reason, to place power in the assemblies was to lodge it, in Trelawny’s words, “in the Planters themselves,” a mistake that, he was convinced, was “the Pandora’s box from whence our evils have issu’d”; hence, in Jamaica’s case, “the engrossing of lands, the paucity of white inhabitants, the bad state of the Militia &c &c &c.”¹¹ 10. Trelawny to Board of Trade, June 8, 1749, CO 137/25, ff. 89–92. 11. Trelawny to Pelham, Apr. 13, 29, 1749, in Jack P. Greene, ed., “Edward Trelawny’s ‘Grand Elixir’: Metropolitan Weakness and Constitutional Reform in the Mid-EighteenthCentury British Empire,” in Roderick A. McDonald, ed., West Indies Accounts: Essays on the

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To remedy these problems, Trelawny, picking up on the central assumption animating the new drift in colonial administration in London, called for metropolitan officials to “consider our Colonies” not as would “a Merchant or Planter,” but “in a more general & political sense.” Although he proposed a number of measures to shore up executive authority in the colonies, he regarded such measures as “palliatives only.” To get at the root of the problem of imperial governance, he proposed that “a State of the Colonies . . . be laid before the Parliament.” Declaring that it was “high time” that the ministry take such a step, he argued “that unless there is an hearty & steddy intent to go to the bottom of things, unless there is resolution to consider fully the state of the Colonies & make a thorough reformation to be settled by Act of Parliament, all other things will be ineffectual, productive of no lasting good, but [be] a meer transitory amusement.”¹² The most important element in that reformation, Trelawny made clear in setting forth his boldest proposal, was to take most of the authority to raise revenue out of the hands of the assemblies. “Whereas now a Colony Government is supported from year to year, as it were from hand to mouth, by annual bills rais’d by the Assembly, the standing revenue of the Island being very inconsiderable,” he observed, “an Estimate should be made, (by a medium of former actual expenses for any numbers of years the Board of Trade should think proper) of what the future services of Government may be suppos’d to amount to, & then, that those very funds, (as the duty on negroes, rum, &c) which now are rais’d annually should be settled perpetually by Act of Parliament to answer those services.” Once “a proper & ample Revenue [had been thus] settled by Parliament for the current & ordinary services of the Country,” Trelawny noted, governors would have “no need to trouble the Assembly for a supply but upon extraordinary occasions.”¹³ In Trelawny’s view, such a measure, which he referred to as his “grand Elixir,” could not fail to produce “unaccountable . . . good”: “all squabbles between Governors & Assemblies would cease at once as it were by some charm. There will be an authority in a Colony Government, which will be rescued from the dependence on the humour of an Assembly, Who will then ’tis to be hoped turn their thoughts from Politicks to Planting, & to the real good of the Colony. It will not then be in the power of a popular man to blow the assemblies up into a blaze, & all Westminster to the very Palace under the Greatest History of the British Caribbean and the Atlantic Economy in Honour of Richard Sheridan (Barbados, Jamaica, and Trinidad & Tobago: University of the West Indies Press, 1996), 93, 95–97. 12. Ibid., 92, 95–96. 13. Ibid., 92, 96.

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alarms.” “Let this once be set right,” he predicted, “& all other things will go right; Trade & Planting will of course necessarily prosper.”¹4 In expressing his conviction that such an action by Parliament was “agre[e] able to the ancient constitution of England,” a constitution whereby Parliament itself had met only to grant “aids upon extraordinary occasions,” Trelawny implicitly acknowledged that it was contrary to the tradition of active and regular parliamentary government that took shape in England—and the colonies—during the seventeenth century and had been institutionalized during the Glorious Revolution. Whether colonial political leaders might have opposed such a drastic revision of existing governing arrangements seems not to have occurred to him, albeit he was certainly aware that it would be necessary to have their approval or acquiescence.¹5 But Trelawny’s proposals seem never to have made it beyond Pelham’s chambers. No doubt, at least some men in power, including the Earl of Halifax, Pelham’s new president of the Board of Trade, would have been sympathetic to Trelawny’s call for sweeping reforms. Weak politically, Pelham’s ministry, like most of those which succeeded it over the next quarter century, seems not to have agreed on when or under what circumstances reforms in imperial governance should be undertaken or how far they should go. As a result, the Board of Trade had little choice but to fall back on its old stratagem of insisting upon strict gubernatorial adherence to the royal instructions. Thus did the board in November 1749 again admonish Trelawny for “passing Bills for imposing Duties upon Rum & other strong Liquors for a shorter Term than one Year.” Denouncing his behavior as “an Innovation of a very dangerous Tendency & expressly contrary to his Majesty’s Instructions,” it expressed its great concern “that any Exigence should have obliged you even once to acquiesce in a Method of raising Supplys so extreamly improper in every light & on every good Reason of State.” Reason of state, not considerations of local rights and liberties or local convenience, the board thus suggested in an important departure from traditional modes of metropolitan-colonial relations, should determine the nature of imperial governance. The board did not deny “that Circumstances may fall out and Exigencys do sometimes occur in the Administration of Government to make a Deviation from His Majesty’s general Instructions expedient & indeed necessary,” but it added “that to justify such Deviations the Necessity must be very apparent and such Deviations cannot be too seldom Practiced.”¹6 14. Ibid., 95–96. 15. Ibid., 92, 96; italics added. 16. Board of Trade to Trelawny, Nov. 10, 1749, CO 138/19, p. 119.

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The difficulty with such an approach was that governors rarely had means at their disposal to persuade assemblies to comply with their instructions. Thus, when, in response to an earlier chastisement from the board, Trelawny in October 1749 exhorted the Jamaica Assembly “to make your bills agreeable to his majesty’s instructions, and to consider what a cruel dilemma you will otherwise put me to, either to risk the security of the country for want of supplies for the pay of the soldiers, the forts, and other necessary services, or else to go contrary to his majesty’s instructions, which are and must be the rules of my conduct,” the Assembly expressed its “extreme regret . . . to put your excellency under any dilemma” but quickly moved on to take other measures that brought Trelawny still further censure from London authorities.¹7 Indeed, the Assembly at this session took one of its boldest steps yet. Annoyed by the actions of the Crown’s receiver general, it insisted upon passing a revenue bill that placed the monies raised by the bill into the hands of a commissioner of its own choosing, and Trelawny again had no choice but to accept it. Such a measure, while common enough in other colonies, represented a substantial innovation in Jamaica, where the receiver general had customarily handled all public monies. Moreover, to add to Trelawny’s difficulties, the Assembly the following April signaled that it intended thenceforth to keep all public monies in the hands of officers of its own appointment by again including a clause to appoint a receiving commissioner in the annual supply bill. Though he “rejected the first Bill that came up with that Clause, & prorogu’d the Assembly,” members of that body “continued fi xt [in their determination] to insert this Clause in all their Bills,” whereupon, Trelawny explained to his London superiors, he “was forced to yield; but not till I had the unanimous opinion of the Council,” the governor’s advisory board, and the upper house of the legislature “that it was for His Majesty’s Service as the case was, that I should do so.” Trelawny acknowledged that this action was directly “contrary to my 17 th Instruction” and professed “that this deviation from my Instructions gave me the utmost concern, & that nothing but the necessity I was really under, of otherwise losing all the Mon[e]y Bills, could have oblig’d me to submit to it.”¹8 The Assembly’s actions did not escape the notice of London authorities. Already in January 1750, Trelawny’s London agent Francis Gashry informed him that the Assembly’s measures had immediately “occasioned much speculation & a variety of opinions in the Ministry &c,” with some being “for 17. Assembly Journals, Oct. 24, 26, 1749, 4:190, 194. 18. Gashry to Trelawny, Jan. 25, 1750, Vernon-Wager Manuscripts, Box 15, Peter Force Papers, 8D, Library of Congress; Trelawny to Board of Trade, Apr. 10, 1750, CO 137/26 f. 126.

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having the Instruction [forbidding such a measure] strictly insisted on” and others thinking it “better to take your advice and temporize a little and at a proper opportunity to Endeavour to bring this affair into its old Channels.”¹9 As Gashry put it in reference to another contemporary dispute involving Trelawny, the debate seems to have been over whether “this matter should be consider’d Legally” or “in a Political Light.”²0 In the end, the exponents of a tough line won out, the Board of Trade denouncing the Assembly’s efforts to appoint revenue officers as “an extraordinary Insult upon his Majesty’s Government” and “a dangerous Precedent.” “Unless a firm stand be made against the Encroachments of the Assembly,” the board told Trelawny in September 1750, “they will continually avail themselves of the same Plea of Necessity whenever they think proper to attempt further Infringements upon his Majesty’s Authority, already too much weakened in many of his Colonies by Proceedings of a like Nature.”²¹ Over the next year, the Board of Trade kept up the pressure on Trelawny. Indeed, the more deeply it dug into the recent laws of Jamaica the more convinced it became that Trelawny had repeatedly breached his instructions. He had, the board discovered, passed many tax acts in which the Assembly had appointed commissioners to receive money that the board felt should have been “lodged in the hands of the Crown’s receiver general,” and in August 1751 it wrote Trelawny “highly condemn[ing] your Conduct in giving your Assent to these Laws in open violation & contradiction to an express Instruction. We every day experience the fatal Effects of the Encroachments of American Assemblys upon the Prerogative of the Crown more especially in Money Bills,” it added in expanding upon a point made in its letter of the previous September, “and therefore it more earnestly behooves every Person Whom His Majesty has entrusted with the Powers of Government in his Plantations to guard against every Attempt to lessen the Power & Authority of the Crown.” Further, it instructed him to persuade the Assembly to pass acts for the same ends without including the objectionable clauses.²² Trelawny remained unrepentant, essentially replying that he expected to be relieved by a new governor the following year and would wait on the board to explain himself orally when he got to London.²³ In the meantime, however, he made little effort to check the Assembly. On instruction from London, 19. Gashry to Trelawny, Jan. 25, 1750, Vernon-Wager Manuscripts, Box 15, Peter Force Papers, 8D, Library of Congress. 20. Gashry to Trelawny, Feb. 3, 1750, ibid. 21. Board of Trade to Trelawny, Sept. 1, 1750, CO 138/19, pp. 132–33. 22. Board of Trade to Trelawny, Aug. 6, 1751, CO 138/19, pp. 163–65. 23. Trelawny to Board of Trade, June 13, 1751, CO 137/25, f. 208.

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he did manage to persuade the Assembly to consider a measure to oblige all people with uncultivated land either to dispose of it or to plant it, attributing his success in this matter to the threat in the instruction that failure to handle this problem in Jamaica would lead to the board’s bringing the matter before the British Parliament. This threat, Trelawny wrote, had “a great weight with many & will be a principal cause of our succeeding if we do succeed.” In the end, however, the Assembly failed to produce such a law, hinting that it was inconsistent “with our constitution and present circumstances,” and, in fact, persuaded Trelawny to consent to several other measures regarding the administration of the judicial system and the regulation of officers’ fees that the governor knew the board would find equally objectionable.²4 Writing to the Board of Trade several months after he had passed these laws, Trelawny admitted that they should have included suspending clauses. More and more during the late 1740s and early 1750s, the board had insisted upon the inclusion of a suspending clause in many types of legislation, including especially laws that modified statutes already confirmed by the Crown and laws affecting the Crown’s prerogative claims. Such a clause suspended the operation of a law until it had been formally approved by the British Privy Council. An old device, such clauses were much disliked by colonial assemblies because they sharply reduced their capacity to handle problems expeditiously and represented a check upon their legislative independence. This dislike meant that they had been relatively little used during the first century of British imperial governance. The Jamaica Assembly was no exception. As Trelawny informed the board in March 1752, this was “a point they could never be brought into.”²5 But Trelawny never again had to carry the battle over the enforcement of royal instructions to the Assembly. Despite opposition from people in the administration in London, his considerable political capital with Pelham enabled him to resign and to designate his successor, Admiral Charles Knowles, a person often stationed in Jamaica. With great applause from the Jamaican settler establishment for his political accomplishments during fourteen years in office, Trelawny left Jamaica in November 1752, a few months after Knowles’s arrival. Before he could ever appear before the Board of Trade, he died in January 1754 as a result of a malady contracted on shipboard during his passage to England. As Knowles would later charge, Trelawny’s enormous popularity in Jamaica was a function of his thorough capitulation to the Jamaican political establish24. Trelawny to Board of Trade, Sept. 16, 1751, CO 137/25, f. 215; Assembly Journals, Sept. 10, Oct. 3, Dec. 14, 1751, 4:277, 282, 322. 25. Trelawny to Board of Trade, Mar. 25, 1752, CO 137/25, ff. 236–37.

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ment. When he arrived as governor, Knowles later wrote the Duke of Newcastle, secretary of state in charge of colonial matters, he discovered that his Predecessor had so far Yielded up his Power that he had not Authority left, without the Consent of the Ruling Demagogues [in the Assembly], for to make a Common Majestrate or even an Ensign in the Militia; Three fourths of the Money rais’d for the Current Services of the Year was likewise solely in their Disposition, and they appropriated it as they Pleased, without ever Accounting to His Majesty[’]s Auditor General here for one Penny; The Method of Levying and Paying in of the Taxes, was likewise solely in these Great Men, and was to be paid by their Commissioner to such Favorites & to such purposes as they thought proper; by these and such like means, They invested themselves with all the Power both Civil & Military, and the Arbitrary manner in which They exercized it, has been the Occasion for near this Century past of the continual disputes, between them and their Governors & kept up a Spirit of Animosity & dissention amongst the People.

The Assembly’s preponderance of authority was not, as metropolitan officials assumed, a relatively new phenomenon, a function of gubernatorial capitulations to recent innovations, but, as Knowles thus suggested with far more accuracy, one that stretched back to the colony’s earliest days.²6 III With no powerful patrons in London, Knowles never had the option of following Trelawny’s example, albeit Trelawny did his best to try to make it possible. In a masterful political stroke, Trelawny had paved the way for a similar accommodation between Knowles and the Jamaica political establishment. In the fall of 1751, he assembled twelve of the colony’s most prominent public figures, many of whom had long been bitter political rivals, and persuaded them to bury the hatchet for the sake of political peace. Trelawny drew up a written “Association,” which they all signed, pledging themselves to put aside the “great heats & animosities” and the pursuit of the “private resentments” that had frequently characterized Jamaican politics during Trelawny’s administration and to support Knowles “as long as he appears to us to have at Heart the public Service.” In letters to Knowles and his London agent, Francis Gashry, Trelawny congratulated himself upon his success. The association, he reported, produced “a happy reconciliation between the Parties of 26. Charles Knowles to the Duke of Newcastle, May 21, 1755, Newcastle Papers, Additional Manuscripts 32855, ff. 80–82, British Library, London.

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this Island” that brought immediate “Peace, harmony & joy” and laid “a sure foundation . . . for those blessings to continue during the whole time of Mr. Knowles’s Administration.” The implicit assumption underlying the association, of course, was that Knowles, like Trelawny, would allow himself to be guided by its members’ advice. As Trelawny told Knowles, no one knew “the interest of the country better” than “all the principal Gentlemen of the Island on the spot.”²7 The formation of the association was a de facto acknowledgment of the overwhelming influence of the local political establishment and the lack of gubernatorial independence in Jamaica’s internal affairs, giving the provincial Jamaican polity a quasi-republican character. Knowles was at first quite happy with this arrangement. Trelawny, he wrote Gashry, had “installed me to my heart[’]s wishes, & I hope by reconciling Men, has so temper’d their Minds that I shall have a quiet Administration.”²8 Indeed, Knowles seems to have operated under the naive belief that he could use Jamaica’s newfound political harmony to enhance royal authority in the colony. In November 1752, shortly after his arrival, he wrote the Board of Trade a long letter in which he manifested his own desire to be a constitutional reformer. Speaking directly to the board’s longstanding concern with “the difficulties most of the Governors of this Island have laboured under to execute his Majesty’s Instructions, by the Ballance of power being constantly in the House of Representatives,” he pointed out what the board already knew as a result of its recent dealings with Trelawny: that the Jamaica Assembly had “long (tho’ contrary to His Majesty’s Instructions) assumed to themselves the Sole power of raising and appropriating Money exclusive of the Council” and that the Assembly’s use of this power meant that it was “indeed the Government.” Moreover, he added, the fact that the Assembly “was never so fi lled before with so many Gentlemen of Figure and Substance” meant that its “weight” was “even heavier and the Consequences more to be dreaded.” With “no Mol[l]ifications or Gratifications left here in the disposal of the Administration,” he observed, a remedy through which the Crown could acquire its “just weight” in island governance had proven to be “next to impossible.”²9 Knowles traced the source of this imbalance to the “fi rst Concoction” of the Jamaica constitution, specifically to the weakness of the royal Council, which was too small and dependent on the governor to act as an effective counter27. Trelawny to Knowles, Oct. 23, 25, 26, Nov. 2, Dec. 9, 1751; Trelawny to Gashry, Nov. 2, 1751, Vernon-Wager Manuscripts, Box 15, Peter Force Papers, 8D, Library of Congress; Jamaicanus, The Jamaica Association Develop’d (London, 1757), 5–7. 28. Knowles to Gashry, Vernon-Wager Manuscripts, Box 5, Peter Force Papers, 9, Library of Congress. 29. Knowles to Board of Trade, Nov. 18, 1752, CO 137/25, ff. 279–80.

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weight to the Assembly. In consultation with “Mr. Trelawny and several of the ablest Gentlemen of this Community,” probably some of the twelve members of the association, Knowles devised a scheme to redress this situation. This scheme proposed to increase the size of the Council “so far as to take in every Gentleman of weight in the Country,” thereby at once making the number of its members roughly equivalent to that of the Assembly and depriving the Assembly of all its “Gentlemen of Figure and Substance.” To render the Council’s members more independent, he proposed to raise property requirements for membership, thus presumably excluding dependent placemen from the metropolis. Although he suggested that the governor be permitted to designate from this larger number of councillors a smaller group to act as his advisers on executive matters, the members of which he could change at will, Knowles proposed to free all councillors from dependence on the governor by making it impossible for him to remove them from office without the consent of the majority of the Council or a hearing before the Crown. With its new independence, Knowles thought, the Council would be able to act more “freely in” its “Legislative Capacity.” At no point in the letter did Knowles reveal any awareness of the extent to which such an arrangement, by giving local leaders control of both houses, would have vested virtually all of the remaining vestiges of metropolitan authority in the hands of the local establishment.³0 If such an arrangement would have been satisfactory to Jamaican political leaders, it “greatly alarm[ed]” the Board of Trade and other colonial officials. As Gashry reported from London in July 1753, it was “so little Relished here that People talk[’]d of it with great warmth,” and he predicted that it would “never go downe.”³¹ For its part, the Board of Trade dismissed Knowles’s ideas out of hand. Although it acknowledged that the colonial assemblies had shifted the balance of power in colonial governments to themselves, it insisted that this development derived “from an improper Administration of Government,” not “from any original Defect in the Constitution.” “By a prudent & steady Exercise of the Powers given him by his Commission and Instructions,” the board told Knowles, the governor had all the authority he needed “to check and divert the Attempts of any one Branch of the Legislature to encroach upon any other, and whenever such a Disposition appears, the Conjuncture calls upon him to exert his Resolution as well as his Sagacity.”³² How far the board was willing to go in insisting upon strict gubernatorial adherence to the royal instructions was revealed in its relations with Knowles 30. Ibid.; Knowles to Board of Trade, Sept. 13, 1753, CO 137/26, ff. 5–11. 31. Gashry to Knowles, July 26, 1753, Miscellaneous Papers, 1619–1783, Additional Manuscripts 19038, ff. 50–51, British Library. 32. Board of Trade to Knowles, May 16, 1753, CO 138/19, pp. 473–74.

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during his first two years in office. Reinforced by formal opinions from its own legal counsel and the Crown’s attorney and solicitor generals,³³ the board had already in February 1753 laid out its legislative standards following an extensive review of Jamaica legislation passed during the last two years of Trelawny’s governorship. Many of these laws were in violation of the instructions in that they expired in a year, they appointed commissioners to collect and hold public revenues, or they altered or repealed laws already confirmed by the Crown without including a suspending clause. The board denounced such practices as “lessen[ing] His Majesty’s just and necessary Authority over his Colonies, by which their Connection with and Dependence upon their Mother Country can only be preserved.” It directed Knowles to assent to no laws “which may contain any Provisions contrary to any of His Majesty’s Instructions,” assuring him that all such acts would be disallowed. By forcing Knowles into a strict adherence to his instructions, the board signaled its intention to reign in the authority of the Jamaican Assembly by restricting its capacity to pass temporary legislation, to appoint provincial revenue officers, and to frame legislation free of suspending clauses.³4 Knowles’s response plaintively underlined the difficulties this approach presented for him. He immediately agreed that the Assembly’s refusal to include suspending clauses in any of its laws carried “such an Air of Independence and trenches so much on the Just Authority of the Crown” that he would in future veto any bills that altered those that had already been confirmed by the Crown or contained “matters of a new and extraordinary nature.” But he warned that this approach might produce a political impasse. Men of the “best abilities and greatest weight in the Community,” he told the board in expanding upon Trelawny’s earlier assessment, had assured him that suspending clauses were “what the People are in general averse to, and that if His Majesty will not permit them to make Laws where the nature and evident necessity of the Case calls upon them, they must dutifully submit, and must be contented to live under the Common Laws of England, and such Statute Laws as are now in force.” He asked “for His Majesty’s orders how I am to act in Case matters should come to such an extremity that” the Assembly would “chuse to be deprived of having the benefit of such new Laws as the Exigencies of Affair may require, rather than give up the point of a suspending clause.”³5 This threat was the first in a series. Over the next decade, the Jamaica Assembly would several times express its adamant opposition to metropolitan 33. Matthew Lamb to Board of Trade, Nov. 20, 1752; Dudley Ryder and William Murray to Board of Trade, Jan. 22, 1753, CO 137/25, ff. 261–62, 267. 34. Board of Trade to Knowles, Feb. 13, 1753, CO 138/19, pp. 378–82. 35. Knowles to Board of Trade, June 27, 1753, CO 137/25, ff. 376–77.

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restrictions upon its legislative capacity and repeatedly reveal its conception of the Jamaica constitution as an arrangement that, while providing room for metropolitan review of provincial statutes, placed control over all internal contingent affairs in the hands of the Jamaica legislature. These threats would cumulatively expose how far the Jamaican political establishment was willing to go to preserve the local autonomy it had so long enjoyed as a quasi-republican polity within a nominally monarchical empire. Nor did Knowles expect any more cooperation in the board’s program to force the Assembly to pass supply bills for more than one year or to give up the appointment of revenue officers. Of such “long usage” was this method of raising supplies that he predicted that it “would throw the Government into the utmost Confusion and disorder if I should keep back these Supply’s upon either of these Accounts.” He then asked for the board’s orders as to “how far you would recommend it to me to go, in Case the Assembly,” as he anticipated, refused to give in. “When I have Your Lordships[’] definitive orders,” he promised, “I shall inviolably adhere to them without adverting to any Consequences,” vowing, like the obedient admiral that he was, always to make “His Majesty’s Commands the sole Rule of my Conduct” and to adhere to them “steadily and with the utmost precision.”³6 Long before the Board of Trade could have received this plea for direction, however, that body had sent Knowles still another expression of its wrath. In drawing up Knowles’s formal instructions in 1752, the board, at the request of the House of Commons, had included a special clause directing him to prepare “an exact and full account” of the “present State of the island of Jamaica,” giving particular attention to the problem of uncultivated lands and the paucity of white settlers. Not knowing enough to prepare this report himself, Knowles, to the great dismay of the board, which regarded this instruction as a private communication to the governor, had sent this instruction to the Assembly. Even more objectionable to the board, Knowles had proceeded to pass an act to disable placemen, including all Crown officers, from sitting in either the Council or the Assembly. For several years, the board had been receiving complaints about Jamaica legislation to regulate the fees of those officers, contrary, as one of them said, to “a long series of practice or Custom supposed” within the British constitutional tradition to be of “equal Authority with the Law.” With this exclusion act, which, the board complained, was “probably the first of it’s [sic] kind which has ever been transmitted from any of His Majesty’s Colonies,” the Assembly had boldly sought to diminish the status and influence of Crown bureaucrats in Jamaica, thereby once again enhancing its own 36. Ibid.

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authority at the expense of that of the Crown. For Knowles to have passed such an extraordinary measure without a suspending clause, the board informed him, was “so manifest a Violation of your Instructions[,] so unbecoming a Sacrifice of the prerogative of the Crown & such an Injustice to it’s [sic] Officers as deserves the severest Censure.”³7 Such severe censures provided the impetus for a constitutional confrontation in Jamaica. Stung by the Board of Trade’s critique, Knowles thenceforth rigidly insisted upon adhering to his instructions. At his next meeting of the Assembly in September 1753, he opened the proceedings with a recommendation that the Assembly comply with an instruction that it digest all Jamaica’s “laws into one code or system.” The Virginia legislature’s general revision of the laws of that colony in 1749 had enabled the board to undertake a systematic review of Virginia laws and to disallow many that seemed to contradict metropolitan notions about the proper mode of colonial governance, and this experience inspired London officials to recommend similar revisions to ten other royal colonies, including Jamaica. No doubt well aware of the Virginia experience, however, the legislatures of no other colonies complied with this recommendation. In Jamaica, as Knowles reported in January 1754, the Assembly simply ignored it. Metropolitan officials finally withdrew it altogether in 1761. Evidently, American assemblies had no intention of permitting such codifications to become a vehicle for restricting their scope for legislative action. More immediately important, Knowles, in the same speech, called upon the Assembly to “pay that dutiful regard to his majesty’s instructions to me, in framing all your bills, as I may be able readily to give my assent to them.”³8 For its part, however, the Assembly ignored the implicit threat in this announcement and proceeded to frame its supply bills in its customary manner. When in mid-October 1753 it presented Knowles with several bills, he discovered that two bills, an additional duty bill and a measure to prevent frivolous arrests, had been framed without regard to his instructions. While the former appointed a commissioner to receive and issue public money “in derogation of the officer appointed by the crown” for that purpose, the latter had been passed “for a limited time, and without a suspending clause.” These measures, 37. Leonard W. Labaree, ed., Royal Instructions to British Colonial Governors 1670–1776, 2 vols. (New York: D. Appleton-Century, 1935), 2:744; Board of Trade to Knowles, May 16, 1753, CO 138/19, ff. 468–69, 475–76; Francis Delap to [Peter Forbes], Feb. 13, 1751, Sharpe Papers, Manuscript 366, National Library of Jamaica, Kingston; Petitions of Thomas Graham, 1753, CO 137/25, ff. 265–66, 360–61. 38. Assembly Journals, Sept. 18, 1753, 4:401; Board of Trade to Knowles, June 3, 1752, CO 138/19, pp. 258–59; Labaree, ed., Royal Instructions, 1:167; Knowles to Board of Trade, Jan. 12, 1754, CO 137/27, f. 18.

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Knowles announced, were “so contrary to the tenor of his majesty’s instructions to me, that I cannot pass them.” Accordingly, he rejected them and prorogued the Assembly for a day so that it might have “another opportunity of re-considering and altering those bills” in such a way that they would not be “liable to those objections.”³9 When Knowles reconvened a new session the following day, he again entreated it “to comply with the demands of your sovereign, who hath upon all occasions, extended the most distinguished marks of his royal favour to this colony” and to pass legislation in a form agreeable to his instructions. In this standoff with the Assembly, Knowles thought that he had a trump card: the Board of Trade’s July 1753 report on twelve Jamaican acts passed in 1751 and 1752 during the final years of Trelawny’s governorship. Prepared for the Privy Council, this report left little doubt that London officials would thenceforth subject Jamaican laws to a very strict review and disallow any measures that were contrary to the royal instructions. Laying this report before the Assembly, Knowles asked its members to consider whether, in view of the board’s harsh line, it would be of any benefit to “you or the people of this island” to continue to refuse to include suspending clauses in its bills.40 The report represented a wholesale condemnation of a pattern of behavior on the part of the Jamaican Assembly that, as the board implicitly suggested, seemed bent upon aggrandizing its own authority at the expense of that of the Crown. In the board’s opinion, most of the laws it reviewed constituted a serious violation of the royal instructions. It condemned four revenue acts that appointed commissioners to receive and disburse public monies as “an open breach and violation” of the governor’s seventeenth instruction forbidding him to pass any revenue measures that did not put the money to be raised under the control of the Crown’s receiver general. To an act granting all supreme court judges tenure during good behavior, a measure that would have brought Jamaican practice into conformity with the English as it had been established at the time of the Glorious Revolution, the board objected that “the Situation and Circumstances in which the said Island or other American Plantations stand” made it “[in]adviseable, either for the Interest of the Plantations themselves, or of Great Britain, that the Judges in the former should hold their places” during good behavior rather than, as had been the case in Stuart England, at the pleasure of the Crown. It denounced a law to use ballots in elections as a “great . . . Innovation” that was contrary to both English practice and “long usage” in all the colonies except South Carolina. It objected to an 39. Assembly Journals, Oct. 18, 1753, 4:418. 40. Ibid., Oct. 19, 1753, 4:419.

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act to appoint commissioners to hear debt cases on the grounds that it made “an extensive a Change in the Constitution of Government with respect to the administration of Justice” and represented a “great . . . incroachment on Your Majesty[’]s Prerogative to which the establishing Courts of Justice belongs.” It criticized an act excluding Crown officers from sitting in the Assembly and acting in the Council in a legislative capacity as “extraordinary and unprecedented” in that it barred the Crown’s servants in Jamaica “from Privileges which they ought to enjoy, in Common with the rest of Your Majesty’s Subjects.” Finally, it found defective this law and four others of “an extraordinary nature” because they had been passed without a suspending clause in violation of the governor’s twenty-second instruction. “Obedience to” that instruction, it declared “has been always thought most necessary to be secured, and can be no way so effectually secured, as by constantly denying the Royal approbation to every Act passed in contradiction to it.” With this declaration the board signaled its intention to seek disallowance of all such laws in the future.4¹ But the Assembly was not to be intimidated by the Board of Trade’s threats. This was the body which, two years earlier, had been daring enough to resolve that the board had “no right to take notice” of any Jamaica affairs that were “not a public act of the legislature of this island, or represented to them by their agent in London,”4² and Knowles subsequently reported to the Board of Trade that since “the arrival of Your Lordships[’] Representation to His Majesty against the 12 Acts passed here in 1750 and 1751” Chief Justice Rose Fuller, a leading member of the Assembly, had “with others of the same turbulent Spirit been endeavouring to propagate amongst them [the contention] that your Lordships and the Ministry intend to take away their Priviledges as Englishmen.”4³ Instead of backing down, the Assembly went on the offensive, Speaker Charles Price evidently reminding Knowles of the principles of the association earlier formed by Trelawny and various leading men and informing him that if he “intended to Govern quietly,” he should follow the advice of, not the Board of Trade, but the members of the association.44 When Knowles made it clear that he would not submit, the Assembly, in response to his speech at the opening of the new session, adopted on October 29 a set of seven resolutions that directly challenged the constitutionality of the assumptions underlying the board’s report as well as its emerging policy for imperial governance. 41. Board of Trade to Privy Council, July 19, 1753, CO 138/19, pp. 481–99. This report is reprinted in James Munro and W. L. Grant, eds., Acts of the Privy Council of England: Colonial Series, 6 vols. (London: His Majesty’s Record Office, 1908–12), 4:215–23. 42. Assembly Journals, Oct. 26, 1750, 4:259. 43. Knowles to Board of Trade, Jan. 14, 1754, CO 137/27, f. 130. 44. Knowles to Board of Trade, Jan. 12, 1754, CO 137/27, ff. 1–20.

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These resolutions focused on the two most prominent constitutional issues: the Assembly’s right to appoint revenue officers and the suspending clause requirement. The first resolution dealt with the former issue, the Assembly declaring, without equivocation, that it was “the undoubted right of the representatives of the people, to raise and apply monies for the services and exigencies of government, and to appoint such person or persons for the receiving and issuing thereof, as they shall think proper,” a right, it asserted, that “this house hath exerted, and will always exert, in such a manner as they shall judge most conducive to the service of his majesty, and the interest of his people.” The six remaining resolutions dealt with the suspending clauses. No such clause, the Assembly declared, “hath ever been inserted in any act of a public nature, passed by the legislature of this island.” Such clauses, it announced, could only function to prevent the application of expeditious “remedies . . . against evils or inconveniences” and, had they been required in the past, might actually have prevented the colony from defending itself “against its foreign and intestine enemies.” Arguing that the existing system whereby all laws were subject to review and disallowance by the Crown was “agreeable to the prerogative of the crown of England, and of the rights and privileges of the people of that kingdom, to which the people of this island are undoubtedly entitled,” it denounced the suspending clause requirement as “a very great alteration of the known and established constitution of this island” and “derogatory to the undoubted right the subject hath of proposing laws to the crown.” For that reason, the Assembly resolved, it could not “consent to the insertion of such clause[s] in public bills, without giving up the rights of the people, their own liberties, and the happy constitution which they have enjoyed under his present most gracious majesty, and his royal predecessors, for above seventy years.”45 With these resolutions, the Assembly again emphatically defended its conception of the Jamaican constitution as an instrument that gave its members, as the guardians of settler rights and privileges, absolute independence in the passage of provincial laws. If it willingly conceded that those laws were liable to subsequent review and disallowance in England, it wholly rejected the contention that the Jamaica legislature might be subject to any prior metropolitan restrictions as a constitutional innovation and an abridgement of its historic autonomy to which it was determined never to submit. In transmitting these resolutions to Knowles the next day, the Assembly expressed its “readiness” to comply with royal commands “in every instance consistent with the trusts reposed in us by the people, and those rights which we do most humbly apprehend ourselves entitled to, under the happy influence 45. Assembly Journals, Oct. 29, 1753, 4:431.

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of his majesty’s mild government.” Caught in the middle between the intransigence of the Board of Trade and that of the Assembly, Knowles could only respond weakly that he would take the resolutions “into consideration, and compare [them] with his majesty’s instructions, whose command I am in duty bound to obey.”46 Although Knowles subsequently informed the Board of Trade that he regarded the Assembly’s resolutions as the “most extraordinary . . . ever entered into by any Assembly in His Majesty[’]s Colonies” and shrewdly pointed out that they “sufficiently shew[ed] the sense they have of being Independant here,” he ignored the resolutions, swallowed his pride, and continued to try to cajole the Assembly into passing legislation. The bankruptcy of the Crown’s receiver general Benjamin Hume revealed that he could not repay £20,000 of the public money, nearly all the money in the treasury, and Knowles tried to work with the Assembly to prevent such an unfortunate development in the future. For its part, the Assembly agreed not to forgo the appointment of revenue officers, but to appoint the receiver general as its collector, thus preserving the principle that it had the right of appointment. But it altered the custom of the receiver general’s receiving a commission based on a percentage of taxes by insisting that he be paid a salary instead. By this action, Knowles complained, the Assembly was endeavoring “even to make the Crown[’]s Officers dependent upon them.”47 This situation significantly increased tension between the Assembly and Knowles, who tried with only modest success to persuade the Assembly to raise the receiver general’s salary. When the Assembly proved recalcitrant, Knowles, growing more and more impatient, insisted, on November 14, that the Assembly resolve this problem before it “proceed[ed] to any other business.” In response, the Assembly asserted its “undoubted right . . . to proceed in such business as is before them,” declared Knowles’s request “a direct violation and breach of the liberties and privileges of this house, and a high infringement of the liberties of the people,” announced that it “would not proceed in any business, until” it had been “righted in” its “liberties and privileges,” and demanded from Knowles “a reparation.” When the governor denied that he had meant to disturb the Assembly “in the exercise of their rights and privileges” and charged it with misconstruing his expressions, that body denounced him further for thereby abridging its “right of applying to his excellency for reparation” 46. Ibid., Oct. 30, 1754, 4:432. 47. Knowles to Board of Trade, Jan. 12, 1754, CO 137/27, ff. 1–20; Brief against Charles Knowles upon a Complaint lodged against him by Wm. Beckford in the House of Commons, [Feb. 12, 1757], Fuller Family Papers, Bundle 18: (7a), East Sussex Record Office, Lewes, England.

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and asserted that his denial constituted “a great reflection on the honour of the house, and a new violation of their liberties and privileges.” When the house continued to refuse to do any business, an exasperated Knowles twice more prorogued the Assembly for a day, reconvening it on November 20 and 22. At his wits’ end, Knowles finally apologized to the Assembly when he reconvened it again on November 22, and he subsequently sought to dampen animosities by giving “an Entertainment at his Farm to many of the Gentlemen of the Assembly,” thereby restoring some degree of political harmony with the Assembly, which eventually passed five bills that Knowles could sign.48 As it proceeded back to business, however, the Assembly entered upon its journals a sworn copy of Charles II’s 1661 proclamation for encouraging immigration to Jamaica. According to Knowles, Rose Fuller had obtained this document from London for the specific purpose of stirring up opposition to the parliamentary inquiry into the state of Jamaica lands. In 1752 the House of Commons had directed the Board of Trade to prepare a report on what had been done over the past two decades “toward peopling, strengthening, and improving the Island of Jamaica.” Laid before the House of Commons in February 1753, this report became the basis for a printed bill “for coming at a knowledge of the Titles by which the present occupyers of Lands [in Jamaica] hold them.” Although the session ended before the bill had been passed, the Jamaican lobby in London, several of whom, including William Beckford, a member of Parliament, had titles to vast uncultivated acreage in Jamaica, endeavored to head off the bill. Originally, Fuller’s objective in obtaining Charles II’s 1661 proclamation, according to Knowles, was to distribute it about the island to let people “see the Conditions or Terms on which they held their Tenures, in order to prepare them to oppose the methods intended by the Printed Bill offered by the House of Commons last Year . . . in Case the same should pass into a Law.”49 In the political climate of Jamaica in the fall of 1753, however, this document quickly came to serve another purpose. With “the arrival of Your Lordships[’] Representation to His Majesty against the 12 Acts passed here in 1750 and 1751,” Knowles reported, Fuller had “with others of the same turbulent Spirit been endeavouring to propagate amongst” the public the idea “that your Lordships and the Ministry intend[ed] to take away their Priviledges as En48. Assembly Journals, Nov. 3, 6–8, 14–17, 19–20, 22, 1753, 4:440–43, 448–51, 454–56; Brief against Charles Knowles, [Feb. 12, 1757], Fuller Family Papers, Bundle 18: (7a), East Sussex Record Office. 49. Assembly Journals, Nov. 22, 1753, 4:455; Knowles to Board of Trade, Jan. 12, 1754, CO 127/27, f. 16; A Short Account of the Interest and Conduct of the Jamaica Planters (London, 1754), 13–14.

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glishmen.” Emphasizing the clause in the proclamation declaring all children born in Jamaica to be “naturall borne subjects of England” and “free denizens of England” with “the same privileges, to all intents and purposes, as our free borne subjects of England,” Fuller allegedly presented this document “as a Magna Charta for this Island.” No doubt, as Knowles suggested, Fuller and his colleagues had this document read in the Assembly and inserted in the Assembly minutes to underline its status as fundamental law—“a Magna Charta” that provided a legal basis for Jamaica’s claims for English rights and local autonomy as exhibited in part by the Assembly’s resolutions of October 29.50 While political storms raged in Jamaica, the wheels of London administration were moving slowly but inexorably in a direction that gave Knowles even less scope for maneuver. In November 1753 John Sharpe, Jamaica’s London agent, petitioned against the Board of Trade report on the 1751 and 1752 laws in terms that made it clear that Jamaica’s conception of imperial governance differed markedly from that of the Board of Trade. Defending the acts as being “of great and publick Utility and calculated for the ease and benefit of the Subjects” of Jamaica, he denied that any of them encroached upon the prerogative. Arguing that the royal instructions did not “affect the Rights of the Assembly,” he contended that the Assembly’s appointment of revenue officers followed logically from the principle that “the same Power which gives and raises the Money . . . hath a right to give the Collection of it to whom they please” and pointed out that this right was “exercised by the Assembly in all the other Sugar Islands,” adding that “it would be extream hard to deny it to Jamaica.” Because many of the measures contained “nothing in the least” that affected the royal prerogative but related “wholly . . . to Regulations touching their own Property and within themselves,” he stated, they were “within the discretion and power of that Legislature.” Acts that related solely “to the Domestick Management of the Affairs of Jamaica,” did not “prejudicially affect the Royal Prerogative of the Mother Country or Sister Colonies,” and were “approved of and desired by all His Majesty’s Subjects in that Island,” he declared, should be confirmed, not disallowed. Representing the views of the Jamaican legislature, Sharpe could scarcely have been more explicit in his enunciation of the doctrine that the domestic affairs of Jamaica were the province of the Jamaican Assembly and that metropolitan officials ought not to interfere unless Jamaican laws somehow violated the royal prerogative or affected the welfare of other polities within the empire.5¹ 50. Assembly Journals, Nov. 22, 1753, 4:455; Knowles to Board of Trade, Jan. 12, 14, 1754, CO 1377/27, ff. 19, 130. 51. John Sharpe, Extract of a Petition, [Nov. 1753], Sharpe Papers, Manuscript 367, National Library of Jamaica.

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When the Privy Council took up the Board of Trade’s report in February 1754, however, it took little heed of Sharpe’s arguments. Rather, it thoroughly endorsed the report, confirming only two of twelve acts, disallowing seven, and authorizing the issuance of an additional instruction to Knowles to deal with the suspending clause and issues relating to the three short-term acts that had already expired. This instruction censured Knowles and threatened to remove him from office if he did not “pay a due Obedience and Regard for the future to your Commission and Instructions by constantly refusing your Assent to any Bills of an unusual or extraordinary Nature and Importance wherein Our Prerogative or the Property of Our Subjects may be prejudiced or the Trade or Shipping of this Kingdom any way Affected untill” he had sent them home for approval. The instruction followed this endorsement of suspending clauses with an admonition never to give his “Assent to any Law for raising Money . . . by which it is not expressly declared that such Money shall be put into the Hands of our Receiver General” and, by implication, not under the control of any Assembly-appointed officers.5² IV In Jamaica, in the meantime, Knowles, desperate to break the impasse between himself and the Assembly, took measures that brought constitutional confl ict in the island to an entirely new level when he seized upon a January 1754 petition from Kingston merchants to the Crown as a device that would enable him to govern the island on the terms demanded by his London superiors. This action stimulated an internal controversy within Jamaica that lasted almost five years and went through several distinct phases. Bringing Knowles into fierce political struggles with the island’s entrenched political leadership, it eventually cost him his job. The first phase of this controversy, lasting for the first six months of 1754, involved a vigorous round of petitioning in which the antagonists laid out their case for or against the Kingston petition. Emanating principally from the colony’s overseas merchants, most of whom resided in Kingston, the Kingston petition requested the removal of the colony’s capital from Spanish Town to Kingston, on the grounds of Kingston’s superior size, its importance as Jamaica’s chief port and urban center, and the inconvenience of having to go seventeen miles inland to Spanish Town to conduct one’s legal business. Imme52. Minutes of the Privy Council Committee, Feb. 5, 14, 26, Privy Council Papers (hereafter PC), 4/1, pp. 945–49, 951; Munro and Grant, eds., Acts of the Privy Council, Colonial, 4:215–23; Privy Council Minutes, Feb. 28, 1754, PC 104, pp. 40–41; Board of Trade to Privy Council, Feb. 27, 1754, CO 138/20, pp. 10–14; Labaree, ed., Royal Instructions, 1:150–51.

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diately throwing his support behind this petition, Knowles recommended it to his London superiors as an instrument by which “the Planters’ Pride & Power” could be lowered and the “Trade[,] strength & Revenue of the Island” increased.5³ In letters to the Duke of Newcastle, who had succeeded his brother Henry Pelham as chief minister, and the Earl of Holderness, who as secretary of state for the southern department had nominal authority over colonial affairs, Knowles explained the benefits that would flow from the success of this petition. “Since the first appointment of Assemblys in this Island,” he told Holderness, “the Planters have constantly composed that Body” because “the Seat of Trade was too remote from the Seat of Government for the Merchants, & Burghers of Port Royal & Kingston to attend a session without Manifest loss and detriment to their Affairs.” The result was that “the Planters have engross’d that House to themselves & by their Oppulency & high Spirit have constantly obstructed the Governours of this Colony from carrying on His Majesty’s Instructions, and all [other] Measures . . . calculated for whatever good purposes unless they tended purely to their own Interest.” Thus, he explained to Newcastle, had “these powerful princes” been able to acquire “vast Tracts of Land” and to screen from metropolitan eyes both the extent of their holdings and “the Slender (nay wicked) titles some of them hold these lands by,” with the result that they had been able to keep the price of sugar high by preventing their extensive uncultivated lands from “being improved into Sugar Plantations” or being occupied by new white settlers. Neither the amount of sugar produced nor the white population, he predicted, would ever be increased “till some of the Vast Tracts of Land belonging to these Mighty-Men” were “resumed by Law and Vested again in the Crown.” Considering trade “a mean Vocation,” the planters had, Knowles charged, for “a long time supported an Interest against the Merchants with the verry Money they borrow from them,” a practice that the merchants were “determin’d to submit to . . . no longer, but to gett into the Assembly, if the Government is removed to Kingston, as their business will admitt of their attending the House there which it wou’d not do in Spanish Town,” thus “destroying the [planters’] Power, & creating a country ballance for the future.”54 Holding “the greatest part of the Property of the Country in their hands,” the merchants, Knowles explained, were “Men of Interest in the Island,” who 53. Privy Council Memorial to the King, Jan. 1754, Egerton Manuscripts 3490, ff. 19–32, British Library; Knowles to Duke of Newcastle, Jan. 29, 1754, Newcastle Papers, Additional Manuscripts 32734, ff. 86–88. 54. Knowles to Earl of Holderness, Feb. 5, 1754, CO 137/60, f. 69; Knowles to Newcastle, Jan. 29, 1754, Newcastle Papers, Additional Manuscripts 32734, ff. 86–88.

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would not fail to operate as “a Check upon the Planters[’] insolence and [to] enable a Governour to carry on His Majesty[’s] Service with . . . great ease and certainty.” Whereas the planters had always been the “constant Contemners and Opposers” of government who on every occasion and on every issue had betrayed their determination to “govern without Controul,” the merchants had “a constant reliance on the Government,” were always the governor’s “hearty Friends,” and could thus be depended upon to support all metropolitan measures intended to add “Strength & Security to the Island,” including uncovering the “flagrant . . . scene of Deceit” surrounding the planters’ land engrossment. Knowles called upon Newcastle, Holderness, and the “rest of the King’s Ministers” to act favorably upon the Kingston petition and thereby seize upon such a good opportunity for establishing metropolitan authority in the colony. “The late behav[i]our of the Assembly,” he added darkly, made it absolutely “necessary that something shou’d soon be done, or there will be an End of all Regal Authority here.”55 His sanguine expectations notwithstanding, Knowles, through his support of the Kingston petition, only succeeded in intensifying his political problems within Jamaica. Led by Rose Fuller, Speaker Charles Price, and Richard Beckford, three of the most prominent political figures in the colony, the Spanish Town interest soon mounted a counterpetition aimed at keeping the capital in Spanish Town. To oppose the Kingston petition, Fuller organized a rally of a few hundred people in Spanish Town on January 31, 1754, just a few yards away from the building in which Knowles was holding a session of the Court of Chancery. According to Fuller’s subsequent defense of his behavior, this meeting included some town inhabitants who were not freeholders but principally consisted of a combination of people “in eminent Stations,” including seven judges and court officials, six Assembly members, several justices of the peace, the rector of the parish church, eight barristers, “several Gentlemen of Estates, and many Freeholders and Housekeepers of the said Town and Neighbourhood thereof.” But Knowles, regarding the gathering as a mob and Fuller’s action in calling it as a blatant attempt at intimidation, summoned a company of troops from Kingston to keep order and charged Fuller with inciting a riot. Although no riot occurred, local residents quickly began to make life in Spanish Town miserable for the governor and his family, “huzzaing and singing . . . impudent songs” as they passed by the King’s House, his residence, insulting his wife while he was away on a tour of the island, preventing his servants from buying meat in the market, and breaking into the King’s 55. Knowles to Earl of Holderness, Feb. 5, 1754, CO 137/60, f. 69; Knowles to Newcastle, Jan. 29, 1754, Newcastle Papers, Additional Manuscripts 32734, ff. 86–88.

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House, taking the island’s mace, shattering it, and strewing the pieces before the governor’s door. The local doctors even refused to treat his sick child. This harassment effectively drove the governor out of Spanish Town. Fearing for his family’s safety, he moved to Kingston into a house provided by some of the Kingston petitioners. Unless the capital itself was removed to Kingston or “something of that kind . . . done now to create a Ballance in the Assembly,” he excitedly told his London superiors, “I do apprehend the King will have no share in the Government of this Island long, without force to support it.”56 Along with the Kingston petition, these events stimulated an intensive contest for the support of the island’s rural parishes. The result was an extraordinarily extensive political mobilization, the scale of which was certainly unprecedented in Jamaica and probably also in any of the other American colonies. In January 1754, 591 people had signed the original Kingston petition, and 545 people, only 11 of whom had not signed the original petition, signed a second one a few weeks later.57 Most of the parishes in eastern Jamaica drew up and signed petitions to support the Kingston proposal: 87 people from the town and parish of Port Royal, 69 from the parish of St. Andrew, 78 from the parishes of St. Marys and St. Georges, and 188 from the parish of St. Thomas in the East. Altogether, these petitions contained 1,024 signatures from 975 different people.58 Galvanized into action by these petitions, the supporters of Spanish Town drew up three separate petitions between February 1 and June 24, 1754, that included 529 signatures from 506 different people.59 The parishes immediately surrounding and to the west of Spanish Town also produced petitions in support of the existing capital, with the signatures of 13 people from the parish of Clarendon, 7 from the parish of St. John, 12 from the parish of St. Catherine, 11 from the parish of Vere, and 221 from the parishes in Jamaica’s westernmost county, Cornwall.60 In total, these petitions contained 801 signatures of 747 56. Knowles to Board of Trade, Feb. 15, CO 137/26, May 7, 1754, CO 137/27, ff. 196–98; Rose Fuller’s Answer to Charles Knowles’s Complaint, Sept. 1754, CO 137/28, ff. 70–74. 57. Memorial of the Merchants and Factors of Kingston to the Board of Trade, Jan. 1754, CO 137/26, ff. 176–87; Petition of Kingston Merchants to the King, [Feb. 1754], CO 137/27, ff. 453–56. 58. Port Royal Petition, [Feb. 1754], CO 137/27, f. 162; St. Andrew Petition, [Feb. 1754], ibid., ff. 157–58; St. Marys and St. Georges Petition, [Feb. 1754], ibid., f. 161; St. Thomas in the East Petition, [Feb. 1754], ibid., ff. 159–60. 59. Spanish Town Petition, Feb. 1, 1754, CO 137/27, ff. 184–87; Spanish Town’s Answer to the Kingston Petition, [Feb. 1754], ibid., ff. 139–53; Spanish Town Petition, June 24, 1754, CO 137/28, ff. 52–57. 60. Clarendon Petition, [Feb. 1754], CO 137/27, f. 210; St. John Petition, [Feb. 1754], ibid., f. 211; St. Catherine Petition, [Feb. 1754], ibid., f. 212; Vere Petition, [Feb. 1754], ibid., f. 213;

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different people. Thus, at least 1,722 people, perhaps 20 percent of Jamaica’s total free population, including women and children, participated in this contest by signing their names to petitions. Slightly more than half, 56.6 percent, were on the Kingston side; 46.4 percent supported Spanish Town. During the spring and summer of 1754, rival Jamaican interests thus flooded London with petitions for and against removal of the capital to Kingston, but the Spanish Town interest did not stop with sponsoring petitions. In early April an anonymous writer, perhaps Thomas Frearon, a learned and much respected judge who had never been out of Jamaica, writing under the pseudonym Veridicus, or “Truth Teller,” took the contest to another level with the production of a substantial pamphlet. With some additions from an anonymous London lawyer associated with Gray’s Inn, this pamphlet was published in London in September 1754 under the title The Respondents Case. Whereas the initial Kingston petition and all the petitions that later supported it had stressed the utilitarian arguments for removal, The Respondents Case, following the lead of the Spanish Town petition, sought not only to demonstrate the inutility of removal but also to set forth “the juridical Case” against it. In the process of constructing “the Law State of the Case,” Veridicus, exhibiting substantial learning in history, law, and languages, laid out the intellectual underpinnings of the Assembly’s aggressive defense of settler liberties as they had taken shape in the colonies over the previous century and a half.6¹ In colonies, as in larger polities, wrote Veridicus, the function of government was largely protective. That is, it secured the lives, properties, and liberties of the inhabitants. No less than the metropolis, however, the colonial polity was socially exclusive and unequal. As he explained, laws were “principally made for the Protection and Security of the Freeholders, Settlers and staid Inhabitants of a Colony,” and the “staid” inhabitants by no means included everyone who resided there. They did not, for instance, include “transient Persons, mere Merchants, Factors, Agents, or any other set of Transients, having no Plantations, or what is among us called Settlements, and who have only a momentary Residence, and Habitations for the Time being in this Island.” Such people were but “Under-strappers, the mere Factors and Agents of his Cornwall County Petition, [ June 1754], CO 137/28, ff. 62–64. The small number of signatories from Clarendon, St. John, St. Catherine, and Vere, most of whom were local justices of the peace, suggests the haste with which these petitions were assembled. 61. Veridicus, The Merchants, Factors and Agents Residing at Kingston in the said Island, COMPL A I NA N TS , Against The Inhabitants of Spanish-Town, and of the four adjacent Parishes, and against the Members of the honourable Assembly, annually and constitutionally held at saint jago de la Vega, and against the Planters, Freeholders, Settlers, and chief Body of the People of the Island of Jamaica: THE R ESPON DEN TS C ASE (London, 1754), ix.

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Majesty’s Planters . . . and . . . only to be looked upon as the Carnalia of this Country, and the mere Turba Rhemi of Kingston.” Neither did the staid inhabitants include the many “Ruffians, Sailors, and other transient Persons, who frequently resort[ed]” to the port of Kingston “in mighty numbers.” They emphatically did not include the many thousands of slaves, many of whom were eager “to change Conditions with their Masters.” “In all Countries of the World,” declared Veridicus, such transients or, in the case of slaves, disenfranchised people, had “little or nothing to do with the Policy and publick Laws” and no “Right to interfere with the Policy of the State” or to apply for “the Repeal of publick Laws,” the “Honour of Obedience to the Laws in being” operating as the only right to which they were entitled.6² The organs of government were thus, according to Veridicus, all the instruments of the staid population. Thus was the Assembly, the lawmaking body of the colony, composed of members who were “not only the greatest Proprietors of and in the Country” but also had been “severally chosen out of the best people by all the Freeholders of the respective Parishes in this Island.” Precisely because they were thus representative of the “staid Families” in the colony, such people knew “best the true Interest of this Country, which is certainly blended with their own, as well as with that of their Constituents.” With this statement, Veridicus implicitly endorsed the position the Jamaica agent John Sharpe had taken in his presentation to the Privy Council the previous November: that the Jamaica Assembly also knew better how to legislate for their country than did distant officials in London. Invariably, as well, the actions of the Assembly represented—and embodied—“the legal sense of this whole Island as to all and singular Matters in question.” If the Assembly made the laws, the courts enforced them and adjudicated disputes arising out of them—with the security of the lives, liberties, and properties of the colony’s staid inhabitants primarily in mind. As the repository of all the statutes, court decisions, land records, and wills and inventories of the staid inhabitants, the island record office was thus “the Charter-Chest of all the Titles to every individual Plantation, as well as to all the opulent Estates on this Island.”6³ Perhaps because it had so recently and repeatedly been called into question by the actions of London officials, Veridicus took special pains to spell out the legal foundations of colony governance. Authority in British colonies, legislative and all other kinds, depended in his view upon a variety of supports. These included, in the first instance, the original and fundamental laws promulgated coeval with or soon after the initial settlement. Citing Sir Edward Coke’s commentaries on Magna Charta in his Institutes, Veridicus argued that “any By62. Ibid., 20, 23, 30, 50, 55–56.

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63. Ibid., 14, 31, 51–52.

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laws, Acts, Orders or Concessions made contrary to” these fundamental laws were actually “against law” because they were “against the general Liberty of the Subject” and were therefore “void and ineffectual as being against Law.” Indeed, he concluded, because “all His Majesty’s Planters, or the greatest Part of them,” had become “staid Inhabitants, and very considerable Settlers in this Island” on the basis of “the public Faith flowing from these fundamental Laws,” they “ought never to be altered; and indeed . . . never [could] be altered, without renting all Order, and breaking all Unity, without sapping the very Foundation of the Constitution of this Country.”64 The English inheritance was a second source of authority for colonial governance. Veridicus cited Charles II’s 1661 proclamation that Jamaicans would have the same status as “free Denizens of England ” with the “same Privileges to all Intents and Purposes as his Majesty’s free born Subjects of England ” to show that “the Laws of England ” were “their Birth-right” and that “the People of Jamaica” had “just the same legal Rights to the Possession of their own Freeholds” and to other inherited rights, including consensual government and due process of law, “as the People of England have to theirs.” Indeed, in making this case, Veridicus took the usual colonial line that Charles II’s proclamation, like other similar documents issued in connection with the establishment of civil government in other colonies, was “in Truth of the Nature of Declaratory Laws, for they gave no new Right, but only declared an old one.” Even without such an instrument, he contended, those “brave Britons who made the Conquest of Jamaica” would automatically have taken their inheritance—“all the old and valuable Laws of England ”—with them. That inheritance, he insisted, was “truly the Birthright of the People of this Island.” By adding such “a valuable Jewel” to the English Crown and opening up such “a fine large Avenue to the Wealth of the World,” he argued, the conquerors of Jamaica could not possibly “be supposed to have forfeited” that birthright.65 A third source of authority in colonies was metropolitan judicial rulings. Veridicus cited several cases at Westminster adjudging, as he put it, “that the Benefit of all the Laws of England preceding the Conquest of this Island, did of Right appertain to the Conquerors.” Chief among these laws, he wrote, was “the uncontroverted Magna Charta of England,” which, according to these judicial rulings, endowed “the People of Jamaica” with full entitlement “to all and singular the Benefits, Privileges, Protection and Immunities conceded [to the metropolitan English] by that Law or Charter.”66 A fourth source of authority for Jamaica governance explored by Veridicus was explicit contract. The 1728 Jamaica Revenue Act, which provided a per64. Ibid., 7–8, 12–13.

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65. Ibid., 4, 8, 10–11.

66. Ibid., 10–11.

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petual revenue for the island’s civil establishment, declared all English laws as had “been at any time esteemed, introduced, used, accepted or received as Laws in this Island . . . to be and continue Laws of this his Majesty’s Island of Jamaica for ever.” Confi rmed by the Crown, this act, wrote Veridicus, constituted “a fair, honest and mutual Contract between the King and People,” by which, in return “for a valuable Consideration,” the king acknowledged that “all the Privileges, Immunities, Freeholds and Possessions” of Jamaicans would become “perpetual.” Though, like Magna Charta, it gave “no new Right” but only “ratified and confirmed existing ones,” this act, Veridicus emphasized, was “in Truth, the modern Magna Charta of Jamaica,” a “Charter of Confirmation” that further guaranteed that “all our Liberties, Immunities, Privileges and possessions enjoyed under the Charter” would be “possessed Justâ Causâ præcedente.”67 A fifth and highly important source of authority was colonial custom. Veridicus quoted Coke on the authority of “the Customs of the Realm” in England, “the most valuable and significant” of which were those that met the four tests of being “ancient, universal, uninterrupted, and notorious.” As inviolable possessions “claim[ed] by Prescription,” rights based on such customs were legally sacrosanct, even if there were no other legal foundations for them. Veridicus cited the writings of Secretary of State John Thurlow to prove that any “Possession which surpasseth the Memory of every Man living” could “be deemed an Immemorial Possession” that “create[d] an inflexible legal Title.” In the case of Jamaica, he argued, “the tacit Consent of the King, his Governors and the People” had “effectually operated” to do just that. “ ’Tis certain,” he declared, “that, 99 Years [of ] quiet Possession” created “an uncontrol[l]able Prescription of a just right.” “Every such antient, uniform, general Custom of the Country,” he claimed, “maketh a Part of the Law of the Land,” of “the Laws and Customs of his Majesty’s Island of Jamaica.”68 In Veridicus’s view, the English doctrine of custom was paralleled by still a sixth source of authority for colonial polities: international practice as rooted in Roman and civil law. He cited various provisions from the Justinian Code to show that possession, in same cases for as little as three to ten years, constituted a “sufficient Legal Title,” not just to freeholds but also to “Chattels, Franchises, consuetudinary Liberties, incident Privileges, or such like Concomitants of the Freehold.” These provisions were in turn the original source of “all the Possessory Laws of Italy, France, Germany, and Holland ” as well as the customary law of England itself. “Being of almost ten times ten Years Dura67. Ibid., 8–10.

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68. Ibid., 5, 13, 39–40.

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tion,” rights based on the doctrines of possession, asserted Veridicus, “should be deemed an uncontrolable Title in Jamaica, and in every other British Colony that is not sufficiently settled, and that not only in Odium of those who rashly and unjustly attempt to disturb the peaceable Possession of the veteres Colonii; but also, lest by a constant Uncertainty, the Settlers of Colonies being as diffident as unsecure, might be thereby induced to neglect the Improvement of what they do possess.”69 A seventh and final source of authority for colonial governance was natural law. Whatever was deducible “from the original and primary Law of Nature,” declared Veridicus, was “as much a Rule for Kings, and . . . as just a directory of their Actions, and as solid a Basis for their solemn Determinations in the great Concerns of Mankind, or in the most important Affairs of the World, as any other Law, Act or Statute whatsoever.” What was authorized by the “Light of Nature,” which Veridicus suggested was equivalent to “natural Sense” and the “Law of Reason,” carried as much weight, he argued, as what was sanctioned by positive law and custom. Thus, the principle that the acquisition of a privilege carried with it “all that is naturally incident to that Privilege,” he declared, was at once “a Rule in Reason, a Maxim in Law, and a certain and eternal Principle in Nature.”70 In all instances, according to Veridicus, these sources of authority operated to promote four fundamental principles of British governance. The first was the idea of consent. Colonial governance, no less than metropolitan governance, was consensual, all acts requiring the agreement of both governors and governed. This consent could be explicit, as, for instance, in the formal promulgation of positive law through statutes, or implicit, as in the mutual acquiescence to a longstanding custom, “the tacit consent of the King, his Governors and the People,” wrote Veridicus, operating “as effectually . . . as their express Concourse doth, or could have done in the making of a positive Act for that very [same] Purpose.”7¹ The second principle involved the subordination of the king or his colonial representatives to the law. If “Justice and Reason” dictated to the king what “he ought not to do,” law, in the English constitutional system, told him precisely what he could not do. Long consented to by the populace, “the just Prerogative of the Crown” constituted an essential “Part of the Law of the Kingdom,” but prerogative, declared Veridicus, could not be extended to the destruction of ancient rights “declared and confirmed by Charters and Laws.” Such rights, he asserted, could “never be legally or justly annihilated by mere Prerogative: For 69. Ibid., 15–20.

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70. Ibid., 7, 42–42.

71. Ibid., 5.

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to dispense with such perpetual and fundamental Laws” was “against the Petition of Right” and therefore “beyond the bounds of prerogative authority.”7² A third principle involved the sanctity of due process of law. Veridicus cited Coke to show that, according to English legal traditions, “no freeborn Briton, or other free Man, shall be ousted of his Possession, or be directly or indirectly attacked or invaded as to any Franchise, customary Liberties, Privileges or Immunities without an open fair Trial, according to the Law of our Land, and the verdict of twelve sworn honest and legal Men, or by a Jury of our own Peers.”7³ The fourth principle involved the sanctity of possessions, a term that extended not just to tangible property but to all fundamental privileges, rights, and liberties. Thus, Veridicus contended, the “constant and uninterrupted possession” of liberties over a period that “surpasseth the Memory of every Man living” had to “be deemed an Immemorial Possession,” to which its possessors had “an inflexible legal Title.”74 From these principles and the sources of authority on which they were based, Veridicus contended, it followed that colonial “Liberties, Franchises and Privileges,” like those of the metropolis, flowed “from positive and perpetual Laws” and were “grounded upon uninterrupted and immemorial Possession” and could not legally be undermined through the application of such illegal, that is, nonconsensual, devices as “a high commission, dormant Powers, obsolete Instructions, and new born Innovations” that sought to “deprive us the People of that sweet and pleasant Security which we enjoy under wise but not fleeting Laws, under an established but not a floating Government.”75 Both “the publick Laws” and “the authoritative Sentiments and the Legal Sense of this whole Island,” Veridicus concluded, required that no custom could be abridged through the unilateral actions of the metropolitan government. Rather they could be changed only “in the regular and usual Way by . . . the Representatives of the People elected and legally Assembled.”76 Implying that Jamaica was not part of a national state but was, rather, a “Lordship” based upon a mutual covenant between the Crown and the freeholders of Jamaica, Veridicus argued that “by disfranchising it’s [sic] freeholders, and depriving it’s [sic] antient Possessors and kindly Tenants of their Dominium utile, to which they have the same just Right and legal Title that their King Lord hath to his said Dominium directum,” the application of such devices would not only destroy the colony’s constitution but effectively annihilate “the very Lordship itself, and . . . destroy the Dominium directum of this Island.”77 72. Ibid., 37–38, 57. 75. Ibid., 42, 68.

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73. Ibid., 14. 76. Ibid., 50, 52, 54.

74. Ibid., 4–5. 77. Ibid., 22.

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Declaring that “anticonstitutional Innovations may prove as fatal to Colonies as Plague, Pestilence, or Famine” and were “the certain Fore-runners of Destruction, Devastation, and Extirpation,” Veridicus concluded by demanding that no Change or Alteration be made use of in the King’s Writs, and that there may be no new Modelling or Transmigration of his Majesty’s Courts, and that, there may be no intermeddling with our Freeholds, our Records, and our Laws; and that the fundamental Constitution of this Country, it’s [sic] antient, wellapproved Customs, and it’s [sic] universally received consuetudinary Liberties may not directly or indirectly be incroached upon, invaded or innovated: And all this we with Humility and Sincerity do request,

he added, “because we know that it is our Right, and because we very plainly do foresee, that a contrary Conduct to what is here desired, may tend to turn Order into Anarchy, Amity into Animosity, and to open upon our Country the Flood-Gates of false Policy, Madness, and Misery!”78 In a telling passage, Veridicus complained that the Kingston petitioners, instead of going about things “in the regular, and usual Way by a solemn and proper Application to the Representatives of the People elected and legally assembled in Virtue of His Majesty’s Royal Writts,” had bypassed the Jamaica legislature altogether and applied “to the Sovereign directly and immediately and without any Intervention.” With this complaint, Veridicus strongly suggested that the Jamaica legislature was the proper venue for consideration “of such weighty Affairs” as a change in the location of the capital, a matter “in which the Order of his Majesty’s Government, the Peace of the People, and the Security of the whole Society” were so deeply concerned, and betrayed his resentment that the petitioners had called the metropolis into a matter that ought to have been left to the provincials. He thereby implied that whether the Crown in Britain should or should not be consulted on any provincial matter was a subject for the determination of the provincial legislature. In the views of the Jamaican political establishment, not the least objectionable feature of the Kingston petition was thus its implicit challenge to the competence of the legislature and to the local autonomy Jamaican settlers had so carefully cultivated for the better part of a century.79 Whether or not any relevant London officials ever read The Respondents Case, the government moved cautiously in its response to the uproar over the proposal to make Kingston the seat of governance for Jamaica. The Privy Council received the initial petitions from the Kingston and Spanish Town interests in late May 1754 and referred them to the Board of Trade two weeks 78. Ibid., 49, 65–66.

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79. Ibid., 53.

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later. Over the next eight months the board held more than twenty meetings hearing testimony on the merits of these petitions, but it seems to have been reluctant to report back to the Privy Council. Indeed, the board’s relationship with Knowles continued cool. At the very time he was endorsing the Kingston petition, the board was denouncing him for having consented to a law excluding royal officers from sitting in the Assembly and admonishing him “for the future [to] act with a due Regard to His Majesty’s Rights and those of his Officers and the Welfare of the Government intrusted to your Care.”80 Moreover, the board infuriated Knowles by seeming to side with Rose Fuller, whose extended family in England was closely allied with the existing ministry, in reference to the alleged riot in Spanish Town on January 31, demanding that Knowles submit proofs for his charges that a riot had occurred and that Fuller had incited it and even providing Fuller with copies of Knowles’s official letters to the board. Knowles especially objected to reports that the Earl of Halifax, the president of the board, had said that Knowles would be recalled in three months. Insisting that he had done no act of government “without the advice and concurrence of His Council and a due regard to the Royal Instructions” (which, he insisted in a telling point, are “the cause of all this uproar and opposition”), he argued that a consideration of all the facts would doubtless exonerate him from any charges of wrongdoing and result in his receiving “that support necessary towards carrying on this Government.”8¹ But little support was forthcoming. The board did support Knowles in his controversy with Fuller, who was chief justice of Jamaica, over the jurisdiction of the judges in the spring of 1754. Whereas Fuller insisted that Jamaica judges could hold courts of nisi prius on the basis of a 1751 Jamaica law that had been recommended for disallowance but not yet disallowed, Knowles contended that both the impending disallowance of the law and the failure of the judges to obtain a royal commission specifically empowering them to hold such courts prevented the judges from holding them. In defiance of Knowles, Fuller contended that as long as the act was not disallowed, the judges deemed themselves “bound by our Oaths as Judges to regard the said Act as a Publick Law of this Island and to put the same in execution untill a disallowance thereof by the King shall be notified to your Excellency in Form,” and congratulated his ally and fellow judge John Morse for actually holding such a court, “taking him by the hand and telling him he had acted like an Englishman and that he had as much right to do what he had done as any Lord Chief Justice of England.” Ac80. Board of Trade to Knowles, Jan. 31, 1754, CO 138/20, pp. 4–8. 81. Knowles to Board of Trade, Oct. 7, 1754, CO 137/28, ff. 95–97. See also Board of Trade to Privy Council, Oct. 15, 1754, CO 138/20, pp. 41–79.

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cording to Knowles, the “sole view” of Fuller and Morse in holding such courts was “to insult his Majesty’s Authority.” When Knowles dismissed Morse for this behavior, Fuller resigned his commission as chief justice.8² Similarly, the board suggested in the fall of 1754 that Knowles’s endeavors to defeat the “extraordinary Attempts and Innovations” of the Jamaican Assembly would win royal approval. But it remained wholly noncommittal on the fate of the Kingston petition, on which Knowles had pinned his hopes for political survival. Rather, it recommended that he use his “utmost Endeavours to conciliate the unhappy Differences by which the Peace of the Island has been so greatly disturbed, and to avoid all Occasion of future Controversy and Dispute, taking Care at the same time to observe your Instructions and on every Occasion acting with a steady and due Regard to them.”8³ V Left on his own, Knowles, increasingly aware that settler Jamaicans would never support the removal of the capital to Kingston without a formal legislative enactment by the Assembly, adopted the desperate political strategy of trying to win legislative approval, thereby launching the controversy over the capital into a second and even more complicated phase, one that would continue through June 1755. To further his new strategy, Knowles sought to gain a majority in the Assembly by manipulating elections. Accordingly, he dissolved the Assembly and called for new elections early in the fall. Between the fall of 1754 and May 1755, he called three successive elections and dissolved two more assemblies in his effort to achieve this goal. Held in early October 1754, the first election, hotly contested in many parishes, produced a significant gain for Knowles and the Kingston interest but not a firm majority. His supporters did, in conformity with his instructions, succeed in pushing through a revenue bill without, as he put it, the “Clogg of Commissioners as had been usual for some years past.” Taxes were to go directly into the hands of the Crown’s receiver general. But Knowles’s actions in trying to gain a majority in the Assembly soon embroiled him in a new dispute with that body over legislative procedures and privileges. Bad weather had prevented elections in two eastern parishes expected to return members in the Kingston interest, and, contrary to longstanding procedure, Knowles 82. This dispute may be followed in Metcalf, Royal Government and Political Conflict in Jamaica, 125–27. The quotations in this paragraph are from Knowles to Board of Trade, Apr. 10, 1754, CO 137/27, f. 138, and June 24, 1754, CO 137/28, ff. 21–22; and Fuller to Knowles, June 15, 1754, CO 137/28, f. 33. 83. Board of Trade to Knowles, Oct. 15, 1754, CO 138/20, pp. 85–97.

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issued writs to hold new elections in these parishes after the Assembly had convened but before it had requested him to issue such writs. Notwithstanding the presence of many of his supporters, the Assembly invoked the conventional English parliamentary principle, long since incorporated into Jamaica constitutional practice, that the house was the proper judge of elections and returns of all members and that it had “an undoubted right . . . to void all writs issued by the governor, during the continuance of the assembly, for electing members to serve in this house, when such writ shall be issued without the request of this house.” Denouncing these resolves as “extraordinary” and confident that his supporters would do even better in a new election, Knowles dissolved the house after it had sat for just over two weeks.84 In his dissolution speech, Knowles seized the occasion to articulate the principles that he hoped would lead to a gubernatorial majority in the Assembly. Contending that their resolutions but “too plain[ly]” manifested a disposition for “carrying things on with so high and usurped an authority,” he reminded the Assembly that the “prerogative of the crown, and the liberties of the people” were both “your duty to maintain and preserve, as well as mine,” and accused it of “invading them daily.” Seizing upon the association established by Trelawny as an effort by “some of you . . . to alter the established constitution of your country” by entering into a secret and “wicked association, destructive to the rights and property of the inhabitants” and the “extraordinary paper . . . sent me the last assembly, by your speaker,” as “proofs of the designs that have been laid, to subvert our happy constitution, and wrest power out of the hands of the crown,” he charged the Assembly with having “for years past lavished away” vast sums of money “in donations and gratifications to particular favourites” and promised to make such peculation “publicly known” so that the people might thereafter “have an opportunity of contributing to their own happiness . . . by a more proper choice of their representatives.” “The sounding words, liberty! and privileges!” he asserted, “convey dangerous ideas; but the loss of the people’s liberties may as soon happen . . . through the tyranny of a decemvirate,” he declared in a direct reference to the members of the association, “as under the administration of any single person.” Almost as an aside, Knowles ended his speech by challenging the Jamaican view of the foundations of settler liberties, declaring, in repeating conventional metropolitan theory about the constitutional structure of the empire, that the Assembly’s existence derived from nothing more than “his majesty’s commission, under the great seal to me directed.”85 84. Knowles to Board of Trade, Nov. 20, 1754, CO 137/28, ff. 154–55; Assembly Journals, Nov. 7–8, 1754, 4:484–85. 85. Assembly Journals, Nov. 8, 1754, 4:485.

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In the election contest that followed, Knowles and his supporters dilated upon these themes. No doubt with the governor’s sponsorship, an anonymous writer signing himself Jamaicanus and claiming to be “a Native of this Island” who had formerly opposed the “Measures of the Government,” published early in 1755 a pamphlet that reproduced both the association and Charles Price Sr.’s advice to Knowles on how to have a peaceful administration. Denouncing these documents as “dangerous Attempts to destroy and subvert both” the “glorious Constitution and [the] Government (which makes us envied by all other Countries),” Jamaicanus expressed his “Detestation and Abhorrence of all Illegal; Anti-Constitutional and Tyrannical Associations of Ten, Eleven, or let their Number be what it will,” declared that “only a groveling wretch” could possibly “choose to set any one, or more of his Fellow Subjects, to lord it over himself,” and called upon “all Free Britons and honest Men” to disown those involved in the association.86 Particularly intense was the campaign to discredit Charles Price Sr., his opponents denouncing him as “the ruling Demogogue” who had “so long Governed this Island that he will not easily give up his Power.” “I appeal to all who know this Island,” declared Knowles, “whether the Laws for these fifteen or sixteen years past, have not been made by him and two or three of his Colleagues[,] leading Men of the Assembly for private views and purposes only.”87 Knowles’s tactics so far succeeded as to enable his supporters to win an equality in the January 1755 election, and, in case of yet another dissolution, he predicted that he had “a certainty of a Majority of five.” For that reason, he confidently predicted that his opponents would be forced to give in, and on the day after the Assembly met on January 20, he confidently wrote the Duke of Newcastle in London that he doubted “not of being able to execute effectually all His Majesty[’]s Instructions & Govern this Island in Peace & quietness. I have had an arduous task to bring matters this length,” he wrote, congratulating himself on his success, “having had a stubborn race to deal with.” But Knowles’s optimism was short-lived. When he endeavored to gain a majority in the Assembly by demanding that it unseat James Dawes, who in 1748 had been convicted at Westminster for having uttered “treasonable expressions” against George II, the Assembly, by a narrow vote of nineteen to seventeen, sustained its decision to admit Dawes on the grounds that by taking all the necessary oaths required of an assemblyman and thereby pledging his fidelity to the King, he had “obtained a legal right to sit in the house.” No doubt salivating at the prospect of winning a majority of his own supporters in the house by a new election, Knowles thereupon dissolved the Assembly after it had sat 86. Jamaica Association Developed, 25–26. 87. Knowles to Board of Trade, Dec. 31, 1754, CO 137/28, f. 166.

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for just four days, denouncing the actions of the Assembly majority to his superiors in London as little less than “inviting Traytors to take an Assylum in the Assembly of Jamaica.”88 In the ensuing elections, Knowles and his party succeeded beyond their wildest expectations, obtaining a majority of nine. First meeting on April 8, 1755, the Assembly elected Edward Manning, a merchant and strong supporter of the removal of the capital, as speaker, thus depriving Charles Price Sr. of the office for the first time in over a decade. Thereafter, it moved quickly to achieve Knowles’s agenda, voting on April 17 to bring in a bill to remove the seat of government to Kingston, passing on April 30 that bill, sending it on May 7 to Knowles for his signature, and passing a bill on May 19 to build a house and offices for the governor in Kingston. Knowles signed the measure the same day. By this series of actions, the Assembly rejected the appeals of the inhabitants of Spanish Town to keep the capital there.89 Knowles was ecstatic. “Whilst the Governing Power was in the hands of Mr. Price, Fuller, Beckford & their Faction,” he wrote Newcastle immediately after he had signed the removal bill, passing such a bill “was always look’d upon [as] next to an impossibility.” “The many Arbitrary Acts of Power the Factious opposition to Government here had invested themselves with,” he told the Board of Trade in reiterating a complaint he had frequently made, have been a “matter of Complaint for near a Century past, and to divest them of this Usurped Power & open the People[’]s Eyes, who had been so long deluded, was no easy task, yet,” he exclaimed proudly, “I have the Pleasure to tell Your Lordships [that] I have accomplished this, and will venture to say [that] if the Act for removing the Courts & Records is confirm’d, not only the Peace of the Island will be effectually restored, but His Majesty’s just Rights & Prerogative maintain’d in every point.” Yet, he had to admit that, in defiance of the Crown’s repeated instructions he had had to pass this unusual bill without a suspending clause, in order to obtain the Assembly’s and the Council’s support. Evidently not even his strongest supporters in Jamaica were willing to permit suspending clauses to be introduced into Jamaica legislation! Pleading necessity and “Numberless other Reasons, . . . both Provincial and Political,” he urged both Newcastle and the board to seek Crown approval of the removal law. Without such approval, he warned, “I foresee [that] nothing but Anarchy 88. Knowles to Newcastle, Jan. 21, 25, 1755, Newcastle Papers, Additional Manuscripts 32737, ff. 198–99, 248–49; Knowles to Board of Trade, Jan. 21, 1755, CO 137/28, f. 292, and Jan. 25, 1754, CO 137/29, ff. 1–2; Assembly Journals, Jan. 22–24, 1755, 4:491–93. 89. Knowles to Board of Trade, Apr. 10, 1755, CO 137/29, f. 17; List of Assembly members, Apr. 8, 1755, CO 137/29, f. 21; Assembly Journals, Apr. 9, 17, 22–26, 29–30, May 7, 19, 1755, 4:496–97, 503, 508–14, 519, 531–32.

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& Confusion will ensue, and Oppression to all those who have assisted me in bringing these Measures to bear.”90 The removal bill was not the only instance of Knowles’s political triumph in the spring of 1755. During the heat of the October 1754 election, Knowles and his party began to suspect that Francis Delap, a supporter of the Spanish Town interest and as provost marshal the person responsible for overseeing elections, might try to deliver the election of three members for Port Royal parish to the Spanish Town interest. Accordingly, just before the election, Knowles, with the Council’s approval, replaced Delap and ordered him to return the writs for Port Royal and two other parishes. Because Knowles had neglected to notify Delap of his dismissal, and because the writs had not been executed, Delap thought that his compliance with this order might render him, as he later put it, “liable to many Pains and Penalities, contained as well in the Laws of Great Britain, as in the particular Acts . . . of this Island” and refused to deliver them to his successor, instead hiding them in chests stored at the houses of Charles Price Sr. and William Wynter in Spanish Town. Though Price and Wynter immediately handed over the chests containing the writs, Knowles ordered Delap’s imprisonment, first in Kingston and then at the fort at Port Royal, where without the government’s showing any cause for his imprisonment he was held in irons, debarred from access to counsel or friends, prohibited the use of pen, ink, and paper, and told that he would shortly be dispatched to England “as a State Prisoner.” Though Knowles did not carry out this last threat, the courts, now presided over entirely by people of his appointment, consistently denied Delap access to habeas corpus and bail. Indeed, the government brought no formal action against him until February 1756, when it finally fi led three informations charging him with secreting the writs “with an Intention to suspend the Execution of the Writ[s], subvert the Government, and disturb the Peace of the Country.” Yet, Jamaica’s supreme court showed no hurry to begin proceedings, and Delap continued to languish in jail.9¹ The Delap affair represented an important sidebar to the removal controversy because, as the Jamaica political establishment was aware from the very beginning of Delap’s imprisonment, it raised fundamental constitutional questions about the capacity of a desperate and unrestrained governor to manipulate the judicial system in his private interest in violation of traditional English legal safeguards for the rights of individuals. From jail, Delap urged his political allies to “exert themselves” in his behalf “to support the Law, and 90. Knowles to Board of Trade, May 19, 1755, CO 137/29, f. 40; Knowles to Newcastle, May 21, 1755, Newcastle Papers, Additional Manuscripts 32855, ff. 80–82. 91. An Account of the Trial of Francis Delap, Esq; Late Provost-Marshal-General (London, 1755), viii, ix, 45.

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the Liberty of the Subject” and warned them that if they did not do so the law would be unable to protect any person “from Injury and Oppression” of the sort he had experienced. Through their agents in London, they made sure that this latest instance of Knowles’s arbitrary behavior came to the attention of metropolitan authorities. The result was an order from the king and Privy Council commanding Knowles to admit Delap to bail and to show cause for having imprisoned him. Instead of complying with this order, which he received while the Assembly elected in May 1755 was sitting, Knowles laid the case before the Assembly, in which he now had a substantial majority. On May 9–10, the Assembly reviewed the case, praised Knowles for having Delap confined, and asked the governor to order the attorney general to prosecute Delap for “his wicked crimes and misdemeanours, with the utmost rigour of the laws.” Thus vindicated by the legislature, Knowles quickly sought the approval of the courts. On June 18, 1754, the supreme court, functioning with a jury handpicked to achieve a result favorable to Knowles, found Delap guilty, the jury, despite an effective defense, deliberating for less than two minutes. The chief justice sentenced him to pay a fine of £500 and serve a year and a day in prison “without Bail or Mainprize.” Reporting this outcome to Newcastle, Knowles expressed certainty that the result of the trial would “sufficiently Justify my Conduct to His Majesty and His most Honourable Privy Council” as to clear “up my Conduct to the World” and win “the approbation of my Sovereign.”9² But Knowles’s victories came at a high price. The behavior exhibited by him and his adherents deeply alarmed much of the settler population, created profound resentments against them, and stirred manifold apprehensions about the tyrannical potential of delegated government unrestrained by close metropolitan supervision and unchecked by the power of an independent representative assembly. As Knowles’s May Assembly was getting on with the passage of the removal bill, an anonymous tract, entitled simply “Grievances,” unprinted, perhaps because the governor controlled the Kingston press, circulated in manuscript around the colony. As its title implied, “Grievances” consisted largely of a five-page list of actions by Knowles and his followers that could be construed as “publick Grievances” that gave “great cause of Complaint” and cried “aloud for Redress.” Denying the Assembly its privileges and harassing it with prorogations and dissolution, interfering in elections and “new Model[ling] the ways of Elections” for the purpose of giving “a Party all advantages for obtaining 92. Ibid., x, xi, 54, 7, 8; Assembly Journals, May 9–10, 14–15, 1755, 4:521–22, 525, 528–29; Knowles to Newcastle, June 30, 1755, Newcastle Papers, Additional Manuscripts 32856, f. 411.

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a Majority devoted to give a Sanction to” his “unwarrantable” proceedings, suspending laws, intimidating judges and dismissing any who would not heed his commands, replacing public officers with “inferiour Men” whose chief recommendation lay in their willingness to serve as “the Instruments of Faction,” obstructing justice, imprisoning people without cause, ignoring petitions, dispossessing men of their estates, and engaging in a variety of acts that showed nothing but contempt for the “antient usage and custom” of the island—these were only the most egregious of many examples of Knowles’s “arbitrary Ministration of Power.” “Is this treating British Subjects as what they are?” asked the author. “Is it not exercising the most arbitrary Power over a People? & ought the [lives and] Properties of Britons be thus Sported with[?]”9³ But this document also had two larger points to make about the nature of British colonial governance. The first was that “Subordinate Powers,” such as those exercised by colonial governors, included “no authority beyond what is by positive grant & Commission granted to them,” no power even of exercising “the prerogative of doing good beyond that grant & Commission, much less of employing it to carry on uncertain projects or to serve private purposes.” The second was that the governor’s commission directed him “to govern not only according to the Fundamental Laws of the Mother Country but also according to the particular Laws & Customs of that Colony over which it” granted “the governing Power[,] provided the same” were “not repugnant to the Laws of the Mother Country.” The “particular oecomony of a Colony” sometimes required its legislature “to make Laws different in some respects from the Laws of the Mother Country.” In a colony like Jamaica, the very “being and subsistence of ” which required “a permission of holding some of Human kind in perpetual Slavery which by the fundamental Laws of the Mother Country absolutely abhors within itself,” the author argued, the “repugnancy so provided against” could “only relate to what is Subversive of that form of Government[,] that Liberty & property established by those fundamental Laws, and what tends to dissolve that dependency of the Colony on the Mother Country, and to lessen that Utility which is necessary for the well being of both, and for which it was first Settled.” For that reason, the author contended, “Whatever Customs & Laws of the Colony circumscribed within these bounds are established & have been allowed of, they are the Customs & Laws by w[hi]ch that Colony should be Governed Jointly with the fundamental & General Laws of the Mother Country extending to that Colony.” For that reason, the author insisted in an 93. “Grievances,” Hall Family Papers, Mss. 0220/FB226, Folder 44, Mandeville Special Collections Library, University of California–San Diego, La Jolla, California.

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obvious reference to Knowles, “A Subordinate power appointed to govern that Colony by such a limitted Commission who acts Contrary to those Customs & Laws or in Violation of them, Abuses his Authority, is guilty of a breach of Trust and exerts an Arbitrary Sway.”94 When the May Assembly found a copy of this wholesale condemnation of Knowles and his allies tacked to the house door, it branded it “a false, malicious, and scandalous libel, highly reflecting upon the justice and wisdom of his excellency the governor’s administration, as also upon the proceedings of the honourable the privy-council of this island, and of this house, and tending to create jealousies in, and inflame the minds of the people” and ordered it “burnt in the open street, fronting this house, by the hands of the common hangman.”95 VI With passage of the removal bill, the confl ict over the location of the capital entered still a third phase, one in which each side desperately sought to persuade metropolitan authorities either to confirm or to reject the bill. Knowles’s expectations that metropolitan appreciation for his achievements would insulate him from attacks such as that composed by the anonymous author of “Grievances” and enable him to accomplish the constitutional revolution in Jamaica that his superiors enjoined on him proved to be entirely illusory. In April 1755, well before Knowles had succeeded in getting the removal bill through the Assembly, some London officials had decided that his repeated dissolutions and other tactics had thrown Jamaica “into great Confusion and Disorder, and greatly obstructed the Course of Justice and Government there,”96 and at the same time, the Crown’s law officers concluded that Knowles had no solid legal foundation for dissolving either the October 1754 or January 1755 assemblies. With regard to the former, they ruled that the Assembly’s claim that the governor had no right during sessions to issue writs for elections was “analogous to the Law & Practice” of England and depended entirely upon the “Constitution & Usage” of Jamaica; concerning the second they decided that James Dawes’s subscription to the oaths of allegiance in Jamaica meant that his English conviction “was no legal Objection to his right or capacity of sitting” in the Jamaica Assembly.97 In July the Board of Trade advised the Privy Coun94. Ibid. 95. Assembly Journals, May 1, 1755, 4:515. 96. John Pownall to William Murray and Richard Lloyd, Apr. 25, 1755, CO 138/20, pp. 110–11. 97. Murray and Lloyd to Board of Trade, Apr. 29, 1755, CO 137/28, ff. 7, 9–10.

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cil that Knowles’s actions in unilaterally moving the courts and legislative session to Kingston without the consent of the Assembly was “improper.”98 These actions were a harbinger of the metropolitan reaction to the removal law. The Board of Trade was dismayed by the absence of a suspending clause in the bill. As Rose Fuller, just arrived in England from Jamaica, gleefully reported to a correspondent in Jamaica, Knowles “had promised the ministry that he should carry the suspending clause by his supporting ye favourite scheme of ye removal,” and the ministry was therefore deeply “surprised to find those laws passed and executed without it.” As a result, Fuller wrote, the ministry was “heartily displeased” with Knowles, “which I doubt whether they ever were before, the language being that though he was wrong headed, & did irregular things yet he was doing the King[’s] business, meaning that his proceedings would produce the injection of that clause in our acts.” Because Knowles had failed in that grand objective, Fuller reported, the ministry now appeared ready to remove him and “reject ye laws upon account of that clause being omitted.” Certainly, as Ferdinand Paris, London agent for the Spanish Town interests, informed Fuller, the removal act was “flat in the Teeth of all the Reports & Orders on the 12 Acts of 1751 & 1752, as well as contrary to the Instructions & without a Suspending Clause.”99 A month later, Paris wrote Fuller that a leading member of the Board of Trade had told him that the board had two profound reservations about the removal act that would probably prevent its being confirmed. The first was a doubt about whether the Jamaica legislature could by its “sole Authority, enact, & execute, a Repeal of a former Law, confirm’d by the Crown,” or whether such an attempt was “not void, & a nullity, for Want of Power” in the legislature. The second was whether “the Commands, in the Instructions to the Gov[erno]r, not to pass unusual & extraordinary Bills, without the Suspending Clause” did “not operate like an Exception, out of the Powers, given in the Commission to the Gove[rno]r & thereby render this Act a mere Nullity, ab Initio.” Accordingly, when the board met in late October, it voted to send the removal act to William Murray and Sir Richard Lloyd, respectively attorney general and solicitor general, for an opinion on “whether the Legislature of Jamaica have a Power by their Constitution, to pass such a Law, to take immediate Effect, without the Crown’s Consent, & without inserting in it, a Clause, suspending its Execution, until the Pleasure of the Crown could be known.” A few days later, the board wrote Knowles, expressing its own displeasure that he should 98. Board of Trade to Privy Council, July 3, 1755, CO 139/20. 99. Rose Fuller to , Sept. 3, 1755; Rose Fuller to John Venn, Sept. 3, 1755; and Ferdinand John Paris to Fuller, Sept. 30, 1755, Fuller Family Papers, Bundle 19, No. 3, East Sussex Record Office.

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have assented to such a law without a suspending clause “after the very positive Instruction you have received from His Majesty upon this Point.”¹00 At the same time, Fuller and Paris were endeavoring unsuccessfully to bring Knowles’s persecution of Francis Delap before London authorities. In the view of his supporters, Delap’s treatment and trial represented a violation of all of the basic principles of English law. Pointing out that “his Judges had before found him Guilty in the Legislative as they have now in their Judicial Capacity,” they charged that the vindication of Knowles for his treatment of Delap had required a packed jury, complained that even after his conviction Delap remained a “mark of an outrageous & wanton Fac——n to throw their unruly Darts at,” and celebrated him as a genuine “Martyr to Liberty.” Judging Delap’s petition to the king unsuitable for presentation because of the nature of its prayer, his friends in London urged Delap and their allies in Jamaica to submit a new petition with a “proper prayer.” Delap’s case was “so flagrant,” Fuller wrote, that it afforded such “a fine oppertunity which may never again happen of establishing the liberty & property of ye colonies upon a pure & solid foundation and of trying the disposition of ye great men in England to us that I think we should be out of our senses if we did not prosecute it to the utmost.” The establishment of “the Liberty of ye Subject in ye colonies upon a just & solid foundation,” he wrote to a correspondent in Jamaica, was a matter in which “we are all soe deeply interested” that the case had to be pursued “or we are undone.”¹0¹ In the meantime, Knowles’s opponents in Jamaica complained that they lived under “a Scene of Oppression[,] venality & indeed every Species of immorality” and that this “Unhappy Country” had been “Subdued & Chained under a Yoke of Tyranny.” They could only hope that when Knowles’s “system of Government is detected, & laid open to Publick View” in London, metropolitan authorities would recall him, make him an “Example for all future G——s,” and restore all other Jamaica affairs “to their Pristine State.” “Our Publick Disorders daily encrease,” lamented Thomas Frearon, “so that if there be not a Speedy remove, I can[’]t say what the Consequences may be.” Without relief from Britain in the form of the disallowance of the removal bill, Edward Clarke warned Fuller, “this Country will languish away by Fraud, Corruption, & Oppression on one Side, and passion, perversity, & futility on ye other.” In 100. Paris to Fuller, Oct. 4, 1755, Fuller Family Papers, Bundle 19, No. 3; John Pownall to Murray and Lloyd, Oct. 30, 1755, ibid., Bundle 20, No. 7; Board of Trade to Knowles, Nov. 6, 1755, CO 138/29, ff. 70–71. 101. Edward Clarke to Fuller, Sept. 4, 1755; Fuller to , Sept. 3, 1755; Paris to Fuller, Nov. 12, 1755, Fuller Family Papers, Bundle 19, No. 3; Fuller to , Fall 1755, ibid., Bundle 20, No. 13.

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view of the impending war with France, the “Disorder & Confusion within” Jamaica seemed to its residents especially ominous. Unknown to his opponents, Knowles had indeed, already in July 1755, used the prospect of war to ask the Board of Trade for leave to resign the Jamaica governorship and return to sea.¹0² The disorder about which Clarke and Frearon complained was never more evident than during the first legislative sessions held since passage of the removal bill. Principally called to pass a tax bill to provide funds for metropolitan troops stationed in the island, the Assembly convened in late September 1755 to find the political balance shifting in the opposition’s favor. Over the previous few months, the death of two members of the governor’s party and the resignation of one member of the opposition had reduced the governor’s majority to four, but the defection of two members of the governor’s party and the possibility of gaining additional seats in the by-election to fi ll vacated seats combined to raise opposition hopes for regaining control of the Assembly. Led by former speaker Charles Price Sr., the opposition came to the opening session with plans, as a later writer charged, to “purge the House of several of its Members, regulate all the Courts of Justice and Public Offices upon their own Plan, and carry back the Court and Records to Spanish-town again.” When the Assembly met, the absence of one member of the governor’s party enabled the opposition to gain a majority of one, and it quickly pushed through votes to suspend two members of the governor’s party on dubious legal grounds, thereby gaining a working majority of one. This majority enabled the opposition to initiate an investigation of Knowles’s dismissal of judges and other public officers. In the debate over the money bills to pay the troops, one opposition member avowed “with the most insolent and indecent Language . . . that His Majesty, or his Ministers, might have taken warning by former Resolutions of the House, and have ordered his Governors to recall these Troops, for that they would not provide for them any longer,” and the House proceeded to extend the old money bills for just a few months in direct violation of Knowles’s instructions not to pass any bill for a shorter term than one year.¹0³ But Knowles, having, in his view, finally put “an End” to the power by which “the great Planters . . . had been long used to govern their Governors,” was determined, as one of his supporters later remarked, not to “suffer the 102. Edward Clarke to Rose Fuller, Sept. 3, Oct. 24, 1755; Thomas Frearon to Fuller, Oct. 15, 1755; Mark Hall to Fuller, Oct. 21, 1755, in Fuller Family Papers, Bundle 19, No. 3; Knowles to Board of Trade, July 25, 1755, CO 137/29, f. 50. 103. See, for a narrative reflective of Knowles’s point of view, An Historical Account of the Sessions of Assembly, for the Island of Jamaica: Which began on Tuesday the 23d of Sept. 1755 (London, 1757), 9, 16, 54.

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Reins that had been put into his Hands by his Royal Master to be wrested from him by a Party, which, by a Despotism long usurped and tamely submitted to, has reduced the Substitute of the Sovereign to a mere Instrument of their own Power, and made use of his Name as a Sanction to their Oppression.” Accordingly, on October 23, he prorogued the Assembly for an hour, a step that had the immediate effect of readmitting the two suspended members, which made the governor’s party equal in numbers to the opposition and gave Speaker Edward Manning, one of Knowles’s principal supporters, the deciding vote. When opposition members perceived what had happened, they tried to break up the house by leaving en masse, but the governor’s party used force to keep three of the opposition in the house and proceeded, in an election inquiry, to displace an absent member with one of their supporters and to expel another opposition member, thereby regaining a comfortable majority. When the sixteen opposition members who had left the house refused to return, the Assembly expelled all of them as well. With fewer members than were required for a quorum, the Assembly was unable to do further business until late November when the rump reduced the quorum from twenty-one to nineteen and eventually to fifteen, after which it passed a money bill in a manner “conformable to his majesty’s instructions” so that the troops could be supported, albeit many settlers refused to honor it.¹04 From the point of view of the opposition, these machinations represented a new low, even for the Knowles administration. Claiming that the prorogation for an hour and the subsequent expulsion of seventeen opposition members had no other purpose than to screen Knowles from the Assembly’s inquiry “into the Abuses in the several Courts of Justice” and other oppressive measures, they saw Jamaica, in the words of Edward Clarke, as “Languishing under ye most Despotic Acts of Government[,] Ruled by ye wanton will of a little Tyrant[,] the weight of whose power began to grow terrible,” a veritable “Babel of Power & iniquity” in which “the Ancient Frame of a well-constituted government” had been completely torn “to pieces” by Knowles’s set[t]ing aside all orders[,] rank & degrees amongst men—Rendering ye Administration of the Government weak & frail in all its branches by turning out fit and introducing unfit persons in all the offices Civil and Military—Making hasty dunces in ye Court of Chancery [and] passionate & petulant Decretal orders to ye manifest injury of good Substantial Men[’]s Credit & perhaps at ye Ruin of orphans most certainly to their great Loss—Granting partial Admin104. Ibid., 4, 71; “The Prorogation for an hour,” Mar. 17, 1756, Fuller Family Papers, Bundle 18, No. 7d; Knowles to Board of Trade, Dec. 1, 1755, CO 137/29, ff. 98–99; Assembly Journals, Sept. 23–24, Oct. 23, Nov. 11, 19, 1755, 4:533–35, 540–44, 549–50.

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istrations (as ordinary) to favorites no ways entitled there to the prejudice of other persons.

“In short,” Clarke declared, “by every iniquitous Act of G——n——t he has perpetuated a name here to Posterity that will sting in the Nostrils of all Mankind When not one Single Virtue in either Public or a Private will be remembered to his Honor!”¹05 Perhaps sensing that he could no longer keep his coalition together, Knowles reportedly became “a mere Frantic,” bolting his doors, remaining in his house for a day or two at a time, becoming “suspicious of Every Body he Speaks to, Jealous of Ye Advice given him even by those he had always Consulted,” and having “no reliance . . . but upon himself & even there he is not at peace.” Starting in mid-December 1755, he began pressing his request for permission to resign. “For want of proper Support” from London, he wrote the Board of Trade in early 1756, “I find myself driven to a state of desperation . . . and entirely unable to discharge the Duty of the Trust reposed in me.”¹06 London authorities soon granted this request. By early January 1756 Knowles’s opponents had gotten a petition to London complaining about the “extraordinary and Illegal methods” the governor’s party had used “to obtain a Majority” in the October Assembly, and the Board of Trade concluded that “the Minds of His Majesty’s Subjects” in Jamaica were so “greatly inflamed, and [such] great Heats and Animosities have prevailed,” that Knowles, whether or not he was responsible, should be removed. Perhaps because metropolitan authorities recognized that Knowles’s maladroit behavior derived in some major part from their insistence that he not deviate from his instructions, the Privy Council, on January 27, did not dismiss him but merely gave him leave to resign.¹07 At the same time, the board was moving to resolve the dispute over removing the capital to Kingston. On December 27, 1755, Murray and Lloyd, the attorney and solicitor generals, reported, after extensive hearings, that Knowles should not have passed the removal act and two accompanying statutes without suspending clauses, and on February 12 the board, complaining that “the Practice, which is become too frequent in His Majesty’s Colonies, of passing Laws of a Nature not warranted by his Majesty’s Instructions, which take 105. An Historical Account of the Sessions of Assembly, for the Island of Jamaica, 60; Edward Clarke to Rose Fuller, Dec. 20, 1755, Fuller Family Papers, Bundle 19, No. 3. 106. Edward Clarke to Rose Fuller, Dec. 20, 1755, Fuller Family Papers, Bundle 19, No. 3; Knowles to Earl of Holderness, Dec. 13, 1755, Egerton Manuscripts 3490, ff. 36–37: Knowles to Board of Trade, Jan. 2, 1756, CO 137/29, f. 107. 107. Board of Trade to Privy Council, Nov. 4, 1755, Jan. 21, 1756, CO 138/20, pp. 137, 150–53; Order in Council, Jan. 27, 1756, CO 137/29, f. 92.

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immediate Effect and continue in force till His Majesty’s Pleasure be signified to the contrary, is productive of Consequences very prejudicial to His Majesty’s Service,” reported against the removal act and three other statutes passed at the same time. On February 19, 1756, the Privy Council Committee on Plantation Affairs voted to accept the report. Also in February, the Crown appointed Henry Moore, a Jamaican with close ties to the ministry, lieutenant governor to succeed Knowles and instructed him to dissolve the Assembly, call new elections, and get the new Assembly’s opinion on the wisdom of moving the capital.¹08 With Knowles on the way out and the removal bill in the process of disallowance, the Jamaica lobby in London struck directly at Knowles in the most public way. In late January 1756, William Beckford, Jamaica’s most extensive landholder who had become an absentee in England in the early 1750s and was elected to Parliament in 1754, condemned Knowles in the House of Commons for his “tyrannic government of Jamaica” and moved for all the papers necessary for a prosecution. When the ministers tried to head off an inquiry on the grounds that Knowles had already been recalled, William Pitt chastised the ministry for “endeavouring to screen the guilty,” and the ministry agreed to call for papers, which minister Henry Fox collected from the Board of Trade and presented to the House over the next two months. But it would be another year before the House formally considered the charges against Knowles.¹09 Knowles did not leave Jamaica until early July, and during the intervening months public life in Jamaica remained embittered. Knowles continued to denounce “the People (the Rebells to All Government I mean),” who, notwithstanding all his efforts, still seemed to be “much in the same disposition of Mind” that had led them to oppose all his measures to shore up royal authority in the colony.¹¹0 On the other side, the opposition found nothing to admire in the Knowles administration, charging that he had appointed Catholics to office¹¹¹ and arbitrarily forbidden people to leave the colony.¹¹² The impris108. Murray and Lloyd to Board of Trade, Dec. 27, 1755, CO 137/29, ff. 70–71; Account of the Proceedings before the Privy Council on Removal of the Seat of Government in Jamaica, [1758], PC 1/50/45, National Archives, London; Board of Trade to Privy Council, Feb. 12, Mar. 9, 1756, CO 138/20, pp. 160–66, 172–76. 109. Horace Walpole, Memoirs of the Reign of George II, 2 vols. (London, 1846), 2:152–53; Journals of the House of Commons (London, various dates), 27:399, 457, 468–69, 530 (Jan. 23, Feb. 18, 24, Mar. 17, 1756); Henry Fox to Board of Trade, Jan. 26, 1756, CO 137/29, ff. 82–84. 110. Knowles to Board of Trade, Apr. 7, 1756, CO 137/29, f. 112. 111. See to Earl of Holderness, Feb. 16, 1756, and Samuel Dicker to Holderness, Feb. 19, 1756, Egerton Manuscripts 3490, ff. 38–41. 112. Knowles to John Gregory, June 30, 1756; John Gregory to Charles Knowles, July 2, 1756; and John Gregory to Stephen Fuller, July 7, 1756, Fuller Family Papers, Bundle 19, No. 3.

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oned Francis Delap continued to deplore the failure of due process of law in Jamaica under the Knowles regime. Metropolitans should not assume “that we are Free, or in a Condition to State our Grievances, or that our J——s, C——ts, Records &c, are upon the same fair footing . . . as in England. In England,” he wrote, “you have Fair-Play,” but in Jamaica one could only expect “to be tryd by a Gang of Sh—p—s and P—k P——k-ts, who have first Rob’d you, had afterwards charged you with Robbing them, who could at one and the same Time Act the several parts of Inquistions, accusers, W-t—ss, J-ug—s, and J——rs, all of them Consederate and Unanimous to Punish you first and then to try and find you Guilty.” With Fuller, Delap continued to hope that his “unfortunate Case” would “Attract the Attention of all Friends of Truth and Liberty” and “be considered as that of all His Majesty[’]s Subjects and Especially of those Residing in the Colonies.”¹¹³ Even as Knowles was preparing to leave the colony in June, the opposition feared that he and his allies, still in control of the Assembly, would try to “take some very extraordinary steps,” such as passing the removal bill with a suspending clause and thereby at once answering the chief metropolitan objection to the measure and making sure that the capital would remain in Kingston.¹¹4 Although Knowles reportedly “continued his Mad Rash Conduct to the very last day,” his departure in early July fi lled the opposition with optimism. “After such a Series of Injustice[,] Tyranny & Confusion,” said Delap, who had recovered his freedom only a week before Knowles’s departure, Jamaica, in the words of Spanish Town resident Charles White, now had “a noble Prospect, of Tranquility being once more restored to this so long distracted Country.” The “Dog Star is set and no more rages amongst us,” White said, “and all his pestiferous influence ceases.” “Everything has been done for us at home[,] as the phrase is[,] that our hearts could wish,” White declared in expressing his gratitude to metropolitan authorities for removing Knowles, and the Spanish Town interest looked forward to Knowles’s receiving his final comeuppance in London. It was impossible, wrote William Nedham, “that the Ministry will Protect & Support a Man of his Stamp.”¹¹5

113. Delap to Ferdinand J. Paris, Feb. 4, Apr. 19, 1756, Fuller Family Papers, Bundle 19, Nos. 12a, 12b. 114. John Gordon to Rose Fuller, June 15, 1756, Fuller Family Papers, Bundle 19, No. 3. 115. William Nedham to Rose Fuller, July 24, 1756, Francis Delap to Ferdinand J. Paris, July 8, 1756, and Charles White to Rose Fuller, July 30, 1756, Fuller Family Papers, Bundle 19, No. 3.

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When Henry Moore, newly appointed lieutenant governor, succeeded Knowles in July 1756, the contest over the removal of the capital entered a fourth and final phase marked by relative political tranquility and the eventual resolution of this bitter dispute. Moore gained the instant applause of the Spanish Town party when he “immediately dissolved Our Oxhead Assembly of P—k P—kets,” issued writs for a new Assembly to meet in Spanish Town in midAugust, and announced his intention to live in the King’s House at Spanish Town. Moore himself was remarkably sanguine about his prospects for “reconciling the Animosities which have reign’d so long among us.” Unlike Knowles, he made no attempt to interfere in elections, and he wrote his English patron, the Earl of Holderness, that the Kingston interest had been so discredited through its association with Knowles that it would be unable “to return more than eleven Members,” the “inclination of the People” tending hugely toward the people who had had no association with Knowles’s party. Expressing confidence that the Assembly would “set forth the real Sentiments of the People, in regard to” the location of the capital, he confidently predicted that “in a very short time all odious distinctions will be laid aside, & we shall unite again for the Public Service.”¹¹6 Thomas Pinnock, a Jamaican who had supported Knowles for most of his tenure, was not so sure. Doubting that Knowles’s presence was in itself the real “Obstacle to harmony” in Jamaica public life, he expressed the fear that “Contention” was “the darling passion of this Community.” “This Island is healthy, pleasant, and fruitfull, and affords the Industrious Man a genteel and agreeable living for his labour” so that “he may live Comfortably & Enjoy his little in great cheerfulness, provided he can curb his Ambition,” he declared, “but as our Government over Slaves is allmost Absolute, so it intoxicates the brain, and creates in us a most notorious Desire to Lordity over our Equalls, from whence great men can Bear no Controle, nor have they any bounds to their passions. I have been here from England [since] the entrance of 1731, and I have seen little or no alteration in the minds of people for as the Old ones have dropt of[f ], the like principles have been in their Successors.”¹¹7 For the short term, at least, Pinnock could scarcely have been more accurate. In the election for the new Assembly, just nine of thirty-two members 116. Francis Delap to Ferdinand J. Paris, July 8, 1756, Fuller Family Papers, Bundle 19, No. 3; Moore to Holderness, June 29, July 9, July 26, 1756, Egerton Manuscripts 3490, ff. 42–47. 117. Thomas Pinnock to , June 26, 1756, Miscellaneous Manuscripts, 490, Jamaica National Library.

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adhered to the Kingston party, and when that body met on August 17, it immediately signaled its political colors by electing Charles Price Sr. speaker. As the long-term speaker, Price was the nominal leader of the Spanish Town party. At Moore’s request, the Assembly quickly set to work responding to the metropolitan call for the “unprejudiced and dispassionate sense of the legislature” upon the issue of the location of the capital. On September 3, it sent an address to the king in which it expressed its view that Spanish Town was the “proper place” for the capital. At the same time, it condemned Knowles’s removal bill as “an unjustifiable and unconstitutional” attempt to render “the prerogative subservient to the purposes of a few, instead of following the royal example of your majesty, by making it the protection of your subjects in general.” Offering to satisfy the legitimate grievances of Kingston merchants by establishing circuit courts to be held in Kingston and ports of entry in other parts of the island, the Assembly prayed that “your loyal subjects will be restored to the full enjoyment of their rights and privileges” as they had existed before Knowles undertook his nefarious schemes to rig elections and subvert the wishes of a majority of the island’s inhabitants.¹¹8 Although Moore predicted that this address and his own “perseverance and moderation” would produce a reconciliation, subsequent events proved that he was far too sanguine. The Jamaica Council was still controlled by Knowles’s appointees, and its behavior demonstrated that Jamaica was yet a long way from political quietude. Not only did it refuse to join in the Assembly’s address to the king, it sent an address of its own reaffirming its commitment to the removal bill and the principles that lay behind it.¹¹9 At the same time the Assembly began to move aggressively to investigate what it referred to in a letter to Jamaica’s London agent as the “unconstitutional methods made use of, to get an assembly to answer the purposes of Mr. Knowles,” including the imprisonment of Francis Delap. From late September through mid-November, its committee on the state of the island subjected the behavior of Knowles and his allies to what it referred to as a “parliamentary enquiry.” On October 9, it summarized the preliminary results of its findings in an address to Moore. In this address, the Assembly asked Moore to suspend Philip Pinnock, whom the Assembly subsequently denounced as “the principal promoter of all the grievances and uneasinesses” Jamaica had experienced under Knowles, from his seat on the Council and to remove him from the chief justiceship, principally on the grounds that his treatment of Delap 118. Assembly Journals, Aug. 17, 19, Sept. 3, 1756, 5:572–73, 575–76, 586–87. 119. Moore to Holderness, Sept. 1, Oct. 3, 1756, Egerton Manuscripts, 3490, ff. 48–49, 54–55; Assembly Journals, Sept. 7, 28, 1756, 4:589, 607–9.

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had polluted “the fountains of Justice” in the colony. “The unconstitutional, illegal, and cruel treatment, Mr. Delap received” at the hands of Pinnock and his fellow judges, the Assembly complained, “wants a precedent, unless we look back to the age of the star-chamber,” while the condition of his confinement was unknown outside the bounds of “the Turkish dominions.” Because Pinnock remained a powerful advocate for the removal bill in the Council and a staunch foe of Moore, the lieutenant governor eagerly granted this request, suspending Pinnock from his seat on the Council and removing him from the chief justiceship. This action put Moore at loggerheads with the majority of the Council, threatened to undermine “his plan of moderation,” and ultimately forced him to suspend six additional councillors, a move that brought him the Assembly’s hearty approval. With neither the governor nor the Council on its side, the Kingston interest no longer had a power base from which to pursue its claims.¹²0 In London during the winter and early spring of 1757, the Jamaican lobby renewed its campaign against Knowles in the House of Commons. With the backing of First Minister William Pitt, William Beckford, who had introduced the subject to the House in January 1756, and Rose Fuller, recently elected to Parliament, among others prepared an elaborate brief against Knowles in February 1757, listing twenty specific examples to prove that he had “Enterprized many things to divide” Jamaicans “into Parties and Factions contrary to the Established Custom and Laws of the Island,” attempted “to destroy the Freedom of Elections and Privileges of the Members of the Assembly,” thereby seeking to intimidate “the Legislative Power” of Jamaica, interfered with judicial proceedings, and “wantonly exercised an Arbitrary and tyrannical Power ag[ain]st such of the Judges, Counsellors, Members of Assembly and Officers of the Crown as had Courage and Integrity to represent against his unlawful and dangerous proceedings.” Six resolutions rehearsed in detail and condemned Knowles’s persecution of Francis Delap.¹²¹ In his defense, Knowles’s supporters produced an elaborate pamphlet detailing the history of 120. Assembly Journals, Sept. 7, 22, 25, 29–30, Oct. 2, 7, 9, 20, 29, Nov. 3, 6, 10, 13, 1756, 4:590, 599, 603–5, 610–13, 616–33, 641, 661–66, 669–77, 683–86, 689–715, 717–20; Moore to Board of Trade, Nov. 4, 1756, CO 137/29; Moore to Lord Granville, Nov. 4, 27, 1756, PC 1/58/3; Moore to Holderness, Nov. 27, 1756, Egerton Manuscripts, 3490, ff. 58–59; Zachary Bayly to Rose Fuller, Jan. 20, 1757, Fuller Family Papers, Bundle 19, No. 3. 121. Brief on the Charge against Charles Knowles Esqr. Late Governor of Jamaica, to be heard before the Committee of the whole House, Feb. 22, 1757, Buccleuch Muniments, SRO/ GD/224/299/4, Dalkeith, Scotland; Proposed resolutions against Knowles, n.d., Fuller Family Papers, Bundle 20, No. 14. A preliminary version of the brief, dated Feb. 27, 1757, may be found in Fuller Family Papers, Bundle 18, No. 7n.

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his administration and arguing that the enmity against Knowles arose entirely from his determination to put an end to the power by which Jamaican planters “had been long used to governing their Governors.” His only fault, the anonymous writer of this pamphlet claimed, lay in his refusal to “suffer the Reins that had been put into his Hands by his Royal Master to be wrested from him by a Party, which by a Despotism long usurped and tamely submitted to,” had “reduced the Substitute of their Sovereign to a mere Instrument of their own Power, and made use of his Names as a Sanction to their Oppression.”¹²² Although the Jamaicans succeeded in getting the House of Commons to call for additional papers on the Knowles administration, Pitt’s resignation on April 4 derailed their efforts, and by the time Pitt returned to office on June 18, the Knowles matter had been settled—and in a way far from congenial to Jamaican settler interests. Not only did the House fail to condemn Knowles, it resurrected the Board of Trade’s adverse October 1754 report on the Jamaica Assembly’s defiant resolutions of October 29, 1753, and—for the very first time in the history of British imperial governance—intervened in the domestic internal affairs of an American colony by passing on May 23, 1757, three resolutions denouncing the Assembly’s resolutions of October 1753. The first and second of these resolutions declared the Assembly’s claim to exclusive control over public funds and to the right to appoint officers to handle those funds to be “Illegal, repugnant to the terms of his majesty’s commission to his governor of the said island, and derogatory of the Rights of the Crown & people of Great-Britain.” The third denied that the Crown’s demand for suspending clauses in unusual Jamaican legislation represented any “alteration of the constitution of that island” or was in any way “derogatory of the rights of ” the king’s “subjects there.”¹²³ The high point of the initial phases of the metropolitan effort to tighten the reins of empire, these resolutions—emanating from the metropolis’s highest power—seem to have carried little weight in Jamaica. So that “his majesty’s subjects in” Jamaica might “be fully apprized of the sense of ” the House of Commons upon the Jamaica Assembly’s “extraordinary claims,” Board of Trade secretary John Pownall transmitted the resolutions to Lieutenant Gov122. An Historical Account of the Sessions of Assembly, for the Island of Jamaica, 4, 71. 123. See Journals of the House of Commons, Feb. 1, 7, 22–24, Mar. 1, 28, 31, Apr. 4–6, 25, 27, 29, May 4, 10, 12, 17, 18, 20, 23, 1757, 18:674, 683, 725–27, 733, 743, 800–21, 825, 833, 836–39, 854–55, 858, 864, 883, 889, 898, 900, 902–3, 910–11. The resolutions are on pp. 910–11. See also Pitt to Board of Trade, Feb. 17, 19, Mar. 21, Apr. 4, 20, 1757, CO 137/29, ff. 235–52; List of Papers laid before House of Commons, Apr. 5, May 9, 1757, CO 138/20, pp. 200–203, 207. The Board of Trade’s original report of Oct. 15, 1754, may be found in CO 138/20, pp. 41–79. See also Metcalf, Royal Government and Political Conflict in Jamaica, 135–36.

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ernor Henry Moore just eleven days after they had passed, and Moore duly transmitted them to the Assembly when it met in November 1757. Although the Assembly entered the resolutions in its minutes and voted that they “lie upon the table, for the perusal of the members,” it took no further notice of them, neither acknowledging their receipt nor challenging their validity.¹²4 As William Lewis reported to Rose Fuller just two months later, “most of the Gentlemen” in the island, seemed to have had “a surfeit of Contention, and” were “willing to pass over some defects rather than continue to deserve the Character of [a] turbulent ungovernable people, which in England ’tis said is given to us.”¹²5 The same sentiments probably also accounted for the dropping of the Delap affair. Delap, unsatisfied with the Assembly’s investigation of the previous fall, which he denounced for its failure to get “to the Bottom of the principal Matters, the great Abuses of power under the late Adm[inistratio]n especially those relevant to the Freedom of Elections, the Privileges of the Assembly, & other Fundamental points,” continued to press his case for another two years. Reminding Jamaica’s principal political leaders in both Jamaica and England that his case was not that “of a Single Man, that had been ill treated . . . but took in the freedom of the People, the Whole Matter of Elections, & indeed the very fundamentals of our Constitution,” he argued that “a better Opportunity could not happen, for getting our Rights & Liberty’s & those of the Colony’s in general fi xed and Ascertained” and urged his supporters to push “Mr. Knowles, both at Law, & in the House of Commons” for “the Acts of Tyranny & Oppression they have been guilty of towards me” and “to leave no Stone unturned” to vindicate him and to “Support . . . the common cause of Liberty and of the Colonies.” But his ministrations were of little avail. As late as October 1758, he was still complaining of “the Shamefull Neglect of the Assembly or Principal Gentlemen” in not avidly pursuing his case and of their “scandalous . . . Desertion of the Cause.” “Strange!” he declared, “that such an opening Should be lost” for “Getting our Rights & Libertys better Settled and Secured.”¹²6 The Jamaican political establishment exhibited a similar spirit of accommodation in its appointment of a new London agent. When Lords Holderness and Halifax both recommended Lovel Stanhope for the Jamaica agency, Ferdinand J. Paris, solicitor for the Spanish Town interests, pointed out that Stanhope was a mere “Creature of ” the “Courtiers” and warned against the dangers 124. Assembly Journals, Nov. 8, 1757, 5:28–29. 125. Lewis to Fuller, Jan. 17, 1758, Fuller Family Papers, Bundle 19, No. 3. 126. Delap to Charles Price Sr., Apr. 21, 25, 1757, Fuller Family Papers, Bundle 18, No. 12c; Delap to Stephen Fuller, Oct. 8, 1758, Fuller Family Papers, Bundle 19, No. 3.

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of being “drawn into such a Snare.” If “the Gentlemen of Jamaica” give way to “one single application of this Sort,” he cautioned, “they may rest assured, they’l never be free Agents Themselves, nor have a free Agent for them, hereafter; but their Agency will be lookt upon, as a Court Perquisite, to be always insisted on, as a Thing usual, & of course; for some great Man’s poor Relation, or Dependant.” Thus forfeiting control over the agent, Paris predicted, would make “certain, that all their Purposes & Designs & Instructions, would be instantly communicated to & as instantly defeated by the Ministers unless they perfectly quadrated with their own Schemes.” Declaring that the colony agent “sho[u]d be very faithful, & desirous to serve his Jama[ica] Ma[ster]s,” Paris called upon the Jamaican Assembly, which he referred to as “a Body of People, over whom no Courtiers have any coercive Authority, as yet,” to insist upon its right to be “free in the Choice of so high a Trust” and thereby “keep Themselves free, & not bind Themselves, their Posterity, & their Country, in Fetters, to any Court Minion, whatever.”¹²7 But, as planter William Gale reported to Rose Fuller, the recommendations of Holderness and Halifax, “to whom we are so immediately indebted for the Late Change” in the governorship, “had such Weight, that, as soon as they were known, to have spoke their Inclinations in the Affair, the Election [of Stanhope] was Unanimous.”¹²8 No doubt, the Assembly’s failure either explicitly to challenge Parliament’s resolutions or to pursue the Delap case also had much to do with the fact that the fate of the capital removal bill was still pending in London. On this complicated issue, the wheels of the administration moved slowly. On February 8, 1757, the Board of Trade held a hearing to which it invited representatives of both Spanish Town and Kingston interests. At this meeting the board outlined a plan whereby the removal act would be disallowed, the repository of records and the supreme court would remain in Spanish Town, the governor’s residence and the site for Assembly meetings would be left to the governor’s discretion, and circuit courts and ports of entry would be established in Kingston and elsewhere in Jamaica “for the Ease & Conveniency” of suitors, witnesses, jurors, and masters of vessels. The attorney and solicitor generals, Robert Henley and Charles Yorke, took more than three months to approve 127. Paris to Stephen Fuller, Nov. 16, 1756, Fuller Family Papers, Bundle 19, No. 1; italics added. 128. Henry Moore to Holderness, Feb. 27, Mar. 20, 1757, Egerton Manuscripts 3490, ff. 77–78, 85–86; Edmund Hyde to Rose Fuller, May 2, 1757, William Gale to Rose Fuller, May 3, 1757, James Prevost to Rose Fuller, May 4, 1757, Samuel Whitehorne to Rose Fuller, May 7, 1757, John Venn to Ferdinand J. Paris, May 21, 1757, John Morse to Rose Fuller, June 5, 1757, William Lewis to Rose Fuller, June 6, 1757, Thomas Frearon to Rose Fuller, June 25, 1757, William Wynter to Rose Fuller, June 25, 1757, and William B. Ellis to Rose Fuller, Aug. 28, 1757, Fuller Family Papers, Bundle 19, No. 3.

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this plan, with the provision that the Crown should not establish new courts without “an Act of the Legislature in Jamaica, or by the Parliament of Great Britain.” On May 25, 1757, the Board of Trade finally laid the plan before the Privy Council, which on June 15 asked for further details on port locations and suitable circuit court districts. The board took nearly a half year to produce this information.¹²9 In the meantime, public life in Jamaica remained outwardly calm. Moore peppered his London superiors with letters, claiming to have succeeded in “restoring Peace to this distracted Country”—without violating his instructions.¹³0 Some members of the Jamaican political establishment wished for the appointment of “a Man of Family and Spirit” to succeed Knowles as full governor, while others distrusted the “new Politicians” who seemed to want to become “Great Men” without attending to “the business of the Country.” “Poor Jamaica,” lamented the planter William Lewis, “hath lately been deprived of so many Gentlemen of Capacity and Fortune, that it seems to be on its last Legs.” Still others continued to hope that justice would “be administered to” Knowles, “that late Disturber of our Peace and perverter of our constitutional Rights.” Except for the Kingston partisans, however, everyone agreed with Moore that Jamaicans “enjoy[ed] perfect Tranquility under the present mild Administration.” As William Gale wrote Rose Fuller, there was no longer in Jamaica any “such thing as Delaping or Dragooning a Man out of his Liberty or Estate.”¹³¹ Yet, they also agreed that the “Minds of the People” could never “be at rest . . . as long as the Fate of ” the removal bill was “in Suspense.” “As soon as this affair is determined,” Thomas Frearon wrote Rose Fuller in June 1757, “the Heats & Animosities in this Country will subside & . . . we shall again become a united People, an Event much to be desired by all good Men, especially in this Time of War with a potent Enemy.” As the decision dragged on through 1757, however, they became increasingly concerned as to “whether we shall be restored to our Rights, or not,” and they became more and more wor129. Stephen Fuller to Charles Price, Thomas Frearon, and John Ellis, Feb. 9, 1757, and Stephen Fuller to Gentlemen of Jamaica, Feb. 9, 1757, Fuller Family Papers, Bundle 19, No. 3; Account of Proceedings before the Council on Removal of the Seat of Government in Jamaica, n.d., PC 1/50/45; Henley and Yorke to Board of Trade, CO 137/30, ff. 1–3; Board of Trade to Privy Council, May 25, 1757, CO 138/20, pp. 205–25. 130. Moore to Holderness, Jan. 18, June 29, Oct. 31, 1757, Feb. 12, 1758, Egerton Manuscripts, 3490, ff. 67–68, 99–100, 103–4, 107–8. 131. Zachary Bayly to Rose Fuller, Jan. 20, 1757, John Venn to Rose Fuller, May 22, 1757, William Lewis to Rose Fuller, June 6, 1757, and Jan. 17, 1758, Charles White to Rose Fuller, Mar. 19, 1757, William Gale to Rose Fuller, May 3, 1757, Fuller Family Papers, Bundle 19, No 3. See also Assembly Journals, Sept. 27, 30, 1757, 5:1–2, 5.

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ried when they heard that the merchants of London, Bristol, and Liverpool had petitioned Parliament in favor of the removal bill. “We wait with the highest Impatience for the decision at home,” William Lewis wrote Rose Fuller in January 1758, “and with great Astonishment that it is so long in Agitation, from whence arise some fears and Apprehensions.”¹³² Finally, in December 1757, the Board of Trade completed its plan to establish three new ports in Jamaica and divide the island into three counties that would double as circuit court districts. On the grounds that “the Intervention of Parliament here in Matters which relate to the peculiar Police and private Oeconomy of particular Colonys has not been usual, and may therefore if introduced in this Case excite Jealousy and Uneasiness in the Minds of His Majesty’s Subjects in that Island,” the board opted to leave this piece of legislation in the hands of the Jamaica Assembly. But it did recommend that the attorney and solicitor generals prepare a draft of a bill to establish circuit courts and counties to be sent to Jamaica, not as a piece of legislation that the Jamaica Assembly had to pass, but merely “as an Instruction to the Governor . . . for his Guidance and Direction [in] passing such Law.” Accepting this report, the Privy Council’s committee on colonial affairs directed the preparation of this draft legislation. But it took another six months for the attorney and solicitor generals to complete this work. On June 29, 1758, more than four years after it had first taken up the matter on May 29, 1754, the Privy Council formally disallowed the removal law and sanctioned the Board of Trade’s proposals for settling the Jamaican dispute. A week later, the board transmitted this outcome to Jamaica.¹³³ Reaching the island in late September, this news set off elaborate celebrations in Spanish Town, where local residents burned effigies of Knowles, his flagship, and “an eminent merchant” of Kingston, probably the then deceased merchant Edward Manning. Moore duly laid notice of the disallowance of the removal bill and associated acts before the Assembly, then in session, and recommended passage of the draft act dividing Jamaica into three counties, complete with circuit courts. Overjoyed, the Assembly immediately prepared an address of thanks to the king, expressing its great sense of gratitude and “duty 132. Moore to Holderness, Apr. 27, 1757, Egerton Manuscripts 3490, ff. 87–88; Frearon to Rose Fuller, June 25, 1757, James Prevost to Rose Fuller, May 4, 1757, William Wynter to Rose Fuller, June 25, 1757, William Lewis to Rose Fuller, Jan. 17, 1758, Fuller Family Papers, Bundle 19, No. 3. 133. Account of Proceedings before the Council on Removal of Seat of Government in Jamaica, n.d., PC 1/50/45, National Archives, London; Board of Trade to Privy Council, Dec. 8, 1757, CO 138/20, pp. 228–36; Privy Council Minutes, June 28, 29, 1758, PC 2/106, pp. 179–83, 186–90; Board of Trade to Henry Moore, July 5, 1758, CO 138/20, pp. 408–9. See also Ferdinand J. Paris to Rose Fuller, Dec. 2, 1758, Fuller Family Papers, Bundle 19, No. 2.

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to your majesty and your people,” a phrase that hinted at a separate political status and identity, and then set to work on the draft act. The Assembly made a number of small modifications to meet local circumstances, but essentially accepted the draft act in the form submitted to it. Moore ecstatically reported that the Assembly had passed the bill “with no more Opposition to it than will barely shew the Efforts of a Faction Allmost extinguished.”¹³4 The long constitutional crisis in Jamaica was seemingly over. When George Haldane, the newly appointed governor of Jamaica, arrived in the colony in April 1759, Moore was able, as he later reported, to deliver “the Government in perfect tranquility.” Haldane did nothing during his short tenure to alter this situation. Some Kingston inhabitants offered him a house and pen to reside in Kingston, but he “politely refused” the offer, evidently intent upon not repeating Knowles’s mistakes. When he met the Assembly on May 1, he was delighted to hear it praise the settlement of the previous year as a set of regulations “justly calculated to give proper relief to one part of ” the Crown’s “dutiful subjects” in Kingston while “at the same time, preserving the legal rights of the other” in Spanish Town. He was especially pleased when the Assembly, in an obvious move to make sure that the governor would continue to reside in Spanish Town, voted £12,000 to purchase lands near the capitol for the governor’s use “and to be annex’d forever to the Crown.” Though he did not himself expect to profit much from this measure, Haldane predicted that within a few years it would provide a substantial revenue that would put “governors forever afterwards out of the power of the people.”¹³5 Haldane’s sudden death, on July 26, 1759, returned Henry Moore to the governorship, which he held for more than two years, until the arrival of Haldane’s replacement, William Henry Lyttelton, in December 1761. Moore’s tenure was hardly placid. In April 1760 the island was wracked by the most general slave uprising in its history. Led by a charismatic slave foreman called Tacky, the rebellion spread rapidly from the north coast eastward and westward and lasted for more than three months. The Jamaica militia managed to suppress it with the help of the British troops stationed on the island and the independent Maroon population, which honored its treaty commitment to hunt down runaway slaves. The rebellion put the Jamaican settler community 134. Assembly Journals, Oct. 3–4, 18, 1758, 5:68–70, 78; Moore to Board of Trade, Oct. 3, Nov. 12, 1758, CO 137/20, ff. 135, 145. 135. Haldane to Board of Trade, Apr. 23, May 11, July 20, 1759, CO 137/30, ff. 183–84, 191–93, 233–34; Haldane to Newcastle, Apr. 23, May 20, 1759, Newcastle Papers, Additional Manuscripts 32890, ff. 280–81, and 32891, ff. 202–3; Moore to Newcastle, July 29, 1759, Egerton Manuscripts 3490, ff. 133–34; John Venn to Rose Fuller, July 18, 1759, Fuller Family Papers, Bundle 19, No. 3; Edward Clarke to Rose Fuller, Apr. 10, 1759, Fuller Family Papers, Bundle 20, No. 3; Assembly Journals, May 1, 3, 5, 1759, 5:115, 118, 120–21.

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into a panic, but it also helped to allay political unrest within the colony. As Jamaica’s factions united in an appeal to Britain for more troops, Moore’s second stint as governor was relatively quiet. The grave constitutional crisis of the 1750s, provoked by aggressive metropolitan efforts to trim the authority of the Jamaican settler establishment, seemed finally to have run its course.¹³6 Whether metropolis or colony had gained most from this controversy and the developments that preceded it could not have been totally clear to contemporaries. Through its extreme claims of October 1754, the Jamaica Assembly had invited the attention and unprecedented intrusion of the British Parliament into Jamaica’s internal governance. In the face of metropolitan resistance, moreover, the Assembly had had to back down from its most extreme claim, the authority to appoint revenue collectors, and maintained a tenuous hold on the principle by naming the Crown’s receiver general as collector. By accepting the essentials of the 1758 draft legislation for dividing the colony into counties, the Assembly also opened up the possibility of forfeiting some of its legislative initiative to the metropolitan government. Finally, in the rush to ensure that Jamaica’s governors would continue to reside in Spanish Town, the Assembly contributed to make metropolitan governors more independent financially. On the other hand, the Assembly’s control over the island’s finances, the foundational source for its extensive authority in the island’s governance, remained virtually absolute, and, perhaps most important, it had never given way on the metropolitan demand that it include suspending clauses in legislation that either altered already confirmed laws or was of an unusual nature. Finally, the provincial political establishment could interpret the metropolitan government’s repudiation of Knowles’s efforts to move the capital to Kingston and destroy the political base of the planter establishment as a vindication of Jamaica’s customary rights and of the elaborate constitutional arguments constructed by Veridicus to defend those rights. In short, a decade of close attention to Jamaica affairs had left constitutional arrangements almost exactly where they had been when metropolitan authorities undertook to lessen colonial autonomy in the late 1740s. VIII How far the Jamaican establishment would go to defend its vision of the Jamaican constitution was revealed early in William Henry Lyttelton’s administration. On February 15, 1762, the Privy Council, upon the recommendation of 136. See Metcalf, Royal Government and Political Conflict in Jamaica, 150–52; Assembly Journals, Dec. 15, 1760, 5:244.

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the Board of Trade, disallowed four Jamaica acts passed between 1756 and 1761 having to do with the regulation of imports and the treatment of prize ships during the Seven Years’ War. In its long report on these acts, the board made it clear that, notwithstanding its lack of success over the previous twelve years in bending the Jamaica Assembly to its will, it had by no means abandoned the objective of diminishing colonial autonomy and expanding metropolitan authority in the American empire. The report condemned the Jamaica legislature for eliminating duties imposed by a 1728 act confirmed by the Crown and called upon the Crown “to discountenance the irregular practice, which has but too much prevailed in all your majesty’s colonies, of setting aside the provisions of perpetual laws confirmed by the crown, by temporary laws made to take immediate effect, without the royal consent.” For making general commercial regulations on matters “to which the jurisdiction of the British legislature alone” could “extend,” the Jamaica legislature, the board declared, was guilty of “an arrogant assumption of power” that was “not warranted by the constitution” and “justly” deserved “the severest censure.” Regarding an act that established the death penalty for some categories of smuggling, the board expressed its amazement that “the legislature of Jamaica could have so far departed from the known and established principles of Justice, equity, and reason, and the laws of the mother country, as to have adopted so sanguinary a clause.” In closing, the board called for “such declaration of your majesty’s disapprobation and animadversion, as the conduct of the legislature of the island of Jamaica, in passing laws of so extraordinary and unprecedented a nature, shall appear to your majesty to deserve.”¹³7 When Lyttelton laid this report before the Jamaica Assembly in October 1762, he was appalled by its response. The Privy Council had signified its willingness to assent to a new prize law that was free from the objectionable clauses in the disallowed laws, but the Assembly would have none of it. Rather, as it informed Lyttelton, it had “maturely weighed the purport of the proposition, permitting them to re-enact the provisions of the act passed in 1756, for the regulation of prizes” and decided that it “did not incline to accept the proposition.” Bolding asserting that it did not “admit the objection of the board of trade to that act to carry any weight” and that its members were “by no means disposed to submit their sentiments to the determination of that board,” the Assembly announced that it would never, “at any time, suffer them in any respect to direct or influence their proceedings, by any proposition or proceedings whatever.” At the same time, the Assembly went on the offensive against the board, authorizing a committee to compile a list of the many Jamaica acts 137. Assembly Journals, Oct. 2, 1762, 5:346–50.

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passed since 1728 “which appear not to have been reported on by the board of trade, in order to receive his majesty’s confirmation or disallowance.” This last step, Lyttelton told the Board of Trade, was to supply a foundation for bringing “a charge against your Lordship’s Board of having neglected to lay many of their Laws before the King.”¹³8 When Lyttelton expressed “his amazement” that the Assembly would take a report adopted by the King-in-Council so lightly and called upon it to explain its “extraordinary and unprecedented declaration” and discharge itself “from any intention of treating” the board “in a contemptuous manner, and thereby affronting his majesty’s mild and gracious government,” the Assembly denied that it meant to show “the least disrespect to his majesty, or his most honourable privy-council,” but saucily expanded upon its denunciation of the Board of Trade. By endeavoring “to represent the legislature of this island in a very disadvantageous light to his majesty, and” mentioning “them as objects of his severest censure,” the Assembly told Lyttelton, the Board of Trade had given them adequate grounds to “think themselves ill-treated.” Excoriating the Assembly for the “public manner in which you have arraigned the conduct of the king’s commissioners for trade and plantations,” Lyttelton thereupon prorogued the legislature for a short cooling-off period.¹³9 When Lyttelton reconvened the Assembly a week later, it was unrepentant. It considered but rejected a motion to inform Lyttelton that it was “so far from intending to apologize” for its expression “of our resentment of the treatment we have received from the” Board of Trade that it was “unalterably determined to vindicate ourselves to his majesty, from their hard and unjust aspersions.” According to Lyttelton, the reasons for this rejection were two: fi rst, because the Assembly decided “that a complaint to His Majesty wou’d not avail them,” and second, because it agreed that “it became them better to assert their own Rights & Liberties themselves by Resolutions of the Council & Assembly than to refer them to the decisions of any third party, even of the Crown itself.” Accordingly, the Assembly immediately set to work constructing and adopting a set of seven resolutions, to which the Council concurred with minor amendments on October 23. The Council having, as Lyttelton told the board, been “comprehended in the censure” of the board, were “no illwishers to the measures of the House of Assembly.”¹40 These seven resolutions represented a reiteration and an elaboration of the 138. Ibid., Oct. 6–7, 1762, 5:351–52; Lyttelton to Board of Trade, Oct. 13, 1762, CO 137/32, ff. 207–11. 139. Assembly Journals, Oct. 8–9, 12, 1762, 5:352–54. 140. Ibid., Oct. 22, 1762, 5:359–60; Lyttelton to Board of Trade, Oct. 13, 24, 1762, CO 137/32, ff. 207–17.

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constitutional ideas Jamaica’s political establishment had been honing for decades in defense of its claims for the predominant role in Jamaica’s internal affairs. The first resolution cited Charles II’s 1661 proclamation to support the assertion that Jamaican settlers were “intitled to the benefit and protection of the Laws of England and to the rights and Priviledges of Englishmen.” The second used the 1728 Jamaica revenue act as the foundation for the claim that all English laws that had “been at any time esteem’d[,] introduced[,] used[,] Accepted[,] or received as Laws of this Island” should “Continue Laws of . . . Jamaica forever.” The third resolution declared that Jamaica had “enjoyed without Interruption for upwards of Eighty Years the Use and Benefit of the Laws of England and among others That most essential privilege[:] the power of Enacting Laws for their own Government and Support by a Legislature composed of His Majesty’s Comm[ande]r in Chief[,] His Majesty’s Council and an Assembly of the Representatives of the People.” A fourth resolution cited earlier reports by the Board of Trade to prove that it was “the Constitution of this Colony confirmed by constant and invariable Usage that all Laws of a Publick Nature which” were “not repugnant to the Laws of our Mother Country” were “in full force and Effect after they have been passed by the Gov[erno]r[,] Council and Assembly,” albeit they “remain[ed] liable to be rejected by His Majesty in Council.” A fifth resolution asserted that Jamaica could “not have made so considerable a Progress in its Settlements . . . with a less Degree of Protection than its Constitution affords.” Implicitly calling into question the constitutionality of suspending clauses, the last two resolutions declared that the Board of Trade’s recent castigation of the Jamaica legislature for “setting aside the provisions of perpetual Laws confirmed by the Crown” was “a Misrepresentation of the Constitution of this Colony and would if admitted deprive us of some of our most valuable and established Rights[,] abridge the power of the Legislature and draw this Colony into many inconveniences as well as into a dangerous and unconstitutional Dependance upon that Board.”¹4¹ In two probing letters to the Board of Trade, Lyttelton sought to spell out for his metropolitan superiors the meaning of the legislature’s stand on this question. No friend to the constitutional pretensions of American assemblies, Lyttelton would later deplore the fact that late seventeenth-century English authorities had given up on their efforts to establish “in Jamaica the Irish Constitution” after “they had shown so much firmness and resolution to support the rights of the Crown.” In the case at hand, he explained, the resolutions “fully shew[ed] the sense which the Assembly & Council have of what they judge to 141. Jamaica Council Minutes, Oct. 23, 1762, CO 138/22, ff. 232–33.

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be their Rights & Privileges.” “Whatever powers” the Assembly “was meant to have by His Majesty’s Commission & Instructions to His Governors,” he declared, “an Inspection of their Journals” revealed that its members had “for some years last past considered the House of Commons of Great Britain as their Model & have assum’d and exercis’d the powers thereof as nearly as the circumstances of this Country cou’d allow of,” assuming that whatever they “found upon consulting the Journals of the House of Commons to have been constitutionally done there” was “a sufficient authority to them to proceed in the same manner here.” Moreover, Lyttelton observed, they claimed their authority, not as metropolitan officials had long claimed, “by virtue of His Majesty’s Commission to His Governor,” but on the basis of their “inherent Right so to do as English Subjects, entitled to the use & benefit of the Laws of England of which the Custom of Parliament makes a part.” Of course, this position stood in complete opposition to the House of Commons 1757 resolutions concerning Jamaica, which, as one metropolitan commentator interpreted them in 1763, had declared “in the Case of Jamaica that the Colonies have no Constitution” but “that the Mode of Government in each of them” depended entirely “upon the Good Pleasure of the King as expressed in his Com[m]ission and Instructions to his Governor.”¹4² At the same time, Lyttelton complained, the Council had built a parallel pretension “to exercise the powers of the House of Lords . . . upon the same foundation.” Considering itself in its legislative capacity to represent “one of the three Estates . . . of this Island,” its members constantly “endeavour’d to assimilate themselves in every thing as nearly as they cou’d to the House of Lords in Great-Britain, whose powers and usages they have, as far as ever the condition of this Country cou’d admit of, consider’d as an Authority & model for them to govern themselves by.” No wonder, then, that the Council had “readily . . . concurr’d with the Assembly in asserting a right . . . jointly with the Governor & Assembly to pass laws contrary to the King’s Instructions; & in considering your Lordship’s Report to His Majesty . . . as a misrepresentation of their Constitution.”¹4³ Having “already acquired too much force by the toleration it has met with here to be done away with by anything less than His Majesty’s Interposition & Declaration against it,” the doctrine on which these parallels were founded, 142. Lyttelton, “State of the Constitution of Jamaica,” n.d., Additional Manuscripts 12409, f. 25; Lyttelton to Board of Trade, Oct. 24, 1762, CO 137/32, ff. 212–15; “Hints Respecting the Civil Establishment in Our American Colonies,” [1763], Shelburne Papers, 48:503, William L. Clements Library, Ann Arbor, Michigan. 143. Lyttelton, “State of the Constitution of Jamaica”; Lyttelton to Board of Trade, Oct. 24, 1762, CO 137/32, ff. 212–15.

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Lyttelton believed, was not the grandiose pretensions of the assemblymen and councillors only but was “universal” and “much espous’d by the Inhabitants of this Island in general.” Stressing his helplessness in “this difficult Station” and his inability to deal with the situation on his own, Lyttelton entreated the board “to reflect how extremely difficult it is for the King’s Governor to support His Majesty’s Authority in this Island with a Council assuming the Powers of the House of Lords, and an Assembly those of the House of Commons of Great-Britain if at any time they shall be possess’d by a Spirit of Faction [or opposition], more especially when it is consider’d that . . . the Assembly shou’d grant annual supplies, without which the King’s Troops cannot be subsisted, or many other charges of Government be defray’d.”¹44 Notwithstanding the fact that settler Jamaicans offered repeated and “strong assurances . . . of their Loyalty & dutiful attachment to His Majesty,” Lyttelton concluded, they nevertheless[,] as far as I am able to judge, [displayed] such an eager desire to be freed from those restraints, which the wisdom of His Majesty’s Councils has put them under in common with the rest of His Colonies in the great point of Legislation, & such an aspiring endeavour to acquire in their Assemblies & within the Sphere of their activity the same Powers and Privileges as are enjoy’d by a British House of Commons, as, I humbly conceive, may well deserve the consideration of His Majesty’s Ministers.¹45

Reminding the board of the Assembly’s “constant & steady refusal to insert a clause, in any Act they pass, suspending the execution thereof until His Majesty’s pleasure be known” and of the incompatibility between the Jamaican legislature’s resolutions and the House of Commons’ 1757 condemnation of the Assembly’s October 1753 resolutions “as derogatory of the Rights of the Crown & people of Great-Britain,” Lyttelton stressed the point that the Jamaica legislature’s defiance of the Board of Trade was neither “accidental [n]or temporary” but rather grew “out of the opinion which the people of this Island have form’d of the Constitution of this Government & of their Rights & Privileges and will therefore be likely to produce similar effects to those I am now contemplating whenever they shall think those Rights infringed either by our Lordships in your Representations to The King or by me in the execution of His Majesty’s Instructions concerning the passing of Laws or otherwise.” These opinions, he counseled, were 144. Lyttelton, “State of the Constitution of Jamaica”; Lyttelton to Board of Trade, Oct. 24, 1762, CO 137/32, ff. 212–15; Lyttelton to Board of Trade, Oct. 13, 1762, CO 137/32, ff. 207–11. 145. Lyttelton to Board of Trade, October 13, 1762, CO 137/32, ff. 207–11

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too deeply rooted & founded upon Doctrines & Practises of too high & complicated a nature to be removed or much lessen’d by any Means in my power without His Majesty’s special directions & Interposition[,] which are so necessary that either this Country must be thrown into a state of the greatest Confusion & distraction by a denial on my part of the validity of the pretensions of the Council & Assembly, unless that denial be supported by a solemn Declaration of the Crown, not to say the Parliament also, of such a sort as may bring back the Government to its fi rst Principles again, or His Majesty’s Authority & the Honour of your Lordship’s Office must suffer by an acquiescence in me.¹46

The dilemma Lyttelton described was precisely the same as the one Trelawny had identified in his letters to Henry Pelham fourteen years earlier, and it was no closer to being resolved. Through his long analysis Lyttelton hoped both, as he wrote George Grenville, to impress the Board of Trade with “the manner in which I have endeavour’d to do my Duty as His Majesty’s Governor on this occasion” and to shift responsibility for dealing with the recalcitrant and bumptious Jamaicans to London. In this last hope he was to be sorely disappointed. The “commotions” in Jamaica merited an article in a London newspaper and, according to the Jamaica agent, Lovel Stanhope, put “the Board of Trade in such a Temper, that I dare not show my head at their Board till their Heat is a little subsided.” The board found the legislature’s resolutions to be “of so very extraordinary a nature and Tendency, so injurious to your Majesty’s Authority and subversive of the great constitutional Principles of Provincial Government” that, it wrote the Privy Council in February 1763, it immediately sent them to the attorney and solicitor generals for consideration. The challenges represented by the resolutions, it declared, were “of the utmost importance to the Maintenance and support of your Majesty[’s] Government, not only in Jamaica, but in all your Majesty’s American Colonies.” Although the Privy Council held several meetings between March 3, 1763, and December 14, 1764, to consider “the most proper method to be taken by the Government upon this occasion,” it seems never to have taken any formal action.¹47 Why the Privy Council should have failed to take some action on a challenge so fundamental is unclear. Perhaps it was overtaken by events. By December 146. Ibid.; Lyttelton to Board of Trade, Oct. 24, 1762, CO 137/32, ff. 212–15. 147. Lyttelton to Grenville, Jan. 11, 1763, Stowe Papers, Box 22 (64), Huntington Library, San Marino, California; Stanhope to Lyttelton, Feb. 23, 1763, Lyttelton Papers, 12 (i), Worcester Record Office, Worcester, England; Board of Trade to Privy Council, Feb. 17, 1763, CO 138/22, ff. 261–62; Privy Council Minutes, Mar. 3, 1763, PC 2/109; Munro and Grant, eds., Acts of the Privy Council, Colonial, Mar. 3, 1763–Dec. 14, 1764, 4:520–21.

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1764 Lyttelton was on the verge of involving himself in an even more intense controversy in Jamaica over the extent of the Assembly’s privileges, a controversy that would interrupt the normal process of governance in Jamaica for two years and lead to his resignation.¹48 Perhaps it was distracted by a variety of other colonial issues posed by the new American territories acquired as a result of the recently concluded Seven Years’ War. Or perhaps it simply did not know what to do. The lesson of the immediately previous decade and a half and of the subsequent privilege controversy suggested that settler Jamaicans were a stubborn people willing to go to extraordinary lengths in defense of their liberties and constitution, even if it meant standing up to the might of the metropolis. Without the sanction of the settler community, the pronouncements of the metropolis carried little authority in the de facto settler republic of mid-eighteenth-century Jamaica. And when the metropolitan government repeatedly failed to secure such sanction for its pronouncements, it had little choice but to back off. From the late 1740s through the early 1760s, the Jamaica provincial establishment, operating principally through the Jamaica Assembly, had shown itself, in response to a series of challenges from the metropolis, to be indomitable and, in regard to the colony’s provincial affairs, governable only on its own terms. The Assembly had long enjoyed wide latitude in constructing and presiding over the internal polity of Jamaica, and its stubborn and successful resistance to the new policies emanating from London after 1748 underlined its continuing commitment to the idea of legislative supremacy within the island’s government. In the constitutional structure that had evolved in Jamaica, the representative component—Montesquieu referred to as the republican element in the British metropolitan constitution—was extraordinarily powerful. To suggest, as I did at the outset of this chapter, that this development had long since turned Jamaica into a settler republic is emphatically not to argue that Jamaican leaders at any point subscribed to republican political ideology. Rather, it is to restate the familiar point, made by Adam Smith in The Wealth of Nations in 1776, that Britain’s American colonies were “republican” in their “manners . . . and their governments” long before thirteen of them became formally republican in 1776. The extensive authority of the legislative had made Britain’s American colonies functionally republican long before they were antimonarchical.¹49 That is precisely why, during the settler revolt that began in 148. See Jack P. Greene, “The Jamaica Privilege Controversy, 1764–66: An Episode in the Process of Constitutional Definition in the Early Modern British Empire,” Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 22 (1994): 16–53. 149. Adam Smith, A Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776), ed. R. H. Campbell and A. S. Skinner, 2 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976), 2:585. An

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some North America colonies in 1774–76, the transition from monarchy to republican government was so easy in those polities that had the wherewithal to participate in that revolt and why the revolution it produced could be so profoundly conservative. The colonial case against Britain in the 1760s and 1770s, like the Jamaican responses in the 1750s, was deeply conservative in that it invoked an ancient colonial and, by implication, imperial constitution as a defense against metropolitan innovations in the system of British imperial governance. Until 1776, colonial spokesmen sought, not escape from the British Empire, but equality of British rights and liberties within the empire. In doing so, like the Jamaicans in the 1750s, they drew their conceptions of liberty, not from republican political theorists nor from Protestant religious thinkers, but from the English jurisprudential tradition as it had been articulated by various metropolitan legal theorists and later Whig polemicists, a tradition internalized by several generations of colonial leaders and consistently employed by them throughout the colonies to support their claims to the English rights and liberties they had always sought to incorporate into the constitutional structures they were creating and managing in America. Without full possession of those rights and liberties, those leaders declared, they would be little more than slaves. The Jamaica confl ict analyzed here may have been exceptional in its duration and intensity and in the impression it made upon metropolitan political consciousness, but it was by no means unique. For colonial Britons living outside the bounds of the home island in Ireland and America, the enjoyment of British liberty had always required a capacity for a high degree of provincial selfgovernment within the structure of the larger empire. In 1763, on the eve of the great controversies that led to the secession of the thirteen colonies from the British Empire, that empire, as illustrated by the experience of Jamaica, remained what it had been in the late 1740s and earlier: a negotiated empire in which the provincial legislatures, ever alert to any threat to the liberties of the colonies, exercised as great a degree of influence in shaping the imperial constitution as did metropolitan authorities. In the ongoing effort to understand the constitutional structure of the early modern British empire, historians need to be acutely aware of the extraordinary significance of this influence.

elaboration of this point can be found in Jack P. Greene, Peripheries and Center: Constitutional Development in the Extended Polities of the British Empire and the United States, 1607–1788 (Athens. University of Georgia Press, 1986), 1–150.

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— nine —

1759 The Perils of Success

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T

he fits of patriotic ecstasy that reverberated throughout the British Empire following the British conquest of Quebec in 1759, and again after the favorable—for the British—conclusion of the Seven Years’ War in 1763, disguised from the celebrants the many underlying problems and residual tensions that would over the next few decades reduce the size and scope of the empire, radically change its character, and reconfigure global power in the Atlantic and Indian Oceans. Such an outcome seemed unlikely at the time, for added to the empire’s extraordinary economic successes through the first six decades of the eighteenth century, Britain’s new military, naval, and diplomatic achievements promised to put the entire British world in a position of such preeminence that its future in the early 1760s looked virtually limitless, and with no obstacles that could not be easily overcome. To be sure, a few naysayers fretted about the perils of success, worrying that the humiliation of the French might lead to yet another imperial war, that Britain with all its territorial acquisitions had bitten off more than it could chew, or that the elimination of the French from North America would encourage the burgeoning American continental colonies to throw off British trade restrictions and set up for themselves as independent polities. Yet to most ministers, bureaucrats, and other interested members of the metropolitan political nation, Britain’s propitious situation seemed to offer opportunities as well as problems. The possibility of a French resurgence could be countered by maintaining British defense capabilities at a high level, while colonial aspirations for independence could be headed off by tightening up This chapter was written for the conference “1759 Revisited: The Conquest of Canada in Historical Perspective,” London, September 18, 2009. It is published with permission from “1759: The Perils of Success,” in Philip Buckner and John G. Reid, eds., 1759 Revisted: The Conquest of Canada in Historical Perspective (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012).

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imperial governance and trade regulations and better managing American Indian affairs. Few suspected that these goals would put them on a collision course with sensitive colonial polities, which had emerged from the war experience with expectations of an expanded role and a more secure political status in the collective and cooperative enterprise that was the British Empire.¹ II Certainly, the last four decades of the eighteenth century witnessed major changes in the European imperial state system, and my question examined here is to what extent those changes can be attributed to the British conquest of Canada in 1759 and, more generally, to the Seven Years’ War. While British gains rendered Britain the dominant imperial power in the Atlantic world and enormously enhanced its position in Asia, and while the exchange of Louisiana for Florida potentially strengthened Spain’s position by consolidating its North American holdings, French losses in the Americas and in India severely weakened France’s imperial standing vis-à-vis both Britain and Spain, despite its retention of Martinique, Guadeloupe, and the economic dynamo of St. Domingue, widely regarded as the most successful European colony in America, after Mexico and Peru. These developments left France determined to counter Britain’s overweening global power, and Britain more attentive to imperial defense than it had been in a century and a half of overseas expansion. France’s subsequent intervention in the American War for Independence helped to deprive Britain of thirteen of its most valuable colonies, but it also contributed to the economic crisis that led to the French Revolution, the French loss of St. Domingue, and another quarter century of warfare between Britain and France. Against this broad context, I propose here to focus on the experiences of the wider British world in coping with the problems that it encountered in the decades immediately after the Seven Years’ War. In doing so, I do not intend to minimize the consequences of the transfers of territories that occurred between 1759 and 1763 upon the polities, societies, and cultures within those territories, many of whose residents faced, at the extremes, the dismal choice of migration or amalgamation and assimilation. Rather, I am merely trying to play to my own strength, which lies within the eighteenth-century British imperial world. Even within this limited scope, the task of laying out the many changes 1. This point is explored more fully in Jack P. Greene, “The Seven Years’ War and the American Revolution: The Causal Relationship Reconsidered,” Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 8 (1980): 85–105.

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experienced by the British Empire in the decades after the conquest of Quebec in 1759 and the Peace of Paris in 1763 and relating them to the results of the Seven Years’ War is a daunting one, for the modern historiography on this subject is so rich. I shall be concentrating largely on a few major changes, some of them unanticipated, which dramatically underline the perils that lurked in the great success of 1759.² Along with the acquisition of Quebec, the eastern half of the upper Mississippi valley, and the ceded islands in the West Indies, as a result of the Seven Years’ War, the expansion of territorial jurisdiction in India, first over Bengal in the 1760s and then over Madras and Bombay, considerably increased the religious, political, and ethnic diversity of the empire and this diversity profoundly affected the empire’s character. If, in David Armitage’s succinct formulation, the empire that had developed by the middle of the eighteenth century could be defined as “Protestant, commercial, maritime and free,”³ the empire that came into being after the Seven Years’ War, while still deeply commercial and maritime, was considerably less Protestant and, by traditional English standards, much less free. Within the empire, existing precedents for colonial oversight without traditional English consensual governance and legal practices were few and exceptional: Newfoundland, where ship captains presided over a largely transitory maritime population using traditions of maritime law; and Minorca, Gibraltar, and Acadia, three acquisitions from the War of the Spanish Succession, whose local Catholic and non-English populations had been permitted to retain their own systems of governance and law—with the notable exception of the Acadians, expelled from Nova Scotia during the early years of the Seven Years’ War.4 Whether Quebec, whose settler population was too substantial to expel, would suffer the fate of Ireland following the Protestant Ascendancy and see its Catholic population subjected to Protestant domination under a minority government enjoying and monopolizing the benefits of English consensual governance and common law culture, or would, like Minorca, be permitted to retain its existing political and religious system, was an open question at the end of the war. If allowed to follow the Minorcan model, Quebec promised 2. P. J. Marshall, The Making and Unmaking of Empires: Britain, India, and America, c. 1750–1783 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), provides the most comprehensive and perceptive study of this broad subject. 3. David Armitage, The Ideological Origins of the British Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 173. 4. On the Acadian experience, see John Bartlett Brebner, New England’s Outpost: Acadia before the Conquest of Canada (New York: Columbia University Press, 1927). On the expulsion, see Geoff rey Plank, An Unsettled Conquest: The British Campaign against the People of Acadia (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001).

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to introduce a new and, by English standards, considerably more authoritarian mode into imperial governance. India, with its dense population and ancient culture, seemed to offer no option but the authoritarian. The new conquests not only made the empire more heterogenous but also brought vast new territories under British authority. If Quebec, with its large settler population, presented a special difficulty for metropolitan administrators, they also had to confront the problem of deciding which other new territories in the Americas should be left under the control of indigenous peoples and which should be formally organized into colonies. By forbidding settlement west of the Allegheny Mountains or around the Great Lakes, in the Proclamation of 1763, metropolitan authorities acknowledged, at least in the short run, indigenous dominance of the vast area to the west of the existing continental colonies. Endeavoring to oversee those territories, which would be administered from strategically situated military outposts that doubled as trading centers, metropolitan authorities seemed to promise indigenous groups protection from settler encroachment, a promise they would prove unable to fulfi ll.5 The pressure to divide other conquered area into colonies was considerable, and over the next decade the British established more colonies than they had at any time since the 1660s: one each in the ceded islands of Dominica, Grenada, St. Vincent, and Tobago, two in Florida, East and West, and one on the Island of St. John (now Prince Edward Island). Unlike Quebec, the small or nonexistent settler populations of these colonies presented few impediments to the establishment of traditional English legal culture and consensual governance, but the addition of so many new colonies expanded the total number of American colonies subject to imperial administrative oversight by almost 20 percent. At the same time that so much energy was going into the organization and administration of new territories, metropolitan officials embarked upon a desultory and unsystematic series of initiatives designed to enhance state economic, political, and military control over the old settler empire. These initiatives evoked spirited resistance from most of the component parts of that empire and, in 1776, the revolt of those colonies that were not dependent on the metropolis for their defense, internal against their enslaved populations or external against foreign powers. This settler revolt, known as the American War for Independence, was a long and bitter imperial civil war over the secession of thirteen colonies from the empire. Military losses during this second seven years’ war also led to the retrocession of the two Florida colonies to Spain and the loss of Tobago to France. I will return to this subject later. 5. An excellent general discussion is in Colin G. Calloway, The Scratch of a Pen: 1763 and the Transformation of North America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006).

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A secondary effect of the American War for Independence was the expansion of settler political authority over internal affairs in polities that did not revolt, from Ireland to the West Indies and North America. Metropolitan concessions designed in 1778 to entice the revolting colonies back into the empire, specifically the repeal of the Declaratory Act of 1766, produced a significant increase in settler legislative autonomy in the West Indian and Atlantic island colonies and contributed to the political atmosphere in Ireland that resulted in the early 1780s in the achievement of legislative independence by the Irish Parliament and the elimination of restrictions on Irish trade. Unforeseen at the time was the possibility that the inability of the Protestant Ascendancy in Ireland to control a restive Catholic population intent on securing a civic space would lead to the political union of Ireland and Great Britain in 1800 and the forfeiture of Irish self-government.6 Yet another effect of the American War for Independence was the exodus of Crown supporters from the revolting colonies during and after the war, boosting the populations of the Bahamas and of those North American colonies that did not join the revolt, particularly Nova Scotia, Quebec, and, to a lesser extent, the Island of St. John, and leading to the creation of settler colonies in New Brunswick and Upper Canada. Because most of those loyalists, despite their abhorrence of resistance to legitimate government, were no less committed to British principles of consensual governance and the rule of law than the Whig leaders they had left behind and proved sturdy advocates for the creation or expansion of the authority of representative assemblies wherever they settled, they functioned as agents for the extension of British libertarian traditions in the remnants of the settler empire. Beyond the Atlantic, other contemporaneous developments were extending Britain’s imperial political jurisdiction. In India, a combination of territorial expansion, the assumption of political jurisdiction over Bengal, the inability of the East India Company to control the behavior of its servants in any of the Indian presidencies, the growing importance of the Indian trade for Britain, and the revival of French activities during the American War for Independence led to the metropolitan government’s increasing oversight over the East India Company and the conversion of the company into an arm of the state.7 At the same time, James Cook’s voyages into Oceania and the Pacific, combined with the need to find a new outlet for transported British felons, led to 6. For a fuller discussion, see Jack P. Greene, “Liberty and Slavery: The Transfer of British Liberty to the West Indies, 1627–1865”; and James Kelly, “ ‘Era of Liberty’: The Politics of Civil and Political Rights in Eighteenth-Century Ireland,” in Greene, ed., Exclusionary Empire: English Liberty Overseas, 1600–1900 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 50–76, and 77–111, respectively. 7. See Marshall, Making and Unmaking of Empires, esp. 205–72.

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the occupation of Tasmania and New South Wales and thereby laid the foundations for the eventual creation of new settler colonies in Australia and New Zealand and, after its conquest from the Dutch, in South Africa. Finally, the overseas empire received an increasing amount of metropolitan attention during the closing decades of the eighteenth century. Especially in association with the prosecution of the Seven Years’ War and the intra-imperial contests of the 1760s, 1770s, and 1780s, metropolitan officials involved in colonial administration and associates of those in the higher circles of British government, including members of Parliament, manifested a profound sense of the weakness of central authority in the outlying segments of the empire, combined with an expanding awareness of the importance of the overseas empire to the commercial well-being and international standing of Britain, perceptions that were widely shared by the larger public in Britain. At the same time, however, for those critical monitors who thought that the empire should be a  humane and civilizing one, enhanced interest in the empire provided an opportunity to scrutinize more closely than earlier generations the behavior of  Britons overseas, producing a heightened understanding of the costs of empire for those who were unwillingly subjected to or displaced by it and a more sharply delineated conception of empire that differentiated—and thereby distanced—metropolitan Britons from Britons overseas.8 III Of all these developments, the second, the loss of fifteen of the eighteen contiguous North American colonies between 1776 and 1783, was the most shocking development and had the most profound effect upon the empire as a whole, and it is this subject that I propose to consider in more detail here. How this hugely successful, increasingly well-integrated, and more densely and closely connected empire so quickly came apart has long been a question of central interest to historians of colonial British North America and the early national United States. More recently, it has also attracted the attention of historians of the British Empire and even of Britain itself.9 Notwithstanding a variety of differing emphases among historians with varying perspectives and interests, a rough consensus seems to have emerged around two general points: (1) that metropolitan efforts to enhance state economic, political, and military control 8. I deal with this subject more fully in Evaluating Empire and Confronting Colonialism in Eighteenth-Century Britain (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013). 9. Most recently and importantly from P. J. Marshall, Making and Unmaking of Empires, and “A Free though a Conquering People”: Eighteenth-Century Britain and Its Empire (Aldershot, U.K.: Variorum, Ashgate, 2003); and Stephen Conway, The British Isles and the War of American Independence (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).

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over the old settler empire evoked spirited resistance from most of the component parts of that empire, and (2) that their resistance and the metropolitan response to it led to the reluctant revolt and eventual independence of those colonies with the capacity for resistance. To the extent that this story line is serviceable, it raises the more interesting questions of why metropolitan authorities sought more control over the old settler colonies, why settler leaders in those colonies resisted so strongly, why metropolitans ultimately chose force as the means to try to quell that resistance, and whether the conquest of Canada and the results of the Seven Years’ War had anything to do with those responses. Both contemporaries and modern historians have had a lot to say on these questions. Historians have stressed two main reasons underlying metropolitan initiatives to tighten up the empire. The first revolves around colonial behavior during the Seven Years’ War in the general areas of defense responsibility, Indian relations, and evasion of trade laws.¹0 With regard to defense responsibilities, the difficulties the continental colonies encountered in trying to present a united front against the French during the early years of the war brought the parochial orientation of the component parts of the overseas empire into sharp focus, demonstrated that colonials usually put their own safety and interests ahead of concern for neighboring colonies or the larger welfare of the empire as a whole, and made it clear that an effective colonial defense would have to be organized by and directed from London and would require the commitment of large numbers of British regulars in America. Unable to send enough troops to repel the French, however, metropolitan authorities continued to seek money and men from the colonies, some of which, including especially Massachusetts, Connecticut, New York, and Virginia, made impressive contributions, while others, notably Pennsylvania and Maryland, got bogged down in internal squabbles and made disappointing returns. Although Pennsylvania did much better during the later stages of the war, its failure to contribute during the early years received considerable attention in the metropolitan press and helped to foster the impression that the colonies were not pulling their share of the load, an impression reinforced by Pitt’s policy of encouraging colonial contributions by earmarking metropolitan funds to reimburse colonial treasuries for substantial amounts of their defense expenditures. Notwithstanding significant appropriations for the war effort by the vast majority of the colo10. See Marshall, Making and Unmaking of Empires, 86–118. The already classic account of the war and its relationship to imperial administration is Fred Anderson, The Crucible of War: The Seven Years’ War and the Fate of Empire in British North America, 1764–1766 (New York: Vintage, 2000), which, however, tells us little about the profound effects of the war upon the colonial polities caught up in it.

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nies, metropolitan authorities thus understandably emerged from the war with the feeling that the metropolis had shouldered the financial and military burden for a war from which colonials, especially on the continent, had benefited disproportionately. Indeed, over the following decade, many metropolitans claimed that the war had been fought for their benefit alone. Relations with American Indians exhibited many of the same problems. Intercolonial rivalries and settler pressure on Indian lands had led to the development of an unstable relationship with Indians, especially in the upper middle and lower southern colonies, severely undermining British efforts to enlist Indian allies against the French and the Spanish and thwarting attempts to woo their allies away from them. As in the related case of defense, central intervention seemed imperative, and London authorities responded by placing Indian diplomacy in the hands of London-appointed commissioners, one for the north and another for the south. Although these appointments by no means removed provincial governments from any jurisdiction over Indian affairs, they went a long way in that direction, and Indian relations during the war heightened awareness in London of the effects of questionable land transfers and settler pressure on indigenous nations and raised doubts about colonial participation in the direction of Indian matters.¹¹ The extent of colonial evasion of existing trade laws also came into clearer metropolitan focus during the war. In the decades after Parliament’s passage of the Molasses Act in the early 1730s, English West Indian interests had often complained about North American merchant and ship captain evasions of metropolitan restrictions against trading with French and Dutch islands. As these evasions continued during the war and perhaps even increased in scale, and as North American traders developed creative new ways to get around existing trade prohibitions, metropolitan officials came to see such behaviors as trading with and strengthening the enemy at the expense of the national interest. This situation became a subject of discussion in the metropolitan press and further underlined for those responsible for colonial governance in London the metropolis’s limited capacity to enforce policy on the western side of the Atlantic.¹² Although all of these problems had earlier manifestations, they were all greatly exacerbated and became priority administrative concerns in London as a result of the experiences of the Seven Years’ War. Like the decision in the early 1760s to get help in alleviating the massive war debt by trying to tax the 11. See Calloway, Scratch of a Pen, 92–111. 12. For example, Merchant of London, A State of the Trade Carried on with the French, on the Island of Hispaniola, by the Merchants of North America, Under the Color of Flags of Truce (London, 1760).

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colonies to cover colonial defense and administrative costs, they can all be said to have been direct outgrowths of the war, albeit outcomes that might have produced choices other than the ones made at the time. The same cannot be said for the second main reason that some historians, including myself several decades ago¹³ and most recently Peter Marshall,¹4 have used to explain the metropolitan decision to try to achieve a tighter rein over the old settler colonies: that is, the increasing metropolitan awareness of the enormous economic and strategic importance of those colonies to metropolitan Britain. Such an awareness considerably antedated the Seven Years’ War. From the 1720s on, economic writers had been celebrating the beneficial effects of Britain’s expanding colonial trade and crediting the growing overseas empire, and in particular the American colonies, with the major role in that development. Explaining the many ways in which American plantations had contributed to the economic well-being of metropolitan Britain, these writers emphasized the role of the colonies in providing a place where those with poor prospects in Britain or elsewhere in the Old World could become useful and industrious contributors to the national wealth, in producing valuable commodities that were commercially useful to the metropolis, in stimulating British manufacturing by providing an ever-expanding market for British goods and thereby indirectly accelerating both urban and agricultural expansion and improvement, in providing a field for nurturing British mercantile development and opportunities for capital investment, and in contributing to the augmentation of shipping and sailors. In all these ways, commercial writers and other analysts of the overseas British world emphasized, Britain’s overseas possessions had made substantial contributions to the nation’s wealth and power at the same time that they were spreading British culture over substantial parts of the Americas. By the late 1730s and early 1740s, members of Parliament routinely acknowledged that the plantation trades were, as Earl Cholmondeley said in 1739, “the most valuable branch of our commerce,”¹5 the source, said Sir John Bernard a year later, of “all our wealth, and that power which is the consequence of 13. Jack P. Greene, “ ‘A Posture of Hostility’: A Reconsideration of Some Aspects of the Origins of the American Revolution,” American Antiquarian Society Proceedings 87 (1977): 27–68; and Greene, “An Uneasy Connection: An Analysis of the Preconditions of the American Revolution,” in Stephen G. Kurtz and James H. Hutson, eds., Essays on the American Revolution (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1973), 32–80. 14. Marshall, Making and Unmaking of Empires, 11–56, 81–83. 15. Earl of Cholmondeley, Speech, Mar. 4, 1739, in Leo F. Stock, ed., Proceedings and Debates of the British Parliament Respecting North America, 5 vols. (Washington, D.C.: Carnegie Corporation, 1924–41), 4:689.

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wealth.”¹6 By mid-century, few could have disputed Malachy Postlethwayt’s declaration, in the article “Colonies” in his Universal Dictionary of Trade and Commerce, “that our trade and navigation are greatly increased by our colonies, and that” the colonies “really are a source of treasure and naval power to this kingdom, since they work for us, and their treasure centers here.”¹7 The fact that metropolitan recognition that, as one anonymous writer put it in the early 1750s, “the Colonies in America” were “the Cornucopia of GreatBritain’s Wealth”¹8 extended well beyond a few economic writers and parliamentary orators to affect political considerations became increasingly evident in the form of rising government expenditures for imperial defense. For instance, budgets for military payrolls overseas doubled between 1728 and 1748 and leveled off over the next six years of peace at a yearly sum just above £70,000, a figure almost double the average annual amount the metropolitan government had spent for military pay in the overseas empire between 1728 and 1734. Not just these escalating sums but also the establishment of buffer colonies at the two ends of the continental chain, in Georgia in 1734 and Nova Scotia in 1749, the very first state-sponsored and state-supported colonies in the British Empire, heralded a growing recognition of the economic value of the American colonies and their vulnerability to attack from Britain’s principal imperial rivals, Spain and France. When the French sought to consolidate their hold on the Ohio River valley in the years after the Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle (1748), they thus seemed, as an anonymous speaker in Parliament charged, to be endeavoring “to strip us of our most valuable properties.” Knowing “that the source of power lies in riches, and that the source of English riches lies in America,” the French, he charged, understood that by weakening the British in North America, they would be undermining the very foundations of Britain’s imperial ascendancy.¹9 For this reason, French activities in the Ohio, as the author of another London tract reported in 1755, made “some people think of American affairs more than they ever intended,” quickly opening “the eyes of the whole nation” to “the extreme danger which now threatens our American colonies” and to the fact that what16. Sir John Bernard, Speech, Feb. 5, 1740, in Stock, ed., Proceedings and Debates of the British Parliament, 5:25. 17. Malachy Postlethwayt, Universal Dictionary of Trade and Commerce, 2 vols., 4th ed. (London, 1764), s.v. “Colonies.” 18. G.B., The Advantages of the Revolution Illustrated, By a View of the Present State of Great Britain (London, 1753), 30. 19. Anonymous, Speech, Feb. 21, 1757, in R. C. Simmons and P. D. G. Thomas, eds., Proceedings and Debates of the British Parliaments Respecting North America, 1754–1783, 6 vols. (White Plains, N.Y.: Kraus, 1982–86), 1:195–96.

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ever threatened them also threatened “the mother country, since, in whatever fate betides them, she must herself inevitably be involved.”²0 Reviewing public sentiment in Britain “before and during the war,” a still later writer emphasized how far the British political nation had taken up such arguments. “Environed as they were by French encroachments, French forts and French communications; cut off as they were from the fairest riches and best part of the country by French settlements and garrisons on the Ohio, the Mississippi, and the lakes; these very colonies, our last resource,” this writer observed, seemed “to be in the most imminent danger.” As a consequence, he noted, metropolitan Britons came to believe “that nothing too great, nothing too expensive, nothing too hazardous could be undertaken in their relief: everything,” he added, “was to be attempted; for the time was now come to trial, and a trial not to be avoided, whether Great Britain or France excelled as a naval power.”²¹ Well before the full extent of the French challenge had been comprehended in London, however, those in charge of colonial affairs had responded to the rising awareness of the economic importance of the colonies by undertaking measures designed to tighten metropolitan controls over them and to counteract the centrifugal tendencies of an empire in which authority had long been negotiated between the metropolis and provincial polities, and in which those polities had always enjoyed wide latitude in coping with their internal affairs and refashioning English institutions and practices to meet local conditions.²² For the first time in British imperial history, this reformist impulse stimulated considerable theoretical attention to the problem of imperial relations,²³ but few, if any, of those involved in this exercise seem to have thought in terms of a wholesale reconstruction of the existing system of British imperial governance. Rather, the blueprint for reform, which could be seen in the new royal governments designed for Nova Scotia and Georgia in the early 1750s, merely looked toward the enhancement of royal power and the restriction of the scope of provincial legislative assemblies. To this end, the Board of Trade, under the Earl of Halifax beginning in 1748, pursued colonial problems more systematically and with far more energy and attention than it had at any time since the first three or four decades after its establishment in 1696. The results of this new effort can only have been extremely discouraging for those bent upon enhancing metropolitan supervision over the colonies. Systematic reviews of the situation in colony after colony led to the articulation or 20. State of the British and French Colonies in North America, With Respect to Number of People, Forces, Forts, Indians, Trade and other Advantages (London, 1755), 2, 130. 21. A Full and Free Inquiry into the Merits of the Peace (London, 1765), 17–19. 22. This subject is treated more fully in Greene, “ ‘A Posture of Hostility.’ ” 23. See Peter N. Miller, Defining the Common Good: Empire, Religion and Philosophy in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 150–212.

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revival of a set of restrictive policies designed to shore up metropolitan authority. In most colonies, however, attempts to enforce those policies met stubborn resistance from powerful legislatures who controlled provincial finances and whose consent was often necessary for their implementation. Contrary to metropolitan demands, few legislatures would agree either to be bound by royal instructions issued to colonial governors or to include clauses suspending legislation until it had metropolitan approval. In their opposition to these and a variety of other metropolitan directives they found unsuited to their situations, colonial legislatures justified their opposition as a defense of their constituents’ fundamental inherited rights as Englishmen. Threatened by London with dismissal if they did not obey their instructions, a few governors managed to use internal political divisions to forward some Crown policies, but mostly they failed in their efforts or created such deep political troubles that the government had to recall them. In this situation, colonial administrators reviewed colonial legislation more comprehensively and disallowed more laws. Increasingly in the early 1750s, they also began to threaten the intervention of Parliament in the internal legislative affairs of those colonies that refused to yield to their directives, but actually did so only once, in a case involving Jamaica (see previous chapter). Before the Seven Years’ War broke out, then, the metropolitan government was deep into an ad hoc and largely unsuccessful effort to revamp the colonial system, while its efforts had revived and given immediacy to ancient colonial anxieties about prerogative threats to long-enjoyed colonial rights. This stalemate continued during the early years of the war and may even have deepened, the early failures of proprietary Pennsylvania to contribute to the war effort being largely a result of proprietary insistence, no doubt under direction from Crown authorities in London, upon its governors’ adherence to proprietary instructions regarding appropriations. As the war in the Americas went badly for the British in 1757 and 1758, however, metropolitan authorities backed away from their efforts to achieve reforms in the system of imperial governance, and cooperation against a common enemy replaced contention in transatlantic political relations, albeit most colonial legislatures were quick to take advantage of this situation to extend still further their authority over the internal affairs of their polities. Such “encroachments” in themselves seemed, in the metropolis, to be sufficient justification for the revival of the reform program in 1759, shortly after the fall of Canada to the British, and, as Bernhard Knollenberg demonstrated a half century ago, metropolitan authorities pursued it vigorously throughout the early 1760s.²4 No longer constrained by military exigency to placate colonial demands, they demonstrated their clear 24. Bernhard Knollenberg, Origin of the American Revolution: 1759–1766 (New York: Macmillan, 1960).

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intention to expand royal authority throughout the colonies through their attention to provincial legislation and other efforts to bring the colonies under closer central supervision. In doing so, they stirred new resentments among provincial leaders, although these often got submerged under the warm glow of British patriotism and the palpable pride that colonials took in being part of such a successful empire. The conquest of 1759 and the successful outcome of the Seven Years’ War thus did not initiate metropolitan efforts to tidy up the empire. Rooted in a growing awareness of the economic and strategic value of the colonies in a global struggle for imperial supremacy and a determination to head off French efforts to challenge British successes in the Americas, those efforts stretched back to the late 1740s and were well under way before the war began. The war experience strongly reinforced this reformist impulse, while the conquest of Quebec provided the essential precondition for its revival and extension. At the conclusion of the Seven Years’ War, however, the British Empire remained an empire whose overseas components had been largely constructed by settlers and other private participants on a basis that placed their interests first, and the individual colonies continued, as they had done since their early foundings, to enjoy an extraordinary degree of latitude in the management of provincial affairs. To insist upon tracing the immediate roots of the reform impulse to the prewar years is emphatically not to de-emphasize the causal importance of the Seven Years’ War in the metropolitan decision to pursue that impulse after the war. On the contrary, the successful outcome of the war dramatically reinforced the importance of the colonies in metropolitan thinking, altering even the ways people spoke about empire. No longer was the emphasis so heavily upon trade and the economic benefits, as it had been throughout most of the earlier eighteenth century. Defenders of the treaty that ended the war signaled the change in parliamentary debates in December 1762. “The value of our conquests . . . ought not to be estimated by present produce, but by their probable increase,” one speaker explained, and “neither ought the value of any country to be solely tried on its commercial advantages.” “Such ideas,” he said, were “rather [more] suited to a limited and petty commonwealth, like Holland, than to a great, powerful, and warlike nation” such as Britain. “Extent of territory and a number of subjects,” he argued, were “as much consideration to a state attentive to the sources of real grandeur, as the mere advantages of traffic.”²5 Indeed, observed the agricultural improver Arthur Young, as important as trade was to a commercial empire like Britain, it required “power and dominion . . . 25. Anonymous, Speeches, Dec. 9, 1762, in Simmons and Thomas, eds., Proceedings and Debates of the British Parliaments, 1:422–23.

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to support and protect” it.²6 No longer merely a powerful maritime trading nation, Britain, as a result of the war had become an imperial nation attentive not just to commercial considerations but also to the “real grandeur” it had achieved through its overwhelming victories during the war. In this new situation, Britain’s extensive overseas possessions became important, not only for the great wealth they brought, but also for the extraordinary power they conferred upon the nation. When speaking of empire, the language of imperialism or national grandeur now seemed to be as appropriate as the language of commerce. “By the additional wealth, power, territory, and influence . . . now thrown into our scale” as a consequence of the war, the economic writer Adam Anderson asserted in 1764, Britain would be forever “enabled to preserve our dearest independence with regard to the other potentates of Europe.” Now that the French had been routed throughout the globe and entirely removed from North America, Anderson looked forward to the creation on the North American continent of a “vastly more extensive empire” than Britain had previously enjoyed, one “where our kindred and fellowsubjects” would pave “the way for the comfortable settlement of many more millions of people than the whole British Empire now contains.”²7 From this new, postwar perspective on the empire, the colonies could thus be exhibited not merely, in the tradition of earlier analysts, as the prolific seedbeds of a thriving overseas commerce and an amazing stimulus to metropolitan British manufactures and industry, but also as fields for the exertion and display of Britain’s expanding, and infinitely expandable, national grandeur. Thus, when the chorographer John Campbell composed his massive twovolume Political Survey of Britain, published in London in 1774, he proudly included more than three hundred pages on “the Establishments we have made in all Parts of the World.” Heralding those establishments as “so many distinguishing Testimonies” to “the commodious Situation of this Island [that is, Great Britain], the Superior Genius of its Inhabitants, and the Excellence of our Constitution, . . . so many shining Trophies of our maritime Skill and naval Strength,” Campbell touted the colonies, not just for “support[ing] the Commerce,” but also for “extend[ing] the Fame” and “display[ing] the Power of Great Britain.”²8 26. Arthur Young, Reflections on the Present State of Affairs at Home and Abroad (London, 1759), 25. 27. Adam Anderson, An Historical and Chronological Deduction of the Origin of Commerce, From the Earliest Accounts, containing An History of the Great Commercial Interests of the British Empire, 4 vols. (London, 1787), 1:xliv–xlv. 28. John Campbell, A Political Survey of Britain: Being a Series of Reflections on the Situation, Lands, and Inhabitants, Revenues, Colonies, and Commerce of this Island, 2 vols. (London, 1774), 2:567, note i.

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Especially in view of the fiscal and physical exertions made by the metropolis on behalf of its overseas possessions during the Seven Years’ War, these many emblems of British fame and power no longer appeared to be the virtually spontaneous and largely self-sustaining products of settler initiative and industry, as so many earlier analysts had suggested, but the consequences of Britain’s own careful nurturing and protection, the glorious examples of Britain’s own commercial, political, maritime, and military genius. As they pondered the relationship between empire and national grandeur in the years immediately following the war, however, many metropolitan analysts of empire worried, even more than they had before and during the Seven Years’ War, that the empire might lack the internal cohesion and guidance necessary for Britain to fulfi ll this bold and flattering destiny. If overseas empire was so obviously an essential ingredient in Britain’s rise to international power, should it any longer be permitted to function with so little supervision and control? Did not, as Anderson declared, the many valuable extensions of British power overseas now “demand . . . the first and highest regard”?²9 Did they not, as another writer suggested, “require new regulation”?³0 “Formerly,” Arthur Young explained, “it mattered little, whether our statesmen were asleep or awake [in regard to the colonies]: And why? Because the increase of the colonies did the business for them: their increase caused the national trade to increase, and all went on silently, but prosperously.” With the continuously rising national significance of the colonies, however, this “old dilatory sleeping plan,” Young declared, would “no longer do.”³¹ As the ministerial apologist William Knox would observe in the late 1760s, the “Prodigious extent of the British dominions in America, the rapid increase of the people there, the great value of their trade, all unite in giving them such a degree of importance in the empire, as requires that more attention should be paid to their concerns, by the supreme legislature.”³² In this view, metropolitan passivity in regard to the overseas empire needed to give way to metropolitan activity. Recalling the disunited and parochial behavior of the North American colonies during the early years of the Seven Years’ War, some analysts were anxious lest such fissiparous tendencies should ultimately dissipate all the advantages the metropolis derived from the empire. Now that the war and the peace had 29. Anderson, Historical and Chronological Deduction of the Origin of Commerce, xlv. 30. The Political Balance, In Which The Principles and Conduct of the Two Parties are Weighed (London, 1765), 39. 31. Arthur Young, Political Essays Concerning the Present State of the British Empire (London, 1772), 552. 32. William Knox, The Present State of the Nation: Particularly with Respect to its Trade (London, 1768), 39.

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“freed [them] from all those terrors of a foreign enemy which so lately agitated” them, such people fretted, the colonists, reflecting upon “their efforts, during the war, the [new] sense of their security, [their growing] confidence in their own power, [and] the mistaken opinion that independence [was] . . . freedom,” might exhibit, as one observer said, “a restless spirit, which will become more dangerous in proportion as the people who feel it become more powerful.” For an imperial nation to have unruly or uncontrollable colonies was unbecoming. For that reason, he thought, it seemed “expedient, . . . even necessary to lay” the colonies under some appropriate “restraint now, while” it could still “be made binding.” To this end, several writers called for measures that would at once maintain “the dominion of Great Britain” over the overseas empire, secure “to her the dependence of her colonies,” and mold “the loose texture of that empire . . . into that form which is best calculated for the common good.”³³ Given the failures of Crown authorities using prerogative power alone over the previous decade and a half, many in colonial administration assumed that the achievement of these goals would require parliamentary assistance. For people with such views, the American Plantation Duties Act of 1764 and the Stamp Act of 1765 represented steps in the right direction. As one contemporary interpreter pointed out, the function of those and other metropolitan regulations adopted in the years immediately after the war was not simply to “regulate the commerce, and improve the revenue of the British empire,” but also to achieve still a third “great” purpose of empire: to “secure the dominion” of the parent state over the colonies. “By uniting these three objects,” he thought, the American Plantation Duties Act became “at once a Bill of Police, Commerce, and Revenue.” As such, it promised to lay a “deep and broad foundation” on which to reconstruct the empire.³4 The problem with this strategy was that from the beginning it provoked enormous anxiety throughout the American segments of the empire and met massive resistance from the North American colonies, where it shattered expectations growing out of the Seven Years’ War for metropolitan acknowledgment of their longstanding aspirations for explicit metropolitan recognition of the sanctity of colonists’ claims to the rights of Britons. Exhibited in pamphlets, newspaper essays, legislative resolutions and petitions, an economic boycott, a general congress, and local riots and intimidation to prevent the enforcement of the Stamp Act, colonial resistance drew upon the traditional language of colonial liberty, as it had emerged over the previous century and a half of the colonies’ existence, to claim colonial exemption not only from parliamen33. Political Balance, 44–45. 34. Ibid., 46, 48.

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tary taxation but also from laws relating to their internal polities. Dismissing metropolitan arguments in favor of the legislation as naked expressions of a language of might or state power that ignored their status as free polities within the empire, colonial protagonists argued that colonists, as Britons, were entitled to all British liberties, that by right they were subject to no laws to which they had not consented through their representatives, and that their representatives sat in their several colonial assemblies, not in Parliament. This response set the terms for a decade-long transatlantic debate over whether the maintenance of Britain’s imperial stature required the British Parliament to hold an incontestable and acknowledged authority over the entire empire. IV There is no need here to rehearse once again the slow process by which, over the next decade, thirteen of Britain’s American colonies moved from being functional to dysfunctional to revolutionary components of the British Empire, nor the military events that reinforced their decision to go their own way and try to form a national union independent of the British Empire. Peter Marshall has referred to this unforeseen consequence of the stunning successes of British arms in the Seven Years’ War as the “unmaking” of the British Empire, but it could also be termed the remaking of the British Empire, a change that is in full accord with the spirit of his analysis.³5 Britain’s old settler empire with its traditions of self-government and creolizations of the English common law system was substantially diminished, and the union of Britain and Ireland in 1800 further contributed to this development. And while portions of the empire in North America, the Atlantic, and the West Indies remained to carry these traditions forward, conditions of late establishment, internal weakness, or external vulnerability rendered their situations more susceptible to metropolitan control than had been customary in the older colonies. The metropolitan government even felt it safe to extend those traditions to colonies in which the settler population was substantial, granting consensual government to Quebec in the early 1790s and acquiescing to, in some cases actually promoting, the transfer of both representative institutions and English law to the many settler colonies established in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, and east Africa.³6 Moreover, the new humanitarian standards applied by critics to virtually every part of the empire after 1760 eventually led to a variety of reforms that 35. Marshall, Making and Unmaking of Empires. 36. See Greene, ed., Exclusionary Empire, chaps. 6–10.

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made the empire somewhat less nakedly brutal in its treatment of subordinate peoples, if not usually less exclusionary. East India corruption became less rampant, the African slave trade was outlawed, chattel slavery was formally abolished, and Irish Catholics may have suffered less discrimination after Ireland’s union with Britain. Indeed, following the abolition of slavery, a creditable argument could be made that the British Empire was considerably freer than it had been before the loss of the American colonies or than the contemporary United States. Yet, as Peter Marshall and other historians of the non-settler empire have so often reminded us, the beginnings of territorial empire in India and the growing importance of the Indian trade during the closing decades of the eighteenth century provided the foundation for a new kind of imperial structure, one in which large portions of the empire would be governed without a formal consensual element in a far more authoritarian way than had been characteristic of all but a few polities in the old empire, albeit Europeans and their descendants usually enjoyed the benefits of English common law legal culture. Moreover, Indian precedents informed the creation after 1790 of a new form of governance, crown colony governance, for newly conquered or planted colonies in which the independent population was small, a form that in the 1860s would be extended to all but a handful of the those older colonies in the West Indies, where, after two centuries of consensual governance, provincial establishments chose to do without such governance rather than share it with the formerly enslaved majority. And, the spread of settler colonies in the nineteenth and early twentieth century was accompanied by the addition of many new colonies in which a small group of European bureaucrats presided over massive indigenous populations, few members of which were incorporated into the administrative world. The British Empire, remaking itself after 1783, was not the empire that the celebrants of 1759 and 1763 envisioned.

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— ten —

An Empire of Freemen? The British Debate over the Status of Overseas Representative Assemblies, 1763–1783

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any eighteenth-century Britons celebrated the representative institutions that settlers had devised in the early colonies and that had subsequently become a standard feature of British colonial governance as the central element that allegedly distinguished Britain’s free overseas empire from those that other nations established. In America, proudly declared the agricultural writer Arthur Young in 1772, “Spain, Portugal and France have planted despotisms; only Britain liberty.”¹ “The Case of a Free country branching itself out in the manner Britain has done and sending to a distant world colonies which have there, from small beginnings and under free legislatures of their own, increased and formed a body of powerful states,” wrote the philosopher Richard Price, was unprecedented “in the history of mankind.”² Similarly, Adam Smith, in his extensive dilation in the Wealth of Nations in 1776 upon the causes of the rapid development in new colonial societies in the Englishspeaking world, directly linked the colonies’ rapid development to their extensive self-governing authority and more specifically to the fact that their liberties were “secured in the same manner” as were those “of their fellow-citizens at home . . . by an assembly of the representatives of the people.”³

This chapter is an abbreviated version of a lecture presented at the Yale Center for the Study of Representative Institutions, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut, November 29, 2011, and as a lecture at the University of Notre Dame, South Bend, Indiana, December 6, 2012. It is here published for the fi rst time. 1. Arthur Young, Political Essays Concerning the Present State of the British Empire (London, 1772), 20. 2. Richard Price, Richard Price and the Ethical Foundations of the American Revolution: Selections from His Pamphlets, with Appendices, ed. Bernard Peach (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1979), 82. 3. Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776), in The Glasgow Edition of the Works and Correspondence of Adam Smith, ed. R. H. Campbell and A. S. Skinner, 6 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976–83), 2:572, 583–85.

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But such declamations concealed a deep and longstanding rift within the empire over whether a free empire required that colonial assemblies have parliamentary status within their respective jurisdictions. Long a bone of contention between colonial political establishments and Crown officials, the character and authority of the colonial representative institutions were subjects that lay at the heart of the intense and wide-ranging debate over the nature of the British imperial constitution during the last half of the eighteenth century and that deserve far more emphasis than scholars have accorded them over the past five or six decades. How these questions were contested within Britain itself, before, during, and after the debate over what came to be known as the American question from the early 1760s into the mid-1780s, is the subject of this chapter. More specifically, it will examine the intense debate over whether in a free empire colonial legislatures had to exercise an exclusive authority over taxation and the domestic affairs of their respective polities and how contingent developments, arising mainly out of conflicts with revolting colonies, a restless Ireland, and a problematic territorial venture in India, affected the outcome of that debate. II For more than eighty years, from the late 1670s through the early 1760s, questions about the constitutional basis of the colonial assemblies and the scope of their authority shaped debate whenever metropolitan authorities made one of their periodic efforts to shore up Crown authority in the colonies, and at no time more so than during the fifteen years from 1748 to 1763. Without the fiscal and utilitarian resources or the coercive power to enforce the royal will in the colonies, however, these mostly unsustained metropolitan initiatives accomplished little by way of limiting assembly authority in the colonies. On the contrary, during the eighteenth century, as the growing complexities of the political process rendered those bodies indispensable to the functioning of the colonial polities, they developed a much more articulate sense of their corporate rights and otherwise sought to give substance to the ideal that, as the sole givers of all statutory law operating inside a colony and as the presumed equivalents of the House of Commons within that sphere, they were endowed with charismatic authority and held in trusteeship all of the sacred rights and privileges of the public.4 Few metropolitan officials were ever comfortable with this development. It implied a conception of the empire as a composite state, an association of poli4. See chaps. 5 and 6, above.

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ties, each exercising authority over its internal sphere through the instruments of consensual governance while maintaining a common attachment to a parent culture through well-defined political ties to a central state, whichever institution, Crown or Parliament, might hold the preponderance of power within that state. From the point of view of metropolitan administrators, however, such an arrangement gave the several colonial governments far more extensive authority than they thought desirable and produced an imperial polity that was much too loose and too free from central direction to be easily managed, especially during wartime, and they clung to the idea that the assemblies were little more than glorified equivalents of the governing bodies of English corporations operating within broader jurisdictions. Notwithstanding substantial colonial contributions to the intercolonial wars between 1739 and 1763, London officials became ever more convinced, especially during the Seven Years’ War, that the colonies were too free of central direction to be counted on to contribute effectively to the international struggle for empire or to contribute systematically to the extension to a wider empire of the fiscal military state that had come into existence in Britain in the decades since the Glorious Revolution. To this end, several political writers during the early 1760s called for measures that would at once maintain “the dominion of Great Britain” over the overseas empire, secure “to her the dependence of her colonies,” and mold “the loose texture of that empire . . . into that form which is best calculated for the common good.”5 Such concerns lay behind the Grenville ministry’s efforts in the mid-1760s to add Parliament’s authority to that of the Crown in an attempt to curtail the centrifugal tendencies that had traditionally characterized the British imperial polity, with Parliament asserting its jurisdiction over the colonies in unprecedented ways by taxing them for revenue, otherwise interfering in the internal affairs of the colonies, and funding, for the first time during peacetime, a substantial military force in the colonies. In the vigorous and extended debate that erupted during the Stamp Act crisis of 1764–66 and escalated over the following decade, participants addressed—for the first time in the long history of the British Empire in an empire-wide arena—the unresolved questions of how free the British Empire really was and what made it so. Most members of the British political nation seem to have agreed that the authority of the King-in-Parliament, the locus of sovereignty within Britain, extended over all places British, and the staunchest adherents of this belief 5. The Political Balance, In which the Principles and Conduct of the Two Parties are Weighed (London, 1765), 44–45.

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were in power for all but a few months between 1764 and the early 1780s. Although a significant opposition argued that Parliament, in the interest of the economic well-being of the empire and, more especially, of the parent state, should refrain from exerting its authority in ways unpalatable to the colonies and should pursue a policy of conciliation rather than confrontation, few members of that opposition initially doubted Parliament’s authority, agreeing, theoretically at least, that as the ultimate authority within the British state, Parliament’s jurisdiction extended to all areas of the Crown’s dominions. Parliament explicitly endorsed this view in 1766 in the Declaratory Act that accompanied its repeal of the Stamp Act and, as colonists renewed their resistance, acted on the principles of the Declaratory Act with the Townshend measures of 1767– 68, repeatedly reaffirming those principles in virtually every measure taken in reference to the colonies under the North administration between 1770 and 1776. Throughout, the administration was supported by a substantial majority in Parliament and defended by a large pamphlet literature that endeavored to supply intellectual underpinnings for the government case. Published anonymously in the fall of 1768, a pamphlet entitled The Constitutional Right of the Legislature of Great Britain to Tax the British Colonies in America, Impartially Considered was one of the most impressive efforts written in behalf of administrative measures. In this author’s view, the confl ict over this much-debated question could be traced directly to long-term metropolitan neglect. “Cast your eye back to the first establishment of her American colonies; and from thence progressively forward to the present period,” the author wrote in arguing his case that the colonies enjoyed no more than a provincial status within the empire, “and you shall not find one instance of conduct in the ministry, or legislature of Great Britain, tending towards the establishment of a system of government, natural and proper to their situation and condition, as provinces.” As a consequence of this neglect, he explained, the “colonies thus left to themselves, and grown up into a state of prosperity under the influence and protection of their mother country,” had, “by uninterrupted habit, come to think their corporation assemblies to be no less than parliaments; and with an ambition natural to man, viewing their numbers, and the extent of country they possess,” been “emboldened . . . to grasp at national and independent legislation and government.” But such ambitions, this administration supporter contended, seemed wholly inappropriate for colonies. The “science of politics,” he wrote, made an “essential distinction . . . between national, and provincial government.” “What is true about national governments,” he continued, “can only be improperly, and absurdly said, with respect to the provinces.” If Great Britain permitted “them to govern themselves in the same manner that she

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is governed, they would naturally, and necessarily cease to be provinces; and become, virtually, so many free and independent states.”6 This author did not deny that, as “the offspring and children of Britain” and as the owners “of property, the efficient cause of power and dominion,” Americans were “morally and naturally intitled to all the liberty, rights, and privileges of Britons; and of consequence, they ought . . . to have their property in America taxed with their own consent.” “The liberties of America,” he declared, ought “to be as tenderly regarded, as those of Great Britain—Who can love liberty in the mother!” he asked, “and not wish to see America and every child of Britain free?” But colonial liberty, he insisted, was limited by the provincial status of the colonies. Residents of colonies could only “enjoy as much freedom, liberty, and independency, as their situation will admit of, as subjects and provinces of Great Britain.” But their provincial situation did not mean that the “barriers of their liberty” did not “remain . . . intire,” that the “sovereign fountain of Justice” was not “always open to them at home, by appeals,” that they were not free to “make their own laws, in their corporate assemblies, for regulating their internal police,” or that they did not enjoy, “in every question of private property[,] . . . immortal juries; and all the rights and privileges of Britons there, and every where else.” Certainly, it did not mean that every colony, in its “incorporate and internal state, as a province,” could not tax itself. “But to deny the right of the mother country . . . in her supreme legislative capacity” also to tax the colonies, he argued, was “to deny her sovereignty” and “to change their political existence: and in place of sons and provinces of their mother country, to become aliens: and to form themselves into . . . an independent nation.”7 “From this fair deduction of the argument,” this author concluded, “the single question seems to be; Whether Great Britain ought to retain her provinces under her legal and parental subjection; or, by enfranchising them, under a like constitution with her own, make them a free and independent nation.” He had no doubt that Britain’s own political and economic welfare demanded that they should remain as provinces and that to “continue them as provinces, they” had to “be kept obedient to the laws, and legislature of Great Britain.” Indeed, he thought that “this high humour of the North Americans might be considered as one of the happiest incidents that could have fallen out.” “The not adverting to the natural and necessary difference between national, and provincial legislation and government,” he professed, had “been the principle cause of the 6. The Constitutional Right of the Legislature of Great Britain to Tax the British Colonies in America, Impartially Stated (London, 1768), 2–3, 6, 27–28. 7. Ibid., 12, 44, 49, 52, 57.

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difference in opinion, about the right of British legislation in America,” and by opening “the eyes of the nation” to this problem, American resistance had provided “an opportunity to the legislature, while it is not yet too late, to new model the government of North America, upon a plan of liberty suitable to the nature of colonies, and the dominion of the mother country.” To “confirm the right of the legislature,” to “maintain the honour of parliament,” and to “prove that Great Britain can, and will tax her colonies,” he advocated keeping a small tax in effect, “were it but to the amount of a pound upon each colony,” but such a step, he warned, would “be altogether insufficient, unless that a proper system of provincial government be established.”8 In pursuit of this objective, the author offered what he called “the rough outlines of a provincial system,” the central objective of which was to “Fix the nature, power, and extent of the colony assemblies, so, that they may never be mistaken, hereafter, for parliaments: but known and universally acknowledged as corporate bodies, only, having power to propose laws for the internal police of the colony, to be approved or rejected by his Majesty in council, as usual; and always subject to the revisal and alteration of parliament.” The “distance of America from Great Britain and the vast extent of the country itself,” he concluded, rendered “it incapable of being kept and governed by Great Britain, in any other form or manner, than that of a province.” “The people born there,” he continued, “have an affection for the soil. They are possessed of it. They acknowledge it for their country. Their fi rst and ultimate hopes and fears, are, about its prosperity or misfortune. And every other country and people, even the mother country, occupy but a second place in their consideration.” Once they had been accorded an exclusive power to tax themselves, he warned, independence would soon follow. The colonies, he concluded, “must in every thing be kept subject and obedient to the lords of the field, that is, to the legislature of Great Britain.” North America, he wrote, “must be governed as a province, if Great Britain be inclined to govern her at all: and a military force must be made use of, as well to secure her obedience, as to afford her protection.” That Americans might resist these extensive innovations in the customary constitutional arrangements within the empire or that such innovations might require colonial consent seems not to have entered into the calculus of this author’s proposals.9 In a 1774 pamphlet entitled Colonising, or a Plain Investigation of That Subject; with the Legislative, Political and Commercial View of the Colonies, another anonymous writer systematically endeavored to explore and make theoretical 8. Ibid., 6–9, 17–18, 20–21, 28. 9. Ibid., 8, 12–13, 16, 51–52, 58.

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sense out of the assumptions underlying the government position. Beginning with a definition of “colonising” as “the act of a powerful and parental people,” being “to a state what propagating is to a family,” this author explained that if the entire population of a country moved it would establish not a colony but a state. Owing “their establishment to the conception, maintenance, or protection of a parent government,” colonies, by contrast, were merely offshoots of their sponsoring state that had no “other political ground or national object, than the good of the common weal, the advantage of that government, to which all their enterprises should point.” By this formulation, Colonising’s author thus assumed, as did virtually all those who spoke or wrote in behalf of administration, that the colonies were merely subordinate extensions of the metropolitan state and without the liberty to exempt themselves from taxation and regulation by the metropolitan government.¹0 Administration apologists did not deny that the colonies had been treated liberally and allowed a large measure of self-government. “Ever since they could be called a People,” wrote Adam Serle in 1775, “they have enjoyed . . . all the Advantages and Immunities of Britons. Not the nearest Subjects to the Throne in England, nor the remotest Members of the State in Asia,” he observed, “have had a wider Field of Freedom to range in, than the once happy Sons of highly-favored and indulged America.”¹¹ Even Dr. Samuel Johnson, the ministry’s most strident supporter, agreed that “an English Colony has very liberal powers of regulating its own manners and adjusting its own affairs.”¹² In the administration view, however, this experience did not exempt the colonies from metropolitan authority, and, as Johnson wrote in a 1774 pamphlet, it seemed absurd to “suppose that by sending out a colony, the nation established an independent power.”¹³ Yet another writer, who was anonymous, acknowledged in 1775 that “the present constitutional and legal claims of the British Parliament over the Americans” might appear “somewhat monstrous and unnatural, and not quite conformable to the present popular notions of British freedom, and of equal and just government in general,” but he expressed the opinion that distance inevitably meant that not all British rights were “capable of being practiced and enjoyed in a state of colonial emigration or separation 10. Colonising, or a Plain Investigation of That Subject; with the Legislative, Political and Commercial View of the Colonies (London, 1774), 7–8. 11. [Ambrose Serle], Americans against Liberty: or An Essay on the Nature and Principles of True Freedom, Shewing that the Designs and Conduct of the Americans Tend Only to Tyranny and Slavery (London, 1775). 12. Samuel Johnson, Taxation no Tyranny: An Answer to the Resolutions and Address of the American Congress (London, 1775), 24. 13. [Samuel Johnson], The Patriot (London, 1774), 22–23.

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from the mother country, in so absolute and complete a degree at least as under the circumstances of a personal residence in it.”¹4 III Not all metropolitan Britons agreed with this drift of thought about the empire and the conception of situationally limited colonial liberties on which it was founded. Indeed, during the long-running debate over how to respond to colonial resistance during the dozen years after 1764, a variety of spokesmen in Parliament and in the press subjected this view to a penetrating examination and developed an alternative interpretation that privileged commercial returns over national grandeur or state power and colonial affection and liberty over colonial obedience and submission. The underlying contention of this opposition view was that the government and its supporters had utterly failed to comprehend the historical foundations and conditions for Britain’s imperial success. They started from the argument that early modern European empires had no parallels in European history. “Arms, not Commerce, was the chief Employment of ” the Romans, one writer pointed out during the Stamp Act crisis;¹5 their principal objects, added another, were “the glory of the Roman name, and the plunder of the rest of mankind, for the benefit of the Roman people,” and they extracted “tribute and servility” from their conquered colonies. By contrast, the latter writer explained, the “colonies established by the modern European nations . . . in uncultivated and uncivilized countries” had “two apparent views; the establishment of the Christian religion, and the increase of dominion.” In the English case, the “extension of dominion” did not entail the establishment “of an uncontrouled power over slaves,” as the Romans sought, “but a dominion founded on freedom . . . for the establishment and extension of the commerce of the British dominions.” Unlike the Roman colonies, the English had thus been founded by “freemen, leaving their native home to extend its commerce for the public good” and providing “a liberal obedience, fi lial affection, and those advantages which the balance of trade gives” in return for “that protection which the colonies have a right to expect from” the mother country.¹6 As opposition spokesmen never tired of pointing out, the British experi14. Considerations Upon the Question, What should be an honest Englishman’s Endeavour in this present Controversy between Great-Britain and the Colonies? (London, 1775), 17, 31. 15. The General Opposition of the Colonies to the Payment of the Stamp Duty; and the Consequences of Enforcing Obedience by Military Measures, Impartially Considered (London, 1766), 29. 16. The Late Occurrences in North America, and Policy of Great Britain Considered (London, 1766), 34–35, 37.

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ence with this commercially driven form of empire building had by the end of the Seven Year’s War produced a “fabric [that was] at once the dread and wonder of the world,”¹7 the envy of all other European imperial powers, and they traced this success to the gentle mode of British colonial governance. Out of commercial considerations, said Jonathan Shipley, bishop of St. Asaph and an articulate and perceptive opponent of the government’s colonial measures, Britain had permitted the colonies to enjoy “the form and the spirit of our own constitution” through the instrument of representative assemblies” and thereby had effectively placed colonists “on the same equal footing” with Britons at home and then “joined with them in fairly carrying on one common interest.” “There is no instance in the records of time,” Shipley declared, “where infant colonies have been treated with such a just and liberal indulgence.” In this conception, a free empire required legislative self-governance in all its many constituent parts.¹8 Many opposition writers agreed with the colonists that the metropolitan Parliament did not represent the colonies. During the Stamp Act crisis, one anonymous critic of the Grenville administration denounced the suggestion that the colonies were “virtually represented in parliament” in the same way as were large English towns that sent no delegates to Parliament as “most ridiculous and unfair.” By placing them on the same level as “copyholders, formerly in the vilest bondage, and therefore particularly excluded the least share in government,” and “treating them as women, as infants, and the dregs of the city of London,” groups that, according to Sir William Blackstone, were “entirely excluded from the right of voting” because they could “have no will of their own,” constituted “a plain declaration of your opinion, that they are without property and integrity, will or capacity.” Quoting Blackstone “in his late masterly performance” that there was “ ‘hardly a free agent to be found, but what is entitled to vote in some place or other in this kingdom,” this critic expressed no surprise that the Americans considered any suggestions that they had no wills of their own or were “not free agents” as the supreme “insult.”¹9 As the Scottish writer John Erskine explained in a 1776 pamphlet, met17. A Letter to Sir William Meredith, Bart. In Answer to His Late Letter to the Earl of Chatham (London, 1774), 8. 18. Jonathan Shipley, Bishop of St. Asaph, A Speech Intended to have been Spoken by the Bishop of St. Asaph, on a Bill for Altering the Charters of the Colony of Massachusetts Bay (London, 1775), and A Sermon Preached before the Incorporated Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts (London, 1773), in Paul H. Smith, comp., English Defenders of American Freedoms, 1774–1778: Six Pamphlets Attacking British Policy (Washington, D.C.: Library of Congress, 1972), 19, 32, 34. 19. Late Occurrences in North America, 3–5.

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ropolitan authorities and colonists alike had ever “considered [the colonists] as having quitted the realm,” and while the colonists “incorporated [themselves] into distinct communities” the Crown granted them the “jus regalia” and encouraged them to establish “their own peculiar legislatures, free, uncontrouled and complete, in conjunction with the king’s deputy.” “For a century and a half,” he continued, “the course and practice of government” had operated according to a division of authority and responsibilities between metropolis and colonies, with the metropolitan government “imposing external and port duties, but never directly laying internal taxes on the Colonies for their lands, &c. or on their transactions within the precincts of the jurisdiction of their several territories.”²0 Such free subjects, opposition writers insisted, could not be treated as inferiors who had to bend to the commands of superiors. By the mid-1770s, many writers, spelling out the implications of English traditions of liberty for the organization of the empire, had moved well beyond the prudential arguments employed by most opposition spokespeople to mount a powerful case in behalf of colonial entitlement to English liberties. The “peculiar excellence” of “the English constitution,” one writer noted, was that it proclaimed “to all a liberty and freedom unknown in other countries,”²¹ and they pointed out that Britain could not deprive the colonists of traditional British liberties without violating its own principles and acting out of character. “Let Englishmen, who have been admired for ages, for their regard to liberty, blush, when it is now said, that, by superior force, they would deprive three or four millions of their fellow-subjects of those rights and privileges to which they are so attached themselves,” the political radical John Cartwright declared in the fall of 1774: “Is that the people, foreigners will say, who are so fond of liberty?”²² As the administration drifted toward war, still other writers pointed out that depriving colonists of full British liberties was not only inconsistent with British principles but also politically dangerous. If “we except them out of the fundamental laws and maxims of our Constitution, which form the true compact that links us together, if we arrogate to ourselves exclusive rights and privileges, which we deny to them,” wrote the anonymous author of a pamphlet published in January 1775, “they cease from that moment to be our 20. [ John Erskine], Reflections on the Rise, Progress, and Probable Consequences of the Present Contentions with the Colonies (Edinburgh, 1776), 8–9, 12. 21. An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Present Dispute between the British Colonies in America and their Mother-Country; and their reciprocal Claims and just Rights impartially examined and fairly stated (London, 1769), 24. 22. John Cartwright, American Independence The Interest and Glory of Great Britain (London, 1774), 11.

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fellow-citizens; we dissolve the tie, disfranchise and degrade them from their due state of equality; and having separated them from us by such an injurious distinction, we drive them to consider themselves at liberty to provide for their freedom and welfare in the best manner they can; for they will probably not deem themselves compellable to accept a form of government distinct from that which we retain to ourselves within the realm.”²³ That coercive measures were wholly incompatible with British traditions of liberty was a favorite theme among opposition writers in the mid-1770s. “However we disregard” the opinions of the colonists, advised A.M., “let us regard our own. The asserting of liberty has been the boast of Englishmen,” he said, and “to make a people we look on as brethren, even ideally slaves, must hurt our own pride; to be enraged at them, for being as jealous of their rights as we are,” he contended, was “inconsistent.” Whenever “the Parliament of Great Britain decides in favour of liberty,” he continued, “it does so consistently, and with honour, for such decision has always the appearance of a compliance to its own, and to the principles of the nation.” “Take the matter in any light we please,” he observed, “our principles, our honour, and our interest, forbid our forcing them.” “Let us not,” he pleaded, “let a mistaken pride betray us into a conduct, the most flattering consequence [of which] is to enslave so many valuable members of a state, which we wish to call free.”²4 To deny English rights to Britons not resident in the realm, Cartwright declared, was to “invade the most precious rights a human being can enjoy, and” to “render the rest of ” the Anglophone world beyond the metropolis little more than “miserable servile wretches.” Was this appropriate behavior for a “people so celebrated for” liberty, he inquired? “It is high time,” he declared, “that we opened our eyes to the unconstitutional encroachments we have been making upon the liberties of mankind,” including the Irish and the West Indians, as well as the North Americans, “and to the necessity of setting bounds to our dominion.”²5 IV Nor did this critique end with the outbreak of military confl ict. Richard Price laid out many of the principal ingredients in what soon became the conventional opposition position in his Observations on the Nature of Civil Liberty, 23. Three Letters to a Member of Parliament, on the Subject of the Present Dispute with our American Colonies (London, 1775), 68–69. 24. A.M., Reflections on the American Contest: in which the Consequences of a Forced Submission and the Means of a Lasting Reconciliation are pointed out (London, 1776), 37, 41, 49. 25. John Cartwright, American Independence The Interest and Glory of Great-Britain, 2d ed. (London, 1775), 1, 9, 30–31, 48, 66; Cartwright, Letter to Edmund Burke, Esq; Controverting the

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published in early 1776. Contending “that a common relation to one supreme executive head; an exchange of kind offices; tyes of interest and affection, and compacts” were “sufficient to give the British Empire all the Unity that is necessary,” Price denounced the use of coercion to force colonials to acknowledge the supremacy of Parliament as “a gross and flagrant violation of the constitution.” In his opinion the resulting war was one “undertaken not only against the principles of our own constitution; but on purpose to destroy other similar constitutions in America; and to substitute in their room a military force.” By such measures, Price suggested, the administration had instantly transformed the free empire in which Britons had taken so much pride into a tyrannical one. Defining the word empire as “a collection of states or communities united by some common bond or tye,” he distinguished between “an Empire of Freemen,” in which all the states that composed it had “free constitutions of government, and with respect to taxation and internal legislation” were “independent of the other states, but united by compacts, or alliances, or subjection to a Great Council, representing the whole, or to one monarch entrusted with the supreme executive power,” and an “Empire of Slaves,” in which “none of the states possess[ed] any independent legislative authority; but” were “all subject to an absolute monarch, whose will is their law.” If only “one of the states is free, but governs by its will all the other states,” he explained, then is that empire “like that of the Romans in the time of the republic, an Empire consisting of one state free, and the rest in slavery.”²6 Price found this situation all the more appalling because it seemed to some extent to mimic English behavior elsewhere in the empire, and he invited his readers to “Turn your eyes to India,” where “englishmen, actuated by the love of plunder and spirit of conquest,” had “depopulated whole kingdoms, and ruined millions of innocent people by the most infamous oppression and rapacity.” If the “justice of the nation” had “slept over these enormities” in India and if the nation had failed fully to grasp their implications for its reputation and character, its efforts “to reduce to servitude its own brethren” in America, he complained, had now made it clear that Britain, “A nation, once the protector of Liberty in distant countries, and the scourge of tyranny, [had] changed into an enemy to Liberty.” By refusing to be “content with controuling power over millions of people which gave it every advantage,” by “insisting upon such a supremacy over” the Americans “as would leave them nothing they Principles of American Government, Laid down in his lately published Speech on American Taxation (London, 1775), 13. 26. Richard Price, Observations on the Nature of Civil Liberty, The Principles of Government, and the Justice and Policy of the War with America, 8th ed. (Dublin, 1776), 36, 45–46, 64.

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could call their own, and [by] carrying desolation and death among them for disputing it,” he declared, a formerly “great and enlightened nation” had only managed to make itself “execrated on both sides of the globe” and to invite the wrath of God for its injustice.²7 Appealing to what the lawyer Menasseh Dawes called, in a pamphlet published in December 1776, “the tender feelings of independent men, for injured liberty, for wisdom and discretion lost,”²8 writers of various persuasions throughout the early years of the war followed Price in condemning the use of force against the colonies as a violation of British libertarian traditions. Following the lead of Adam Smith in the Wealth of Nations, George Johnstone, formerly governor of West Florida, in a speech in the House of Commons in December 1777, attributed “the flourishing state to which America had attained in a very few years before our invasion of her liberties . . . to the freedom of the laws which Great Britain had given her,” which he referred to as “an epitome of our own government. This,” he explained, “was a secret which England first discovered, of rendering her government in the extremities of her wide empire as compact and strong as that of other free nations had been weak and inefficient,” so that while “their colonists were slaves; Britain had made hers as free as herself.” To support this argument, Johnstone contrasted American development with the “weakness of our governments in the East Indies,” where, “governed in Leadenhall-street” by the East India Company, there was “no freedom” but only “wars, tumults, outrages.”²9 Other writers agreed with Johnstone and Price. “By this species of constitution,” William Pulteney observed in a pamphlet published in January 1778, the Colonies were possessed of a controul, situated upon the spot, and placed in the hands of the representatives of the people, upon the Governor or executive in each Colony. They had also a general controul upon the administration of justice; and the same sort of general superintending and inquisitorial power, for controulling public abuses of all kinds, which belongs to the House of Commons in this country; and the members of Assembly claimed, and by usage actually enjoyed, all the political privileges within each Colony, which belong to the members of the British House of Commons.

No wonder then, Pulteney emphasized, that “the claim of Britain to a power of taxing them by the Parliament here, and of altering their Charter of Gov27. Ibid., 94, 115–16, 132–34. 28. [Menasseh Dawes], A Letter to Lord Chatham, concerning The present War of Great Britain against America (London, 1776), 5. 29. George Johnstone, Speech, Dec. 2, 1777, in William Cobbett, ed., Parliamentary History of England from the Earliest Period to the Year 1803, 36 vols. (London, 1814), 19:520–21.

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ernment, without any application for that purpose from themselves, by the sole power of our Legislature,” had “united so great a part of Americans in the present contest with Great Britain.”³0 Sir William Meredith explored the nature of Britain’s libertarian identity and its relationship to colonial governance in a series of published letters to a friend in 1778. “What then,” he asked, “do we mean by the name Country, as relative to the duty we owe, and the love we bear it? We do not mean the soil; we do not mean the climate; but, we mean that Constitution of Government, by which we enjoy peace, security, and freedom. You, my friend, love your country, because you are born to the Inheritance of her laws; because, under them, you enjoy the privilege . . . as your own birth-right.” “But, in order to identify the love, secure the allegiance, and command the duty of ” a colony, Meredith argued, it was “necessary for the mother country, on her part to govern” that “colony exactly upon the same principles, and according to the same rules, forms, and order, as her resident citizens are governed by; it is also necessary to maintain every barrier of freedom, both in person and property, within the province, in the same state as they are kept within her own precincts. For, if the constitution is once changed upon the colonist, the country is no longer his country; he becomes an alien. How is it possible, in nature,” he asked, “for any man to love a country which gives liberty to others, but denies it to himself; and which protects the property of other men, but lays violent hands upon his own?”³¹ Clearly, wrote another anonymous author in January 1778, the Americans, not the metropolitan British, were “the people, at present, that are preserving the constitution, by defending the principle on which it is founded, the right of assent and consent in taxation.”³² The contention of such writers was that the administration was the aggressor in the American contest. “Before the aera of the Stamp Act,” Pulteney wrote, “there was no instance of any general combination in America, to resist the authority of this country” and “that such a general combination did immediately take place, after the passing of that act.” Following the Stamp Act crisis, he noted, the “republican form of the American constitutions . . . began to give us disgust,”³³ and the administration began to think that, in the words 30. William Pulteney, Thoughts on the Present State of Affairs with America, and the Means of Conciliation, 5th ed. (London, 1778), 4, 7. 31. [Sir William Meredith], Historical Remarks on the Taxation of Free States, in a Series of Letters to a Friend (London, 1778), 6–7. 32. The Case Stated, of Philosophical Ground, Between Great Britain and Her Colonies: or the Analogy Between States and Individuals, Respecting the Term of Political Adultness, Pointed Out (London, 1778), 25. 33. Pulteney, Thoughts on the Present State of Affairs, 4, 32–33.

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of Erskine, “checking their growth, and abridging their liberties, was the only method of ” quieting colonial resistance. Denying that the colonies were “entitled to a constitution of the same political liberty as that which they left” in England, the administration adopted policies that assumed that colonial constitutions might “be new modelled and reformed, or suspended and taken away at the will of the sovereign.”³4 The very language they used, “Supremacy of Parliament on one hand, and unconditional submission on the other,” echoed another writer, “are the dogmas and language of Turks, not of Britons.”³5 Nor was it only the North Americans who agreed with the thrust of this argument. Ireland, the West Indian, and the Atlantic island colonies, as another writer said, looked upon Britain’s claim of omnipotency over the colonies “with terror” and “a jealous eye.”³6 Although the West Indian colonies had “not been able, with the northern colonies, to make the paramount power of the British parliament at present a subject of hostile discussion,” warned still another, “yet too many of them,” he said in singling out “the conduct of Jamaica and Barbadoes,” favored “opposition, and wishfully look[ed] forward . . . to a desirable object, to an independency.”³7 V Burgoyne’s defeat at Saratoga in the fall of 1777 raised war opponents’ hopes for an end to the war, and the first half of 1778 generated an astonishing number of proposals for reconciliation. Such a defeat, declared an anonymous author, made it painfully obvious that Britain “might sooner make France a province of the British empire, than reduce those intrepid republicans to obedience.”³8 Using the pseudonym Coriolanus, another writer argued that Britain should go much further to recapture the affections of the colonies. The course of the war, he said, had made it clear that the “doctrine” of absolute colonial subjection to Parliament could never be put “into execution, with so enlightened a people as the Americans are universally allowed to be,” noting that “all men of experience and candor allow[ed]” that it was “absolutely impossible 34. [John Erskine], Equity and Wisdom of Administration, in Measures That Have Unhappily Occasioned the American Revolt, Tried by the Sacred Oracles (Edinburgh, 1776), 2, 9. 35. The Case Stated, 26. 36. Abingdon, Thoughts on the Letter of Edmund Burke, in Smith, ed., English Defenders of American Freedoms, 223–24. 37. Plan of Re-Union between Great Britain and Her Colonies (London, 1782), 5. 38. Friend to Great-Britain, Address to the Rulers of the State: in which Their Conduct and Measures, The Principles and Abilities of their Opponents, and the real interest of England, with regard to America and her natural Enemies, are freely Canvassed (London, 1778), 39.

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to restrain so numerous and so sagacious a people as his Majesty’s American subjects from the free exercise of every source of industry that tends to promote their interest.” Thus, he argued that Britain should “make a virtue of necessity, and grant them, by favor, what is really no more than their undoubted right.”³9 Although the administration stopped far short of recognizing American independence and withdrawing British forces from America, it did abandon all claims to tax the colonies and pushed through a repeal of the Declaratory Act. For many hard-line advocates of American coercion, the ministry’s conciliatory bill, passed in early 1778, seemed to be “the most pusillanimous and ruinous measure that ever disgraced the annals of any nation,” one that relinquished “implicitly and in direct terms, the power of taxation,” and thereby effectively gave “up the original subject of contest between her and America.”40 The refusal of the ministry to recognize American independence and the insistence of the American Congress that such recognition was a sine qua non for any peace negotiations doomed the initiative of 1778 to failure. But it represented an important milestone in the quest to define what the conditions of a free empire should be. By repealing the Declaratory Act of 1766 and thereby abandoning its claims to authority to tax and legislate for the internal affairs of the colonies, Parliament effectively recognized that colonial legislatures had exclusive jurisdiction over the internal domestic affairs of their respective polities and therefore enjoyed parliamentary status within those polities, an admission that had far-reaching ramifications for all those colonial polities that were not in revolt, a subject to which I will return later. In the short run, however, the failure of this initiative with the revolting colonies led to an intensification of Britain’s war effort and a new determination to force the revolting colonies back into the imperial fold, an objective that, in the eyes of the administration and its supporters, seemed to render considerations about colonial liberties almost academic. As the lawyer Charles Francis Sheridan, brother of the dramatist Richard Brinsley Sheridan, noted in a 1779 pamphlet, the ministry had, “with respect to us, rendered” the American question “a mere matter of speculation. The Americans have decided it for themselves.” As Sheridan noted, however, Britain still had “remaining some other dependencies, one of which particularly,” he said, referring to his native Ireland, had suffered “very severely from the narrow illiberal system of policy, which, with respect to that unfortunate country, has long marked and disgraced the councils of this kingdom; for the sake of those dependencies alone, 39. Coriolanus, A Conciliation with America: Adapted to the Constitutional Rights of the Colonies and the Supremacy of Great-Britain (London, 1778), 15–16, 19, 25, 27, 54. 40. The Conciliatory Bills Considered (London, 1778), 29–30.

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without in the least alluding to America,” he declared that it was “highly requisite, that juster notions concerning the nature of liberty; more accurate ideas respecting, the principles of the constitution, and particularly with regard to the extent of the power of parliament, should prevail in Great Britain, than those, the artful propagation, and inconsiderate admission of which, have already cost us thirteen provinces.” In pursuit of this goal, Sheridan was primarily concerned to supply the intellectual foundations for Ireland’s renewed claims for legislative independence, then being agitated in the British as well as the Irish press and in Parliament. In the process, however, he produced what is certainly the fullest consideration of the implications of Britain’s repeal of the American Declaratory Act in 1778 for the constitutional organization of the British Empire.4¹ Taking direct aim at Blackstone’s contentions “that the power and jurisdiction of Parliament” was “so transcendent and absolute, that it cannot be confined either for causes or persons within any bounds; that it can in short do every thing not naturally impossible,” Sheridan cited numerous passages in Blackstone’s work that flatly contradicted this contention. Declaring his abhorrence of any “Idea of an arbitrary despotic power’s being lodged by our constitution in any person, persons, or different bodies of men,” Sheridan avowed that “Parliament . . . could not constitutionally infringe any” of “those rights which are emphatically called the birth-rights of Englishmen,” deplored the fact any Briton could “confound the trustees of the constitution, with the constitution itself,” and insisted that British liberty depended upon making a clear and inviolable “distinction . . . between the persons of the legislators and the British Constitution.” Indeed, he contended, in “a free community” like Britain the legislature had to be “limited with respect to that community over which it presides, and from which it derives all its powers.”4² Applying this principle to imperial governance, Sheridan argued that an empire “in which the largest state is to be itself free, but at the same time the sovereign of the inferior states,” could not possibly be considered a “ free Empire.” Because in “a free government” the “first object” was “to protect the natural rights of the community at large,” he reasoned that “the natural rights of mankind must set limits to the power of that legislature,” and that if “the legislature of a free community must be thus limited with respect to that community over which it presides, and from which it derives all its powers; surely 41. [Charles Francis Sheridan], Observations on the Doctrine laid down by Sir William Blackstone, Respecting the Extent of the Power of the British Parliament, Particularly with Relation to Ireland. In a letter to Sir William Blackstone, with a Postscript addressed to Lord North, Upon the Affairs of That Country (London, 1779), 27–28. 42. Ibid., 2, 5–20, 55, 59.

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that legislature cannot be less limited with regard to other communities, over which it does not immediately preside, and from which it does not derive its powers.” Rather, he argued, “its just power over such communities must be infinitely more confined.” Unlike a single free community in which “the people of the community have in part delegated the exercise of one of their natural rights to the members of that legislature,” he declared, “the people of the other communities have not delegated to that legislature any powers whatsoever. Hence,” he maintained “that the parliament of Great Britain, not only cannot infringe any of the natural rights of this country, who have entrusted them with power—But that the Parliament of Great Britain cannot of right exercise any act of authority over people of other communities, who have not entrusted them with any power, but have on the contrary delegated their power to trustees of their own choosing.” In his view, a “ free empire, composed of different states” required that each of those states have an independent legislature of its own.4³ In answer to those who insisted that “the conservation of an unconnected and diversified Empire, like that of Great Britain,” required a “strong presiding power” in which “the inferior states” were “dependent upon the superior state,” Sheridan argued that “the unity of a free Empire” could consist in nothing more “than that all the constituent states of which such an Empire is composed, tho’ distinct from each other, should notwithstanding with respect to foreign powers act as one state. That the enemy of one shall be the enemy of all, and that the war commenced by one shall be the war of all; in short that with regard to foreign powers, they all should have but one interest.” To those who “said that the unity of Empire” meant “more than this,” that “it must . . . also” imply an “identity of internal government” and an “ identity of laws,” he replied that it “would certainly be the height of political absurdity” to “imagine that such an identity” could “exist in a free Empire, composed of parts widely distant from each other, of nations differing in character, differing in circumstances, yet all attached to liberty, all conceiving that each had a right to appoint the legislature which was to enact the laws they were to obey, and which alone could adapt those laws to the particular circumstances of each.” It was “an idea,” he noted, “impracticable in a free Empire,” one “which only the iron hand of despotism could carry into execution.”44 For Sheridan, the role of the Crown in the British constitution was the critical advantage that gave Britain “so decided a superiority” over other states in the pursuit of imperial projects. With its many “separate and distant states” linked “together by one common relation to the supreme executive power; a power which can contract alliances in which the whole Empire is included; 43. Ibid., 54–59.

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44. Ibid., 60–61.

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which can declare war, in the name of the whole Empire; which can put a negative on every act of legislature of any one state, calculated only to procure a partial advantage to that state, at the expense of the general good of the whole,” the unity of the empire was “completely secured” while each of its constituent parts enjoyed “the same degree of liberty.” While “under every other form of government,” such a unity could be preserved only by an absolute dependence of “the inferior[,] . . . separate and distant states . . . upon the superior state,” under the British constitution it was “only necessary that they should be intimately connected with, not dependent upon the superior state.” Reminding his readers of Montesquieu’s observation “that the people of England are rather confederates than fellow subjects,” Sheridan contended that the “different states which compose the British Empire, are in the same manner rather confederated communities, than subject to any one of the number,” and that just as in Britain “the very unity of the society is preserved by their common relation to one legislature; so in” a dispersed empire “unity . . . is maintained by the common relation of those states to one executive power, while at the same time, this executive power, common to every state, and forming a part of the legislatures of each separate state, [was] so limited in its exercise, that every distinct community” could “enjoy alike the same degree of civil freedom.”45 In making the case that Britain’s conduct toward Ireland exhibited “a degree of oppression” that was at once “totally repugnant to . . . just notions of [British] liberty” and to “accurate ideas of the principles of a free constitution,” Sheridan went further than any other Briton up to that time in acknowledging the importance of legislative independence in a free empire.46 Other opposition writers and speakers, few of whom were sympathetic to ideas of imperial divorce, continued to make the case that a liberal connection was the only kind of connection that held out any prospect for persuading the revolting colonies to rejoin the empire and to press their arguments in behalf of colonial claims to British liberties. With the anonymous author of a substantial treatise entitled Principles of Law and Government with an Inquiry into the Justice and Policy of the Present War, and most effectual means of obtaining an Honourable, Permanent, and Advantageous Peace, published in London in July 1781, they questioned whether “Britain, proud of her liberty,” should any “longer follow, the mean, vicious, and impolitic dictates of avarice and ambition; and in imitation of those tyrants she despises, endeavour to oppress her own offspring.” Challenging the constitutional basis of the metropolitan case for coercion, he flatly denied that, constitutionally, any part of the empire could have any “just right, to violate, oppress, or enslave the other[s]” without transgressing the hallowed English 45. Ibid., 61–63, 63n.

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46. Ibid., 29.

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doctrine of consent, and he did not exclude trade regulations, which he likened to “one sister robbing another.” Such restrictions, he declared, were an example of “one part of the empire” treating “the others as enemies, as tributaries or slaves, not, as fellow citizens, or fellow creatures.”47 Notwithstanding France’s entrance into the war in early 1778, many war opponents continued into the early 1780s to hope for some rapprochement. Thus, in July 1780 “An Englishman,” in a pamphlet entitled An Essay on the Interests of Britain, in Regard to America proposed to create a genuinely free and liberal empire. In his view, Britain had long since “laid the foundation for a vast empire” of freedom, and metropolitan Britons, he urged, should not continue “to alienate it from us, by an attack on that liberty we taught them to revere.” Counseling metropolitan Britons to recall that “freemen cannot be governed by fear, that they must be led by affection,” and “to throw aside that trifl ing and narrow spirit which must inevitably end in your ruin,” he proposed that Britain join with America to found “a confederation on equal and generous terms” that would “be for the advantage of all, let what branch soever of the confederacy become the most powerful,” and in which each part of the British Empire, “as well eastern as western,” should “be one people, and mutually entitled to all liberties, immunities, and privileges whatsoever,” including “a free representation, the habeas corpus, trial by jury, and a free toleration of religion.” With “the consent of America,” he declared, this possibility was still within “our power.” “It is a happiness that has never yet fallen to the lot of any nation, much less any great empire,” he observed, “after the cool deliberation of years, to alter and new model their political constitution,” and he enthusiastically invited Britons to rise to the occasion.48 VI Eventually, of course, metropolitan Britons had to accept the loss of the revolting colonies. A few argued for independence on the grounds that it would be highly beneficial to the maintenance of Britain’s own liberty. “Nothing can be more self-evident,” one author declared, “than that the extent of empire” was incompatible with “a free constitution.” The quarrel with America, he wrote, had exposed “the Omnipotency of Parliament” (which he correctly characterized as the post–Glorious Revolution “successor of the divine indefeasible 47. Principles of Law and Government with an Inquiry into the Justice and Policy of the Present War, and most effectual means of obtaining an Honourable, Permanent, and Advantageous Peace (London, 1781), 24–26, 53, 89–90. 48. “An Englishman,” An Essay on the Interests of Britain, in Regard to America (London, 1780), 9–10, 13–14, 16–19.

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right of princes”) as “a mere phantom” in relation to the larger empire. Clearly, he concluded, this principle and other vital parts of the English constitution represented “insurmountable obstacles to extensive dominion,” so that “either the principles must confine the empire, or the empire subvert the principles.”49 In the meantime, the concessions of 1778 had, at least for the immediate future, ensured that the remaining parts of the overseas settler empire would be more secure in their pretensions to legislative autonomy, in theory as well as in fact. In Ireland, Britain’s difficulties in America emboldened the Protestant political nation to mount a vigorous and successful campaign to eliminate British restrictions on Irish trade and legislative independence. While Britain’s suspension of the Navigation Acts in the case of Ireland in 1780 put Ireland on an equal commercial footing with the metropolis, the repeal of the Declaratory Act of 1721 and the repeal of Poynings’ Law in 1782 freed the Irish Parliament from all limitations on its legislative jurisdiction and thus both paved the way for the adoption of habeas corpus, judicial tenure during good behavior, and local control over military forces and, at least with respect to Ireland’s internal affairs, put the Irish Parliament on a level with the British Parliament. All of these achievements represented the culmination of almost a century-long campaign, spearheaded by the Irish House of Commons and generations of its protagonists, for the removal of any restrictions on their British liberty. Significantly, this contest produced the first open endorsement by a minister of the principle that internal legislative independence for overseas polities was a prerequisite for a free empire, when Charles James Fox, a member of the administration that had succeeded North’s, declared in parliamentary debate over the Irish question on May 17, 1782, that he had always been of the opinion (“so founded in justice, in reason, and in equity, that in no situation had he, or would he ever depart from it”) that “it was downright tyranny to make laws for the internal government of a people, who were not represented among those by whom such laws were made.” The institution of “local legislatures . . . in different parts of the empire,” he observed, was clearly for the purpose of enabling them to “answer all municipal ends” and just as clearly implied that “the great superintending power of the state ought not to be called into action, but in aid of the local legislature, and for the good of the empire at large.” The phrase great superintending power acknowledged Fox’s belief that the British Parliament retained the power of “external legislation” over the empire at large asserted in both the Irish Declaratory Act of 1721 and the American Declaratory Act of 1766, and he expressed his conviction that “this 49. An Enquiry, Whether the Absolute Independence of America is not to be preferr’d to her Partial Dependence, as most agreeable to the real interests of Great Britain (London, 1782), 6, 36, 38.

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right of prerogative or supremacy . . . would never have given umbrage to any part of the British empire, if it had been used solely for the good of the empire.” But when the previous administration turned that right into “an instrument of tyranny and oppression” by carrying it from “external to internal legislation” and attempting “to bind the internal government of its colonies by acts, in the passing of which the colonies had no voice” it was no surprise, he charged, that such measures “should excite discontents, murmurings, and opposition,” create “animosity and hatred,” and produce “the dismemberment of an empire, which, if properly exerted, it would have served to unite and bind [together] in the firmest manner.” In Ireland and America, Fox lamented ironically, “this was the happy consequence of the ill use made of the superintending power of the British parliament, which was perverted from its true use, and instead of being the means to render the different parts of the empire happy and connected, had made millions of subjects rise up against a power, which they felt only as a scourge.”50 A similar course of development occurred in the old West Indian and Atlantic island colonies. The Declaratory Act of 1778 acknowledging the exclusive legislative jurisdiction of colonial assemblies over taxation and internal governance in their respective colonies had the effect of giving provincial legislatures a free hand over their internal affairs. Except for their continued subjection to the Navigation Acts, West Indian and Atlantic island legislatures thereafter were almost as autonomous in their internal polities as were the Irish after Britain’s 1782 concessions to Ireland, although their legislation was still subject to royal veto. This enhanced autonomy would be useful to West Indian legislatures during the half century after 1789. As for the three remaining and highly disparate British settlement colonies on the North American continent after 1783—Nova Scotia, St. John (renamed Prince Edward Island in 1799), and Quebec—the legislatures in Nova Scotia (1758) and St. John (1773) both enjoyed, like those in the island colonies, considerable authority over internal affairs following the Declaratory Act of 1778. Moreover, the influx of loyalists, who may have abhorred resistance to legitimate government but were no less committed to British principles of consensual governance and to British traditions of the rule of law than the Whig leaders they had left behind in the republican United States, proved sturdy advocates for the creation or expansion of the authority of representative assemblies wherever they settled—in Nova Scotia or in the new colonies of New Brunswick (1785) and Upper Canada (eventually renamed Ontario). Indeed, in 50. Charles James Fox, Speech, May 17, 1782, in Cobbett, ed., Parliamentary History of England, 23:19–23.

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the 1791 act that separated Upper Canada from Quebec (renamed Lower Canada), the metropolitan government provided for representative government for both colonies, thereby extending consensual government to the old French colony of Quebec. Thereafter, all new settler British colonies established north of the United States partook of the same privilege. The last two decades of the eighteenth century in many respects constituted the high-water mark up to that time in the extension of representative institutions to overseas territories in the British Empire. After the extension of legislative governance to Quebec in 1791, every colonial polity with enough permanently resident free settlers of European origins to sustain representative government had an elected legislature with exclusive jurisdiction over its domestic affairs subject only to Crown, not parliamentary, oversight. This was precisely the sort of constitutional arrangement demanded by the American resistance after 1764. By forcing the domestic British state to confront a deep structural constitutional problem in the organization of the empire and to come to a new if grudging consensus about how that polity should be governed, resistance and war had finally been the stimulus that, after more than a century, drove metropolitan officials to acknowledge the parliamentary status of provincial assemblies within the imperial constitution as well as the constitutional legitimacy of peculiar provincial constitutional arrangements. With these developments, the “free empire” of Britain had been defined as one that automatically required representative institutions in all its many constituent parts to guarantee that Britons would, wherever they went, enjoy that defining component of a British identity, the right to consensual governance. Unfortunately for that guarantee, parallel developments, most but not all in the non-settler empire, pointed in an entirely different direction. Ireland’s autonomy ended in just two decades when, unwilling to share power with its Catholic majority, the exclusively Protestant government opted to incorporate the kingdom into the British state. Encountering powerful political resistance in India to its efforts to extend English law to indigenous Indians, Britain ultimately had to accept a situation with many local indigenous legalities running parallel to English law for English residents. Indeed, the experience in India of devising a form of colonial governance for territories in which the overwhelming majority of free people were not Europeans informed the creation of a new type of British colonial governance, eventually known as Crown colony governance, in which a Crown-appointed bureaucracy presided over polities without representative institutions or formal input from local free populations. First developed for new colonies with small cadres of European settlers, including Trinidad and St. Lucia, acquired during the Napoleonic Wars, this form became common in new territories. The rise of the antislavery movement in

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Britain after 1770 eventually, in the early decades of the nineteenth century, led to parliamentary interference in the domestic affairs of all the slave colonies, thereby demonstrating their lack of power to resist such interference and effectively abrogating the concessions made in the Declaratory Act of 1778. When in 1865 white Jamaicans feared that they would be unable to stifle the demands of the newly freed for civil rights, many of the proud legislatures in the old colonies—excepting only those of Barbados, Bermuda, and the Bahamas, the colonies with the most substantial white populations—opted to give up their legislatures and become Crown colonies, without representative institutions. By the late nineteenth century, Britain’s reputation as a free empire depended almost entirely on its record of acceding to demands for responsible government in the settler polities of Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa.

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part three

Identities •

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— eleven —

Empire and Identity from the Elizabethan Era to the American Revolution

H

ow the development of a vast transoceanic empire during the early modern era affected the collective identity of the British people who dominated and defined that identity is the subject of this chapter. The earliest stages of English overseas expansion occurred during the Elizabethan and Jacobean eras, the very period when English opinion leaders were elaborating an identity for the emerging English nation.¹ While Protestantism, social openness, intellectual and scientific achievement, and a prosperity based upon

This chapter was published as “Empire and Identity from the Glorious Revolution to the American Revolution,” in P. J. Marshall, ed., The Eighteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), vol. 2 of The Oxford History of the British Empire, ed. William Roger Louis, 5 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998–2001), 208–30, and it is here reprinted with permission. It was presented for discussion at a conference on the Oxford History of the British Empire, St. Anthony’s College, Oxford University, September 19, 1995, and served as the foundation for a plenary lecture entitled “The Emergence of an Imperial Identity between the Glorious Revolution and the American Revolution,” sixty-fourth Anglo-American Conference of Historians, Institute of Historical Research, University of London, June 28, 1995. It was subsequently offered for discussion at the Early American History Seminar, University of Maryland, College Park, March 30, 1995; the Interuniversity American Studies Seminar, University of Melbourne, Australia, July 5, 1996; and the Faculty Research Seminar, Victoria University, Wellington, New Zealand, July 19, 1996. It was given as the Jack and Margaret Sweet Lecture, Michigan State University, East Lansing, September 24, 1997; the Milton M. Klein Lecture, University of Tennessee, Knoxville, October 6, 1997; and as lectures at the Department of History, Florida Atlantic University, Boca Raton, February 20, 1995; Department of History, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, September 27, 1995; Department of History, University of the West Indies, St. Augustine, Trinidad, October 16, 1995; Department of History, Pennsylvania State University, University Park, January 24, 1996; Department of History, University of Canterbury, Christchurch, New Zealand, July 26, 1996; Department of History, Central Michigan University, Mount Pleasant, November 24, 1997; Department of History, James Madison University, Harrisonburg, Virginia, February 3, 1998. 1. See Liah Greenfeld, Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992), 27–87; and Richard Helgerson, Forms of Nationhood: The Elizabethan Writing of England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992).

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trade were all important components of that identity, liberty, under an English system of law and government, composed its principal foundation, and while, between the Elizabethan era and the American Revolution, the acquisition of colonies and other outposts would become increasingly significant in defining what it meant to be English or (after the union with Scotland in 1707) British, liberty was also the single most important element in defining a larger imperial identity for Britain and the British Empire. As used in this chapter, the concept of national or imperial identity refers to the intellectual constructs by which opinion leaders seek to identify the attributes that distinguish the people of one nation or empire from another. Invariably self-serving for the groups whose representatives articulate them, these constructs tend to be highly positive exercises in the assertion of national superiority; homogenizing; serving to reinforce existing social, political, gender, ethnic, and racial hierarchies; insensitive to contradictions between them and the structure and operation of the political society they allegedly describe; and inattentive to alternative readings of the national peculiarity. Although this chapter gives some attention to some of those alternative readings, limitations of space dictate that it be principally an exercise in the recovery of the dominant discourse of English and British national and imperial identity. As early as the late fifteenth century, many contemporary observers, both English and foreign, agreed that the English people’s unique system of law and liberty was what principally distinguished them from all other people on the face of the globe. The proud boast of the English was that through a variety of conquests and upheavals they, unlike most other Europeans, had retained their identity as a free people by safeguarding their liberty through their laws. This boast found sophisticated expression in the English tradition of political discourse which emphasized the role of law as a restraint upon the Crown. By law, the articulators of this jurisprudential tradition meant not only statutory law as formulated by Parliament but, more particularly, the common law, that complex bundle of customs and judicial decisions which was the result of centuries of the working of the English legal system. Presumably embodying the collective wisdom of the ages, the common law, in their view, was the chief guarantor of the Englishman’s celebrated right to security of life, liberty, and property through such devices as trial by jury, habeas corpus, due process of law, and representative government. Rooted in such older writings as Sir John Fortescue’s De Laudibus Legum Angliae (written about 1470 and familiar to the English law community, though not published until 1616), this view was fully elaborated during the early seventeenth century in a series of works by several of the most prominent judges and legal thinkers of the era, the most prominent of whom was Chief Justice Sir Edward Coke.

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Writing in an age when every other major European state, except for the Netherlands, was slipping into absolutism and when England’s own Stuart kings were trying to extend the prerogatives of the Crown at the expense of Parliament, these early seventeenth-century legal writers were anxious to erect legal and constitutional restraints against arbitrary extensions of royal power. Accordingly, they invented the tradition of an “ancient” English constitution, antecedent to and finding expression through the common law, which could justify an expanded governmental role by Parliament, acting to protect the people against the Crown.² Though frequently ignored or violated since the Norman Conquest, this ancient constitution, Coke and his colleagues contended, provided the context for legal government in England. Composed of a variety of maxims, precedents, and principles which they traced back through Magna Charta to the ancient Saxon era, it at once served as the foundation for all governmental authority in England; confined the scope of Crown discretion, or “will,” within the limits of fundamental, natural law; and, in particular, prevented the Crown from governing without Parliament. The early modern jurisprudential tradition rested on a distinction, long since elaborated by Fortescue, between two kinds of monarchy, regal and political. Whereas in a regal monarchy like France, “What pleased the prince” had “the force of law,” in a political monarchy like England, wrote Fortescue, “the regal power” was “restrained by political law.” Bound by their coronation oaths, English kings could not “change laws at their pleasure, make new ones, infl ict punishments, . . . impose burdens on their subjects,” “determine suits of parties at their own will and when they wish,” or keep standing armies “without the assent of ” their “subjects.” Rather, they were “obliged to protect the law, the subjects, and their bodies and goods.” In a political monarchy, Fortescue observed, “the will of the people” effectively became “the source of life”; the law constituted the “ ‘ligando’ by which the community . . . sustained” itself; and the people who composed that community “preserve[d] their rights through the law.”³ The happy result of this system, according to Fortescue, was that English people, in contrast to their neighbors, were “ruled by laws they themselves desire[d]” and were assured that “the law of England [would] favor liberty in every case.”4 For early modern Englishmen, this unique system of law and liberty, arising from what the poet Samuel Daniel referred to in 1603 as “the wonderful 2. J. G. A. Pocock, The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987). 3. Sir John Fortescue, De Laudibus Legum Angliae (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1942), 25, 27, 31, 33, 79, 81. 4. Ibid., 25, 87, 105, 115, 139.

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architecture of this state,”5 was the very essence of their national identity, what Liah Greenfeld has called “the distinguishing characteristic of Englishness.” More than its Protestantism, which many other European polities shared, England’s status, in John Milton’s phrase, as “the mansion house of liberty,” whose people had been “ever famous, and foremost in the achievements of liberty,” had by the middle of the seventeenth century come to be identified as the core, in Greenfeld’s phrase, of “England’s peculiarity.”6 English writers like Henry Care, the popularizer of Whig theories, spelled out the conditions that rendered England a land of liberty. In most “other Nations,” including Turkey, France, and Spain, Care declared in 1682, “the meer Will of the Prince is Law; his Word takes off any Man’s Head, imposes Taxes, seizes any Man’s Estate, when, how, and as often as he lists; and if one be accused, or but so much as suspected of any Crime, he may either presently execute him, or banish, or imprison him at pleasure.” Only in England were “the Lives and Fortunes” of the people not subject to the “Wills (or rather Lusts)” of “Arbitrary” tyrants. The “Constitution of our English Government,” Care asserted, was “the best in the World.”7 The Glorious Revolution further underlined this equation of Englishness with liberty. Throughout the eighteenth century, political polemicists engaged in a running debate over the vigor and security of British liberty. Panegyrists of the Whig regime insisted that liberty had never been “so largely and so equally diff used amongst all Orders of men, in any Country as ’tis here, and now.”8 A simple comparison of “present times with the past,” or “our own condition with that of other countries,” Henry Fielding declared in 1749, revealed that Britons’ “present happy condition” as a “free people” was far superior in terms of the extent to which Britons enjoyed “our lives, our persons, and our properties in security,” were the “free masters of ourselves and our possessions, as far as the known laws of our country will admit,” and were “liable to no punishment, no confinement, no loss, but what those laws subject us to.”9 Even those who emphasized the threat of contemporary political or social corruption to British liberty and were anxious about the health of the constitution tended to agree 5. Samuel Daniel, Defense of Rime (1603), as quoted by Helgerson, Forms of Nationhood, 36–37. 6. Greenfeld, Nationalism, 77. 7. Henry Care, English Liberties, 5th ed. (Boston, 1721), 1–3. 8. William Arnall, Opposition no Proof of Patriotism (London, 1735), 20, as quoted by Hugh Cunningham, “The Language of Patriotism,” in Raphael Samuel, ed., Patriotism: The Making and Unmaking of British National Identity, 3 vols. (London: Routledge, 1989), 1:59. 9. Henry Fielding, A Charge Delivered to the Grand Jury (London, 1749), in The Complete Works of Henry Fielding, Esq., ed. William Ernest Henley, 16 vols. (London, 1903), 13:209–10.

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with the moralist John Brown that “the Spirit of Liberty” had “produced more full and compleat effects in our own Country, than in any known Nation that ever was upon Earth.”¹0 Notwithstanding the fact that, as Kathleen Wilson has shown, critics of the Whig regime, beginning in the middle decades of the eighteenth century, increasingly pointed out the social limits of British liberty,¹¹ this libertarian interpretation of Britain’s constitutional situation remained dominant. In terms reminiscent of Fortescue and Care, its exponents continued to assert that Britain exceeded all other countries in perfection of constitution and enjoyment of liberty and to ponder, with Fortescue, “why this law of England, so worthy and so excellent,” was “not common to all the world.” Fortescue attributed “this superiority” to the high fertility of England’s soil, producing large crop yields which in turn fostered the extensive social independence, the spirit of intellectual inquiry, and the law-mindedness necessary to sustain a free government.¹² And eighteenth-century panegyrists expanded upon this theme, insisting that the conditions emphasized by Fortescue affected the personality and behavior of all English people down even to the commonality, who, as Fielding wrote, “by degrees, shook off their vassalage, and became more and more independent of their superiors” until, “in the process of time,” even “servants . . . acquired a state of freedom and independency, unknown to this rank in any other nation.”¹³ By this process, in the words of John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon, “all Men” in England became ambitious “to live agreeably to their own Humours and Discretion” as “sole Lord[s] and Arbiter[s] of ” their “own private Actions and Property.” This passion for independence in turn encouraged Englishmen both to acquire property and to try to secure that property “by the Laws of Liberty; Laws which” were “made by Consent, and” could not “be repealed without it.”¹4 Whereas in other countries liberty had sometimes and imperfectly “been ingrafted by the Acts of Policy,” observed Brown, in England it thus seemed to have been “laid in Nature,” shooting “up from its natural Climate, Stock, and Soil.”¹5 To its exponents, the truth of this line of argument seemed to be confirmed by England’s economic abundance 10. John Brown, An Estimate of the Manners and Principles of the Times (London, 1758), 13. 11. Kathleen Wilson, The Sense of the People: Politics, Culture and Imperialism in England, 1715–1785 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 137–236. 12. Fortescue, De Laudibus, 67, 69, 71, 73. 13. Henry Fielding, An Enquiry into the Causes of the Increase in Robbers (London, 1751), in Complete Works of Fielding, 13:13–14. 14. John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon, Cato’s Letters, in David L. Jacobson, ed., The English Libertarian Heritage (Indianapolis: Bobbs Merrill, 1965), no. 62: 127–28; no. 68: 177–78. 15. Brown, Estimate of the Manners, 13–14.

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and large population, which they interpreted as both the foundations for and the effects of that island’s “inestimable Blessing of Liberty.”¹6 Thus, whatever the reasons why, as Montesquieu wrote in praise of the spirit of the British legal and constitutional system, Britain was “the only nation in the world, where political and civil liberty” was “the direct end of its constitution,” apologists for the existing order told the public over and over, as Blackstone wrote, that the “idea and practice of . . . political and civil liberty flourish[ed] in their highest vigour in” Britain, where they had been “so deeply implanted in our constitution, and [so thoroughly] rooted in our very soil” that they could “only be lost or destroyed by the folly or demerits of their owner.”¹7 Against those who were producing mounting evidence to the contrary, some writers, like Fielding, even argued that Britain was a country in which the people were too “jealous of [t]he[i]r liberties, that from the slightest cause, and often without any cause at all,” they “were always murmuring at” their “superiors.”¹8 This was an old complaint. Before the union of 1707, Daniel Defoe, in The True-Born Englishman, had trenchantly satirized the English on similar grounds.¹9 Whether they had taken its cultivation to excess or not yet taken it far enough, liberty, as Britons pointed out throughout the eighteenth century, not only remained the “hallmark of Englishness” but rapidly became the emblem of Britishness. If Scots had their own legal system differing significantly from the English, they nonetheless, as Linda Colley has noted, shared with the English and Welsh the “cult of Parliament.”²0 Moreover, as Kathleen Wilson has argued, the increasing use of the term “Free-born Briton” in the decades after the union of 1707 encouraged the emergence of “a British imperial identity, one in which Caledonians[, Protestant Irish,] and Americans, as well as the English, could participate,” and one that emphasized the benefits of the British “constitution and the much-vaunted liberties it guaranteed.”²¹ Especially as the union became ever more secure in the wake of the last Jacobite uprising in 1745, writers identified all Britons with liberty and celebrated the 16. Trenchard and Gordon, Cato’s Letters, no. 25: 68, 70. 17. Sir William Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England, 4 vols. (Philadelphia, 1771), 1:126–29, 145. 18. Fielding, Enquiry into the Causes of the Increase of Robbers, 13:20. 19. Daniel Defoe, The True-Born Englishman (London, 1700), lines 618–23. 20. Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1837 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), 50, 52, 111. 21. Kathleen Wilson, “Empire, Trade and Popular Politics in Mid-Hanoverian Britain: The Case of Admiral Vernon,” Past & Present, no. 121 (1988): 94, 104.

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fact that the sons, not just of Englishmen, but of all “Britons” were “born to liberty.”²² If possession of this unique system of law and liberty was the most significant marker of the English identity during the early modern period and the British identity thereafter, Protestantism was also important to it. Mary Tudor’s persecutions, followed by Elizabeth I’s espousal of an English church, cemented the break with Rome. Thenceforth, England was a Protestant nation, and the English were a Protestant people. In his vivid Acts and Monuments, first published in 1554 and republished in enlarged editions six times before 1600, John Foxe chronicled the sufferings of English martyrs at the hands of the Catholic Church and heralded England as the chief bulwark against papal aggression. Citing England’s prosperity, the seemingly miraculous defeat of the Armada, and the remarkable political stability enjoyed during Elizabeth I’s long reign as evidences of God’s favor, Foxe and other English Protestant leaders developed the idea that theirs was a nation under covenant with God and thereby suggested, as Greenfeld has observed, that “England’s religious standing . . . was the basis of the nation’s distinctiveness and uniqueness.”²³ Early in the seventeenth century, Thomas Brightman and other Puritans took this characterization a step further to argue that England had been a nation elected by God to spearhead the Reformation and “play a singular role in sacred, providential history.” Although their failure to persuade Elizabeth I or James I to reform the Church of England led many Puritans, including Brightman, to identify England with Laodicea, the lukewarm Church of the Apocalypse, and in the 1630s stirred thousands of them to emigrate to New England, others, including John Milton, touted the Puritan triumphs of the 1640s as evidence that England retained its status as an elect nation.²4 During the Elizabethan and Jacobean eras, exponents of English expansion, including the two Richard Hakluyts and Sir Walter Ralegh, had repeatedly justified aggressive action against Spain as a means to extend the domain of the true religion. Within the emerging English Empire, almost all the native Irish remained Roman Catholic. But Ireland’s new English and Scottish settlers and the overwhelming majority of English and Scottish colo22. Jonas Hanway, Letter to the Encouragers of Practical Public-Love (London, 1758), 57, as quoted by Colley, Britons, 97. 23. Greenfeld, Nationalism, 60–66. 24. See Avihu Zakai, Exile and Kingdom: History and the Apocalypse in the Puritan Migration to America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 46–60, and Theocracy in Massachusetts: Reformation and Separation in Early Puritan New England (Lewiston, N.Y.: Edwin Mellen, 1994).

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nists who went to America were Protestant, and the English overseas empire, from the beginning, defined itself in opposition to the Catholic empire of Spain. Yet, if the English Empire was largely Protestant, the Protestantism it represented was less and less unitary. From the end of the sixteenth century, alternative theologies turned to the word of God to champion forms of church polity, modes of worship, and religious beliefs that challenged the hierarchical order of the established Church of England. Thereafter, as Richard Helgerson has remarked, differences between the “state church and the various dissenting churches continued to function as a decisive element in the experience of England and the peoples of the English diaspora for the next several centuries.”²5 Indeed, after Gustavus Adolphus, rather than England, saved Protestantism in Germany during the Thirty Years’ War, England, as Christopher Hill has remarked, effectively “ceased to be the leader of Protestant Europe,”²6 and during the last half of the seventeenth century the classical persona of Britannia (which first appeared on coins of the realm in 1665) rapidly became the chief symbol of English pride, replacing the idea of England as an elect nation with the broader and more secular conception of England as the home of constitutional and religious liberty, intellectual and commercial achievement, sea power, and emerging imperial greatness.²7 By the eighteenth century, Hugh Cunningham has suggested, “the belief that the English were an elect nation . . . may have been of relatively minor importance” in the structure of English national identity.²8 Yet, as Colley has argued, in her magisterial effort to explain how the diverse peoples of the British Isles constructed a national identity as Britons during roughly the century and a quarter following the union between Scotland and England (and Wales) in 1707, the wars of 1689 to 1815 powerfully revived the conception of England or, after the union, Great Britain as the principal champion of Protestantism. During these years, Britain was at war more than half of the time; Catholic France was the main antagonist, replaced between 1739 and 1744 by Catholic Spain, and the fighting stretched from Europe east to India, south to Africa, and west to the Americas. The new British nation that arose from the union, Colley emphasizes, “was an invention above all forged by war,” with a national culture that “largely defined itself through 25. Helgerson, Forms of Nationhood, 268. 26. Christopher Hill, “The English Revolution and Patriotism,” in Samuel, ed., Patriotism, 1:160. 27. Peter Furtado, “National Pride in Seventeenth-Century England,” in Samuel, ed., Patriotism, 1:49. 28. Cunningham, “Language of Patriotism,” 1:58.

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fighting.” But, she contends, war “could never have been so influential without the impact of religion.” “Protestant Britons believed they were in God’s special care” and that Britain was the “Protestant bastion against Roman ambitions.” Britons were “Protestants struggling for survival against the world’s foremost Catholic power,” France.²9 For Colley, the importance of religion in this nation-building, identityconstructing process was fundamental. “Protestantism,” she writes, “was the foundation that made the invention of Britain possible,” the “common commitment” by which the English, Welsh, and Scots “could be drawn together— and made to feel separate from the rest of Europe.” “More than anything else,” she argues, “this shared religious allegiance combined with recurrent wars . . . permitted a sense of British national identity to emerge alongside of and not necessarily in competition with, older, more organic attachments to England, Wales or Scotland, or to county or village.”³0 Colley does not explicitly consider the extent to which the many colonies of settlement and other outposts in the far peripheries of the empire shared this equation of Britishness with Protestantism. Whether outside New England, a region always anomalous in colonial British America, and beyond circles of religious Dissent, this association enjoyed quite so decisive a role in the shaping of colonial identities is doubtful. Certainly, the recurrent struggles against the Catholic powers reinforced the colonials’ already strong awareness that, whatever their distance from the home islands, British peoples were overwhelmingly Protestant peoples. Especially during the Seven Years’ War, colonials endorsed the metropolitan view of the conflict with France as a struggle between Protestantism and Catholicism and heralded Britain’s ultimate success as a victory for the Protestant Succession and an example of God’s special favor toward the enlarged British Empire.³¹ But contemporaries also associated other characteristics with the emerging national identity: social openness,³² a penchant for scientific and intellectual 29. Colley, Britons, 5, 9, 23, 29, 367–68. 30. Ibid., 18, 54, 369. 31. See Nathan O. Hatch, The Sacred Cause of Liberty: Republican Thought and the Millennium in Revolutionary New England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977), 36–51; Ruth Bloch, Visionary Republic: Millennial Themes in American Thought, 1756–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 33–50. The extent to which ordinary New Englanders conceived of British war successes as evidence of Divine Providence may be followed in Fred Anderson, A People’s Army: Massachusetts Soldiers and Society in the Seven Years’ War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984), 196–223. 32. Greenfeld, Nationalism, 30, 47–50, 74, 86; Brown, Estimate of the Manners, 15; Defoe, True-Born Englishman, line 405; Fielding, Enquiry into the Causes of the Increase in Robbers, 13:13–14; Michael J. Hawkins, “Ethnicity, Nationalism and the History of the British Isles,”

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achievement,³³ and, most significantly, prosperity and trade. The widespread stress upon the superiority of English food (“roast beef and plum pudding”) and clothing (“no ‘wooden shoes’ ”) over those of other Europeans, traceable at least as far back as Fortescue, expressed pride in England’s prosperity.³4 The vaunted productivity of its agriculture seemed to distinguish Britain from its Continental neighbors. But pride in the relative abundance of British economic achievements rested even more firmly on commerce. This, too, was a development of long standing. Already by the late sixteenth century, the travel writer and empire promoter Richard Hakluyt touted England as an “aggressive commercial entity” whose wealth and national importance depended “above all on overseas trade” and naval power.³5 By “vigorously” pushing “the Increase of our Navigation and Commerce,” declared the political writer John Campbell in 1774, the Tudors had so far “excited a Multitude of bold, active, and enterprizing Persons to Hazard their Lives and Fortunes in such Undertaking”³6 that by 1600, as Adam Smith noted in 1776 in The Wealth of Nations, England was already “a great trading country” with a “mercantile capital [that] was very great,”³7 a country that defined itself against Spain not just in terms of religion and liberty but also in terms of its peaceful “pursuit of trade” in Europe and America, which, “rather than conquest,” stood as “a sign of England’s virtuous difference” from “Spanish tyranny, Spanish cruelty, and Spanish ambition.”³8 After another century of commercial development, it had become a cliché, as the historian John Oldmixon noted in 1708, that Britons had “no ways of making ourselves considerable in the World, but by our Fleets; and of supporting them, but by our Trade, which breeds Seamen; and brings in Wealth to maintain them.”³9 In terms of “the vastness and extensiveness of our trade,” proudly said an anonymous British writer in 1718, “we are the most considerable of any nation in the world.”40 in Ladislaus Löb, István Petrovics, and György E. Szőnyi, eds., Forms of Identity: Definitions and Changes (Szeged, Hungary: Attila József University, 1994), 30. 33. Greenfeld, Nationalism, 79–83. 34. Cunningham, “Language of Patriotism,” 1:59–60. 35. Helgerson, Forms of Nationhood, 171. 36. John Campbell, A Political Survey of Britain: Being a Series of Reflections on the Situation, Lands, Inhabitants, Revenues, Colonies, and Commerce of this Island, 2 vols. (London, 1774), 2:563–64. 37. Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776), ed. R. H. Campbell and A. S. Skinner, 2 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976), 2:597. 38. Helgerson, Forms of Nationhood, 185. 39. John Oldmixon, The British Empire in America, 2 vols. (London, 1708), 1:xxi. 40. Magnae Britanniae Notitia: Or, the Present State of Great Britain (London, 1718), 33, as cited by Colley, Britons, 59.

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Increasingly during the eighteenth century, a “cult of commerce,” as Colley notes, “became an . . . important part of being British.”4¹ Both “the situation of our island, and the genius of our people,” announced a member of the House of Lords in 1738, depended heavily upon “the extent and security” of British navigation and trade.4² British superiority in “commercial arts and advantage,” said a member of Parliament on the eve of the American Revolution, was the principal reason why Britain had been “raised . . . so high among the modern nations.” Very largely “the creature of commerce,” the great “influx of wealth,” he noted, “solely constitutes our envied power and rank in the present world.”4³ Commerce, said the Glasgow merchant Adam Anderson, “will ever be our great Palladium.”44 Contemporary social theory as represented by the four-stage theory of cultural development propounded by Scottish Enlightenment thinkers saw commerce as the highest stage of social development;45 those who celebrated Britain’s expanding commercial activity argued that commerce was principally responsible for effecting a revolution in the “manners, customs, and habits” of the British people.46 Specifically, they suggested that, in combination with the traditional British spirit of liberty, commerce had softened the manners of the people, made them more polite and civil, and reinforced the “Spirit of Humanity” by which Britain had “always been distinguished.” As evidence that this spirit was “natural to our Nation,” John Brown pointed to the “many noble Foundations for the Relief of the Miserable and Friendless; the large annual Supplies from voluntary Charities to these Foundations”; the “Limits of our Laws in capital Cases; our Compassion for convicted Criminals; even the general Humanity of our Highwaymen and Robbers, compared with those of other Countries.”47 Superior humaneness, moreover, was only one of the many social traits through which, as the classical scholar Conyers Middleton wrote in his Life 41. Colley, Britons, 56, 59–60. 42. Earl of Cholmondeley, Speech, May 2, 1738, in Leo F. Stock, ed., Proceedings and Debates of the British Parliaments Respecting North America, 5 vols. (Washington, D.C.: Carnegie Institution, 1924–41), 4:531. 43. Richard Glover, Speech, Mar. 16, 1775, in R. C. Simmons and P. D. G. Thomas, eds., Proceedings and Debates of the British Parliaments Respecting North America, 1754–1783, 6 vols. (White Plains, N.Y.: Kraus, 1982–89), 5:568–69. 44. Adam Anderson, An Historical and Chronological Deduction of the Origins of Commerce from the Earliest Accounts to the Present Time, 2 vols. (London, 1764), 2:137. 45. Ronald L. Meek, Social Science and the Ignoble Savage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983). 46. Fielding, Enquiry into the Causes of the Increase in Robbers, 13:13–14. 47. Brown, Estimate of the Manners, 14–15.

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of Cicero, Britain, “anciently the jest and contempt of the polite Romans,” had “become the happy seat of liberty, plenty and letters” and was now “flourishing in all the arts and refinements of civil life.”48 Contemporary analysts also suggested that it had changed the structure of British society in ways that contributed to a social deepening of the appreciation of the virtues of the existing constitution. “Being more equally dispersed,” wealth “acquired by Traffic,” Campbell believed, made “more people happy” and over time so lessened social inequalities that Britons were “no longer divided into great Lords and mean Vassals.”49 By begetting “a kind of regulated Selfishness . . . which tends at once to the Increase and Preservation of Property,” in the words of Brown, the “Spirit of Commerce”50 seemed, according to Campbell, to have fostered a psychology of “Independency” and spread a “Consciousness” that the industry that produced wealth and independence was “the Result of [the] Freedom” that “derived from and” was dependent “upon our Constitution.”5¹ This widespread identification of commerce with liberty gave rise to the further conviction that, as a newspaper writer put it in 1770, “riches, trade and commerce” were “nowhere to be found but in the regions of freedom,” such as Britain or, to a lesser degree, the Netherlands.5² Colonies were an important adjunct of commerce, and trade with the colonies constituted an expanding sector of British overseas commerce. As early as 1707, some observers thought that the colonies had been responsible for a substantial part of “Britain’s great Increase in Wealth” over the previous half century.5³ Six or seven decades later, contemporaries disagreed about the precise extent of the colonies’ contribution to Britain’s overseas trade, but few doubted that that contribution was both substantial and critical. In his general History of Commerce, published in 1764 just after Britain’s great triumph in the Seven Years’ War, Anderson “glorified the American plantations as having been exclusively responsible for ‘the change in our national circumstances’ which brought the ‘Britannic Empire’ into being,” while Campbell in 1774 praised the colonies as a great national resource that had “contributed greatly to increase our Industry, and of course our Riches, to extend our Commerce, to augment our Naval Power, and consequently to maintain the Grandeur and 48. Conyers Middleton, History of the Life of Marcus Tullius Cicero (London, 1741), as quoted by Fielding, Enquiry into the Causes of the Increase in Robbers, 13:17. 49. Campbell, Political Survey, 2:705. 50. Brown, Estimate of the Manners, 15. 51. Campbell, Political Survey, 2:705. 52. The Whisperer, Mar. 17, 1770, as cited by Linda Colley, “Radical Patriotism in EighteenthCentury England,” in Samuel, ed., Patriotism, 1:172. 53. Oldmixon, British Empire, 1:xxxi.

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support the Prosperity of the Mother Country.”54 “What comparison can be drawn between the riches of Britain now and in the time of Queen Elizabeth?” asked the agricultural improver Arthur Young. “[Y]et if we come to examine the matter, we shall find the superiority of the latter times to the former, to be chiefly owing to the discovery of America” and British success in colonizing.55 For any nation, Campbell was persuaded from the British experience, the benefits “of fi xing Settlements in distant Countries for the Sake of Commerce” were “self-evident.”56 For many Britons, however, colonies were not merely an economic but a civilizing project. They had already had considerable experience with peoples close to home—Gaelic Irish and Highland Scots—who, living primarily as graziers or hunters and fishermen, seemed to have no settled agriculture or permanent homes and appeared to be “of a different and inferior race, violent, treacherous, poverty stricken, and backward.”57 With regard to such peoples in the peripheries of the British isles, the role of the core societies, as Sir Thomas Smith noted in 1565, was to educate them “in virtuous labor and in justice, and to teach them English laws and civility and to leave [off ] robbing and stealing and killing one another.”58 Thus, in the sixteenth century exponents of English colonization of Ireland justified it as a device by which the English might foster Irish “appreciation for civility so that they might likewise move toward freedom,” Protestantism, and refinement.59 The encounter of British people with America, Africa, and Asia brought them face to face with peoples far more alien, against whom they defined themselves as yet more superior. Living in chiefdoms and bands, North American Amerindians occupied an extensive country which from a European perspective they left a waste and uncultivated wilderness. Africans and Asians lived in more complex societies, some of which had evidently once supported “civilizations . . . of considerable achievement,” but these societies seemed to be largely despotisms, and the African and Asian legal systems, social mores, 54. Richard Koebner, Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1961), 121–22; Campbell, Political Survey, 2:567. 55. Arthur Young, Political Essays Concerning the Present State of the British Empire (London, 1772), 466. 56. Campbell, Political Survey, 2:561. 57. Colley, Britons, 15. 58. Sir Thomas Smith, De Republica Anglorum (London, 1656), as quoted by Robert A. Williams Jr., The American Indian in Western Legal Thought: The Discourse of Conquest (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 142. 59. Williams, The American Indian in Western Legal Thought, 142. See also Nicholas P. Canny, “The Ideology of English Colonization: From Ireland to America,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser., 30 (1973): 575–98.

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living standards, religions, and war-making capacities, like those of the Amerindian, seemed vastly inferior to those of Britain.60 Regarding it as their duty and “Birthright,” as one cleric asserted in 1759, “to carry, not only Good Manners, but the purest Light of the Gospel, where Barbarism and Ignorance totally prevailed,”6¹ advocates of imperial expansion presented these “barbarous nations” as a wide field of action for Britons to act as civilizing agents. In Africa and Asia, where the inhabitants were numerous and sedentary, they had managed by the last quarter of the eighteenth century, as Adam Smith observed, to secure their hegemony over “many considerable settlements,” but they had not yet established “in either of those countries such numerous and thriving colonies as those in the islands and continent of America,”6² where, wrote Campbell approvingly, “in less than Three hundred Years” they had succeeded in turning “a great Part of the Wilds and Wastes of America” into “rich and well cultivated Countries, settled and improved, as well as possessed by Multitudes of British Subjects.”6³ Glossing over “the brutal exploitative and violent processes of ‘trade’ and colonization (including the immensely profitable trade in slaves,” this commercial vision of the empire thus treated colonies as “emblem[s] of English superiority and benevolence” and justified “British imperial ascendancy as a salvation to the world.” In this way, they ensured that Britain’s “nascent imperialist sensibility” would powerfully reinforce British national identity.64 In contrast to the empires of other European powers, the British Empire, wrote the poet James Thomson, was obviously “well-earned.”65 “There is nothing can more fully or more sensibly evince the Truth of our Assertions in respect to the commodious Situation of this Island, the superior Genius of its Inhabitants, and the Excellance of our Constitution, than . . . the Establishments we have made in all Parts of the World,” wrote Campbell in 1774, “for these must be considered as so many distinguishing Testimonies, so many shining Trophies of our 60. Peter J. Marshall and Glyndwr Williams, The Great Map of Mankind (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1982), 3; Linda Colley, “Britishness and Otherness: An Argument,” Journal of British Studies 31 (1992): 324–25. 61. Richard Brewster, A Sermon Preach’d on Thanksgiving Day (Newcastle, 1759), as cited by Kathleen Wilson, “Empire of Virtue: The Imperial Project and Hanoverian Culture c. 1720–1785,” in Lawrence Stone, ed., An Imperial State at War: Britain from 1689 to 1815 (London: Routledge, 1993), 128. 62. Smith, Wealth of Nations, 2:634. 63. Campbell, Political Survey, 2:634. 64. Wilson, Sense of the People, 157, 282; Wilson, “Empire of Virtue,” 15; and Wilson, “Empire, Trade, and Popular Politics,” 109. 65. James Thomson, Britannia: A Poem (London, 1729), line 167.

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maritime Skill and naval Strength,” trophies that “extend the Fame, display the Power and support the Commerce of Great Britain.”66 If having thriving colonies contributed so substantially to Britons’ positive sense of self during the eighteenth century, and if by the middle of the eighteenth century empire was “as much a part of the national identity as the liberties and constitutional traditions for which Britain was celebrated the world over,”67 to what extent were the colonists themselves, including the AngloIrish, included in this emerging imperial identity? If, “in terms of culture, religion and colour,” metropolitans found it easy to define the “manifestly alien” Amerindians, African natives, or Asians of India as patently inferior peoples, the settler societies of America with their European populations, cultures, and institutions presented a different problem altogether.68 With their “evergrowing numbers and increasing local rootedness with each succeeding generation,” American creoles, of European descent but born in America, posed, as Benedict Anderson has emphasized, a historically unique problem. For the fi rst time the metropolis had to deal with . . . vast numbers of “fellow Europeans” . . . far outside Europe. If the indigenes were conquerable by arms and disease, and controllable by the mysteries of Christianity and a completely alien political culture . . . , the same was not true of creoles, who had virtually the same relationship to arms, disease, Christianity, and European culture as the metropolitans.69

Moreover, European immigrants carried with them explicit and deeply held claims to the cultures of Europe and the identities implicit in them. In extreme climates, under primitive conditions, and with limited resources in people and money, they endeavored to reorder existing physical and cultural landscapes along European lines, implanting upon them European patterns of land occupation, economic and social organization, cultural practices, and religious, political, and legal systems and making European languages the languages of authority. Their great physical distances from their metropolises; the social and cultural contrasts, especially during their earlier decades, between the simple and crude societies they were building and the complex and infinitely more polite societies from which they came; their situation on the outermost edges of European civilization, in the midst of populations who appeared 66. Campbell, Political Survey, 2:567n. 67. Wilson, “Empire of Virtue,” 154–55. 68. Colley, “Britishness and Otherness,” 324–25. 69. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (New York: Verso, 1991), 58–59.

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to them to be pagan, barbarous, and savage; the presence, if not the preponderance, in their societies of aliens, in the form of Amerindians, Africans, or Asians; their frequent reliance upon new institutions, such as plantations and chattel, race-based slavery; and the metropolitan reluctance to acknowledge their Europeanness—all these were conditions that both rendered settler claims to Europeanness problematic and enhanced the urgency of such claims among immigrants and their creole descendants. In their efforts to imprint Europeanness upon colonial landscapes, the legal systems by which they defined the new social spaces they were creating were critical. During the second wave of European imperialism, in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, European law frequently served the conquerors as an instrument of domination and control. In this phase of European expansion, a (usually) relatively small group of colonizers, acting as agents of European states and as the self-appointed bearers of European cultures, sought with varying degrees of success to subject the colonized, an often vast population with ancient and complex legal systems of their own, to European legal traditions and institutions.70 By contrast, among the many settler societies established by Europeans, first in America beginning in the sixteenth century and then in other sections of the globe starting in the nineteenth century, law functioned as the principal instrument of cultural transplantation. Intending to create offshoots of the Old World in the New, the large number of emigrants to the colonies insisted upon taking their law with them and making it the primary foundation for the new societies they sought to establish. For these societies, European law was not so much “a tool of imperialism,” a device to dominate whatever indigenous populations remained in their midst, as “a concomitant of emigration. It was not imposed upon settlers but claimed by them.” To “live under European law,” Jorg Fisch has recently and correctly noted, “was a privilege, usually not to be granted to the indigenous people,” a vivid and symbolically powerful signifier of the emigrants’ deepest aspirations to retain in their new places of abode their identities as members of the European societies to which they were attached, identities that, in their eyes, both established their superiority over and sharply distinguished them from the seemingly rude and uncivilized peoples they were seeking to dispossess.7¹ For English people migrating overseas to establish new communities of settlement, the capacity to enjoy—to possess—the English system of law and 70. See W. J. Mommsen and J. A. de Moor, eds., European Expansion and Law: The Encounter of European and Indigenous Law in 19th- and 20th-Century Africa and Asia (Oxford: Berg Publishers, 1992). 71. Jorg Fisch, “Law as a Means and as an End: Some Remarks on the Function of European and Non-European Law in the Process of European Expansion,” in ibid., 21.

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liberty was thus crucial to their ability to maintain their identity as English people and to continue to think of themselves and to be thought of by those who remained in England as English. For that reason, as well as because they regarded English legal arrangements as the best way to preserve the properties they hoped to acquire, it is scarcely surprising that among English colonists all over America “the attempt to establish English law and the ‘rights and liberties of Englishmen’ was,” as George Dargo observes, “constant from the first settlements to the [American] Revolution.”7² The same can be said of Ireland. However, in contrast to the colonists’ endeavors to incorporate English economic, social, cultural, and religious practices and institutions into the fabric of colonial life, their efforts to secure English law and liberties were, throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, contested by metropolitan authorities, who remained skeptical about, not whether, but to what extent English colonists were entitled to English law and liberties.7³ The colonial position in this contest implied a conception of colonies as extensions of Britain overseas and of colonists as Britons living “abroad and consequently the brethren of those at home,” virtual “mirror images” of those who still resided in Britain.74 This conception, as Anderson has pointed out, implied that the colonies were societies “parallel and comparable to those in” Britain and that, in their lives, colonists were “proceeding along the same trajectory” as those who remained in the British Isles.75 From this perspective, held by many people in Britain, the British Empire, as Wilson notes, was “a free and virtuous empire, founded in consent and nurtured in liberty and trade,”76 and colonists were “fellow-subjects”77 who, though “living in different parts of the world,” together with those who resided in Britain formed, as Young remarked in 1772, “one nation, united under one sovereign, speaking the same language and enjoying the same liberty.”78 For those who viewed the empire in this expansive way, the transfer of English liberties to the colonies was precisely the characteristic that distinguished the British Empire from others. Just as Britain was the home of liberty in Eu72. George Dargo, Roots of the Republic: A New Perspective on Early American Constitutionalism (New York: Praeger, 1974), 74. 73. Jack P. Greene, Peripheries and Center: Constitutional Development in the Extended Polities of the British Empire and the United States, 1607–1788 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1986), 7–76. 74. Colley, Britons, 105, 135. 75. Anderson, Imagined Communities, 188, 192. 76. Wilson, Sense of the People, 277. 77. Lord Baltimore, Speech, Nov. 26, 1739, in Stock, ed., Proceedings and Debates of the British Parliament, 5:5. 78. Young, Political Essays, 1.

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rope, so also was the British Empire in America. “Without freedom,” Edmund Burke remarked in 1766, the empire “would not be the British Empire.”79 In America, said Young, “Spain, Portugal and France, have planted despotisms; only Britain liberty.”80 “Look, Sir, into the history of the provinces of other states, of the Roman provinces in ancient time; of the French, Spanish, Dutch and Turkish provinces of more modern date,” George Dempster advised the House of Commons in 1775, “and you will find every page stained with acts of oppressive violence, of cruelty, injustice and peculation.”8¹ As those of similar persuasion thought more deeply about the nature of the empire, they began to suggest that liberty not only “distinguish[ed]” the “British colonists . . . from the colonists of other nations”8² but was responsible for the empire’s extraordinary success. In his two-volume Account of the European Settlements in America, William Burke expressed his confidence that colonial commerce had flourished as it had because “of the freedom every man has of pursuing it according to his own ideas, and directing his life according to his own fashion.”8³ As they surveyed the extraordinary growth and development of the British colonies, analysts such as John Campbell and Adam Smith concluded that, as Campbell wrote, “in their very Nature Colonies require Ease and Freedom” and that colonization was “not very compatible with the Maxims that prevail in despotic Governments.”84 To Smith, the experience of the British colonies seemed conclusive proof that, along with plenty of good land, extensive liberty, permitting wide latitude in self-direction, was one of “the two great causes of the prosperity of new colonies.”85 If “notions of consent and liberty” were indeed “central” to one contemporary conceptualization of the empire, there was an alternative and, in Britain, more pervasive view of colonies and colonists. This competing view saw the colonies less as societies of Britons overseas “populated with free white British subjects”86 than as outposts of British economic or strategic power. In this restrictive conception, explicit in the Navigation Acts and other Restora79. Edmund Burke, Speech on the Declaratory Act, Feb. 3, 1766, in The Writings and Speeches of Edmund Burke, vol. 2: Party, Parliament, and the American Crisis, 1766–1774, ed. Paul Langford (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981), 47. 80. Young, Political Essays, 20. 81. George Dempster, Speech, Oct. 27, 1775, in Simmons and Thomas, eds., Proceedings and Debates of the British Parliaments, 6:140. 82. Edmund Burke, Observations on a Late State of the Nation (London, 1769), in Writings of Edmund Burke, 2:194. 83. William Burke, An Account of the European Settlements, 2 vols. (London, 1808), 2:75–76. 84. Campbell, Political Survey, 2:562n. 85. Smith, Wealth of Nations, 2:572. 86. Wilson, Sense of the People, 24.

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tion colonial measures, the colonies were, principally, workshops or, in the later words of Thomas Pownall, “mere plantations, tracts of foreign country, employed in raising certain specified and enumerated commodities, solely for the use of the trade and manufactures of the mother-country.”87 Increasingly after 1740, and especially during and after the Seven Years’ War, this view gave way to a complementary emphasis upon the colonies as instruments of British national or imperial power. Between 1745 and 1763, intensifying rivalries with France and Spain and the growing populations and wealth of the colonies produced, for the first time among metropolitan analysts, an intensive discussion about the nature and workings of the empire.88 Most of the adherents of this view started from the assumption that the very “word ‘colony,’ ” as Charles Townshend subsequently declared, implied, not equality, but “subordination.”89 Contending that the colonies had been initiated, established, and subsequently succored by the metropolitan state for the purpose of furthering state policy, they argued that the colonies always had to be considered in terms of “power and dominion, as well as trade.”90 In this view, the original purpose of colonization was to “add Strength to the State by extending its Dominions,” and emigrants to the colonies had always been “subject to, and under the power and Dominion, of the Kingdom” whence they came. So far, then, from being in any sense equal to the parent state, colonies were nothing more than “Provincial Governments . . . subordinate to the Chief State.”9¹ Such conceptions of the colonies suggested that colonists were something less than full Britons; not, as Benjamin Franklin put it in 1768, “fellow subjects, but subjects of subjects.”9² They also reinforced longstanding metropoli87. Thomas Pownall, The Administration of the Colonies (London, 1768), 282. 88. Peter N. Miller, Defining the Common Good: Empire, Religion and Philosophy in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 195–213. 89. Charles Townshend, Speech, Feb. 6, 1765, in Simmons and Thomas, eds., Proceedings and Debates of the British Parliaments, 2:13. 90. Jack P. Greene, Charles F. Mullett, and Edward C. Papenfuse Jr., eds., Magna Charta for America: James Abercromby’s “An Examination of the Acts of Parliament Relative to the Trade and Government of Our American Colonies” (1752) and “De Jure et Gubernatione Coloniarum, or an Inquiry into the Nature, and the Rights of Colonies, Ancient and Modern” (1774) (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1986), 45; John Mitchell, The Contest in America between Great Britain and France (London, 1757), xvii, as cited in Miller, Defining the Common Good, 170. 91. Greene, Mullett, and Papenfuse, eds., Magna Charta for America, 26. 92. Benjamin Franklin to the Gentleman’s Magazine, Jan. 1768, in Benjamin Franklin’s Letters to the Press, ed. Verner W. Crane (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1950), 111.

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tan views of colonists as people of “vulgar descent” and unfortunate histories, the miserable outcasts of Britain and Europe.9³ During the Stamp Act crisis of 1765–66, Franklin, who throughout much of the period from the mid-1750s to the mid-1770s resided in London and acted as a self-appointed cultural broker for the colonies, was dismayed to see metropolitan newspaper writers dismiss the colonists with the “gentle terms of republican race, mixed rabble of Scotch, Irish and foreign vagabonds, descendents of convicts, ungrateful rebels &c.,” language that, he objected, conveyed only the most violent “contempt, and abuse.”94 By such language, “lumping all the Americans under the general Character of ‘House-breakers and Felons’ ”95 and by “raving” against them “as ‘diggers of pits for this country,’ ‘lunaticks,’ ‘sworn enemies,’ ‘false,’ and ‘ungrateful’ . . . ‘cut-throats,’ ”96 Franklin protested during the decade after 1765, metropolitans had repeatedly branded the colonists as a people who, though “descended from British Ancestors,” had “degenerated to such a Degree”97 as to become the “lowest of Mankind, and almost of a different Species from the English of Britain,”98 a people who were “unworthy the name of Englishmen, and fit only to be snubb’d, curb’d, shackled and plundered.”99 Such language identified colonists as a category of others, “foreigners” who, however much they might aspire to be English, could never actually achieve those aspirations and who on the scale of civilization were only slightly above the native Amerindian.¹00 The expansion of British activities in India and the massive employment of enslaved Africans and their descendants throughout the British American colonies strongly reinforced this image in Britain. The more Britons learned about India, the more convinced they became that, as Dempster remarked in Parliament, the “eastern species of government” and society was replete with “rapines and cruelties.”¹0¹ Beginning in the late 1750s, the transactions of Robert Clive and others persuaded many Britons that, in their rapacious efforts to line their own pockets, their countrymen in India had themselves often turned 93. Oldmixon, British Empire, 1:iv. 94. Franklin to Gazeteer and New Daily Advertiser, Dec. 28, 1765, in The Papers of Benjamin Franklin, ed. Leonard W. Labaree et al., 27 vols. to date (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1959–), 12:414. 95. Franklin to Public Advertiser, Jan 2, 1766, in Franklin Papers, 13:5. 96. Franklin to Gazeteer and New Daily Advertiser, Jan. 6, 1768, in Franklin Papers, 15:13. 97. Franklin to Public Advertiser, Apr. 5, 1774, in Franklin Papers, 21:185. 98. Franklin to William Franklin, Mar. 22, 1775, in Franklin Papers, 21:598. 99. Franklin, “Fragments of a Pamphlet on the Stamp Act,” Jan. 1766, in Franklin Papers, 13:81. 100. Franklin, “Examination,” 1766, in Franklin Papers, 13:150. 101. Dempster, Speech, Oct. 27, 1775, in Simmons and Thomas, eds., Proceedings and Debates of the British Parliaments, 6:140.

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plunderers and been guilty of “Crimes scarce inferior to the Conquerors of Mexico and Peru.”¹0² Already by the late 1760s, the term nabob, initially a title of rank for Indians, had become, as a contemporary complained, “a general term of reproach, indiscriminately applied to every individual who has served the East India Company in Asia” and “implying, that the persons to whom it is applied, have obtained their fortunes by grievously oppressing the natives of India.”¹0³ Published in 1768, the dramatist Samuel Foote’s The Nabob was only the most prominent of many works that, in Wilson’s words, presented a “scathing indictment of the moral corrosiveness of empire in India.”¹04 Throughout the latter half of the eighteenth century, the rapidly growing antislavery movement more and more focused attention on the association of racial slavery with the colonies and fostered the conviction in Britain that “no People upon Earth” were such “Enemies to Liberty, such absolute Tyrants,” as the American colonists. With “so little Dislike of Despotism and Tyranny, that they do not scruple to exercise them with unbounded Rigor over their miserable Slaves,” colonists were obviously “unworthy” of claims to a British identity or to the liberty that was central to that identity.¹05 No less than the image of the nabob, that of the dissolute “creolean planter”—a despot schooled by slavery in “ferocity, cruelty, and brutal barbarity,”¹06 whose “head-long Violence” was wholly unlike the “national” temperament of the “native genuine English”¹07—shaped contemporary metropolitan conceptions of colonists through dramatic works such as Richard Cumberland’s The West Indian, in 1772, or George Colman Jr.’s Inkle and Yarico, in 1787.¹08 The images presented in these works and in the antislavery literature suggested that no people who consorted with the corrupt and despotic regimes of the East or held slaves in the American colonies could be true-born Britons, who, above all, loved liberty. To reassure themselves that Britain actu102. The Nabob: or Asiatic Plunderers, A Satirical Poem (London, 1773), iii. 103. The Saddle put on the Right Horse; or, an Enquiry into the Reason Why certain Persons have been denominated Nabobs (London, 1783), 1. 104. Wilson, “Empire of Virtue,” 153; Philip Lawson and Jim Phillips, “ ‘Our Execrable Banditti’: Perceptions of Nabobs in Mid-Eighteenth Century Britain,” Albion 16 (1984): 225–41. 105. Franklin, “A Conversation between an Englishman, a Scotchman, and an American, on the Subject of Slavery,” Public Advertiser, Jan. 30, 1770, in Franklin’s Letters to the Press, 187. 106. James Otis, The Rights of the British Colonies Asserted and Proved (Boston, 1764), in Bernard Bailyn, ed., Pamphlets of the American Revolution (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1965), 439–40. 107. “Mnemon” [Edmund Burke] to Public Advertiser, Feb. 23, 1778, in Writings of Edmund Burke, 2:76. 108. Wilson, “Empire of Virtue,” 143.

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ally was the land of freedom, metropolitan Britons had to distance themselves from such people and Britain from such places. “In Asia’s realms let slavery be bound,” demanded one anonymous poet in 1773, Let not her foot defi le this sacred ground, Where Freedom, Science, Valour fi x’d their seat, And taught all Nations how they should be great.¹09

In the same spirit, some polemical writers called for measures to “preserve the race of Britons from [the] stain and contamination” of American settler despotism.¹¹0 The long debate that preceded the American Revolution provided colonists and their advocates in Britain with an opportunity to combat this negative image. In protesting that the extensive free colonial populations were mostly “descendents of Englishmen”¹¹¹ or Britons, and in trying to define of what their “ancestral Englishness”¹¹² consisted, colonial protagonists penetrated to the essence of Englishness and Britishness as contemporaries understood it. What distinguished them from the colonists of other nations—and identified them with Britons at home—was not principally, they insisted, their Protestantism or their economic and social success, but their political and legal inheritance. “Modern colonists,” in James Otis’s view, were the noble discoverers and settlers of a new world, from whence as from an endless source, wealth and plenty, the means of power, grandeur, and glory, in a degree unknown to the hungry chiefs of former ages, have been pouring in to Europe for 300 years past; in return for which those colonists have received from the several states of Europe, except from Great Britain only since the Revolution, nothing but ill-usage, slavery, and chains, as fast as the riches of their own earning could furnish the means of forging them.

Not just the Catholic and despotic Spanish, Portuguese, and French had been so guilty, but even the Protestant and free Dutch, who shamelessly admitted that “the liberty of Dutchmen” was “confined to Holland” and was “never intended for provincials in America or anywhere else.” If “British America” had previously been “distinguished from the slavish colonies around about 109. Nabob: or Asiatic Plunderers, 38. 110. A West Indian [Samuel Estwick], Considerations on the Negroe Cause Commonly so Called (London, 1772), 29, 43. 111. Edmund Burke, Observations on a Late State of the Nation (London, 1769), in Writings of Edmund Burke, 2:194. 112. Anderson, Imagined Communities, 145.

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it as the fortunate Britons have been from most of their neighbours on the continent of Europe,” colonial advocates argued powerfully, Britain’s “colonies should be ever thus distinguished.”¹¹³ To colonial protagonists in the 1760s and 1770s, the colonists’ claims to share in this central component of British identity seemed unassailable. “To the infinite advantage and emolument of the mother state,” the colonists, as the Providence merchant Stephen Hopkins announced in 1764, had “left the delights of their native country, parted from their homes and all their conveniences[, and] . . . searched out . . . and subdued a foreign country with the most amazing travail and fortitude.” They had undertaken these herculean tasks on the assumption “that they and their successors forever should be free, should be partakers and sharers in all the privileges and advantages of the then English, now British constitution,” and should enjoy “all the rights and privileges of freeborn Englishmen.” Exulting in their identity as Britons, colonists took pride in having come “out from a kingdom renowned for liberty[,] from a constitution founded on compact, from a people of all the sons of men the most tenacious of freedom.”¹¹4 In phrases that echoed Fortescue and Coke, whom they frequently cited, they expressed their happiness that, unlike the inhabitants of most other polities, they were not “governed at the will of another, or of others, and” that they were not “in the miserable condition of slaves” whose property could “be taken from them by taxes or otherwise without their own consent and against their will.” Rather, they militantly asserted, they lived, like Britons in the home islands, under a “beneficent compact” by which, as British subjects, they could “be governed only agreeable to laws to which [they] themselves have some way consented, and are not to be compelled to part with their property but as it is called for by the authority of such laws.”¹¹5 The insistence with which colonial protagonists adumbrated these themes persuasively testifies to the fact that at the time of the American Revolution Britons, in the far peripheries as well as at the center of the British Empire, still regarded liberty as the essence of Britishness. Once the actions of the metropolitan government seemed aggressively to contest their claims to a British identity, colonists made every effort to articulate and secure metropolitan acknowledgment of those claims, to make clear, as Burke said, that they were “not only devoted to liberty, but liberty according to English ideas and on 113. Otis, Rights of the British Colonies, in Bailyn, Pamphlets, 436, 447, 478. 114. Stephen Hopkins, The Rights of the Colonies Examined (Providence, 1764), in Charles S. Hyneman and Donald S. Lutz, eds., American Political Writing during the Founding Era, 1760–1805, 2 vols. (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1983), 1:46, 49. 115. Hopkins, Rights of the Colonies, 1:46.

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English principles.”¹¹6 If we can assume that the core of an imperial identity consists of those conceptions that are most deeply felt or internalized in the far reaches as well as at the center of an empire, then, at least through the American Revolution, liberty, as it had been from the beginnings of English overseas expansion, was the single most important ingredient of an imperial identity in Britain and the British Empire. At the heart of the first British Empire, to quote Richard Koebner, had always been “the idea of a political system coordinating Great Britain in lasting solidarity with communities beyond her borders whose constitutions conformed to her standards,” whose political and legal institutions incorporated ancient traditions of British liberty.¹¹7 Indeed, contemporary opinion throughout the empire fails to support recent suggestions that Britain was “a land of liberty because founded on Protestantism and commerce.”¹¹8 Rather, the predominant view among eighteenthcentury Britons, including colonists, seems to have been that Britain was Protestant and commercial principally because founded on liberty. The break with Rome and the active cultivation of commerce were widely thought to have been a function of the intellectual and political independence of the freeborn Englishman, not vice versa. Protestantism, as Burke succinctly declared, was a religion “not only favorable to liberty, but built upon it.”¹¹9 The expansion of commerce and empire provided, in Campbell’s words, “the clearest Demonstration of the Excellence of this Constitution.”¹²0 Established mostly by English people, the American colonies were the most prominent parts of the first British Empire. The imperial identity constructed to include them and the Anglo-Irish emphasized liberty and its attendant benefits—Protestantism, extensive and thriving commerce, and national naval and military strength—as conditions not just of the metropolis but of the whole empire. This identity placed its emphasis upon the dominant settler populations—the merchants, planters, farmers, professionals, and artisans in Ireland, the American colonies, and India—through which it was necessarily mediated. In the process, that identity tended, during the first British Empire, before the emergence of the antislavery movement, to conceal, as Wilson points out, “the exploitative relations upon which the empire was based,”¹²¹ the extensive use of bound labor and racial slavery in America, the discrimination 116. Edmund Burke, Speech on Conciliation, Mar. 22, 1775, in Burke, Selected Writings and Speeches on America, ed. Thomas H. D. Mahoney (Indianapolis: Bobbs Merrill, 1964), 132. 117. Koebner, Empire, 296. 118. Colley, Britons, 103. 119. Burke, Speech on Conciliation, Mar. 22, 1775, in Selected Writings on America, 133. 120. Campbell, Political Survey, 2:694. 121. Wilson, “Empire of Virtue,” 149–50.

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against and the exploitation of Catholics through the Penal Laws in Ireland, the systematic expropriation of native lands in both America and Ireland, and the subjection of parts of India to British rule. By fostering a dissociation of Britishness and colonialness to a degree impossible in the almost wholly settler empire of the seventeenth and eighteenth century, the second British Empire, with its wide array of subject peoples and its development of “new institutions of control, coercion and audit and of the philosophical and aristocratic identity of social or metropolitan superiority” that informed those institutions,¹²² may, in combination with the emergence of full-blown “scientific racism,” have produced something of a de-emphasis of the idea of liberty in the British imperial identity. Yet, by simultaneously taking the lead in the antislavery movement and by being the first Europeans to abolish slavery in their colonies, Britons also reaffirmed their conception of themselves as a nation and an empire that stood high for liberty.¹²³ 122. C. A. Bayly, Imperial Meridian: The British Empire and the World, 1780–1830 (London: Longman, 1989), 108. 123. Phillip Buckner, “Whatever Happened to the British Empire?” Journal of the Canadian Historical Association, new ser., 3 (1994): 27–28.

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— t welve —

“By Their Laws Shall Ye Know Them” Law and Identity in Colonial British America

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or the past quarter century, an expanding cadre of early American legal historians, abandoning the internalist approach of earlier legal historians for the sociolegal approach pioneered, for American national legal history, by J. Willard Hurst in the 1950s, has been producing a rich and sophisticated body of work on many aspects of colonial British American legal cultures.¹ That the significance of this work has not been sufficiently appreciated—that scholars of nineteenth- and twentieth-century American law have largely dismissed it as irrelevant to national legal history, and that early American historians have underestimated its importance to the understanding of colonial British America—is the animating consideration behind the publication

Under the title “The Social and Cultural Functions of Law in Colonial British America: Some Reflections,” this chapter was initially written as a closing address for the conference “The Many Legalities of Early America,” Institute of Early American History and Culture, Williamsburg, Virginia, November 24, 1996. Under the same title, it was presented at a symposium honoring Professor Robert Weir, University of South Carolina, Columbia, October 10, 1997; at the Mid-Michigan Seminar in Early American History, William L. Clements Library, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, October 24, 1997; and at the Department of History, Volgograd State University, Russia, September 13, 2000. Under the title “Liberty and Law in the Construction of Colonial and Revolutionary Identity,” it was presented in a slightly revised form as a lecture to the Royal Irish Academy, Dublin, Ireland, March 9, 1999; to the Department of History, St. Louis University, Missouri, December 3, 1998; and to the Department of History, University of New Hampshire, Durham, April 28, 2000. Entitled “ ‘By Ye Laws Shall Ye Know Them”: Law and Identity in Colonial America,” it was given as a lecture at the Rhode Island Historical Society, Providence, February 29, 2000; as the Frank X. Gerrity Lecture, St. Joseph’s University, Philadelphia, November 14, 2000; at the Department of History, University College, Swansea, Wales, May 29, 2001; and at the Department of History, Southwest Texas State University, San Marcos, November 7, 2001. It is here republished with permission from “ ‘By Their Laws Shall Ye Know Them’: Law and Identity in Colonial British America,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 33 (Autumn 2002): 247–60. 1. See James Willard Hurst, Law and the Conditions of Freedom in the Nineteenth-Century United States (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1956).

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of The Many Legalities of Early America.² Edited by Christopher L. Tomlins and Bruce H. Mann, two of the most respected contributors to this field, this volume represents a major effort to display the range and importance of early American legal historical work and “assess the state of early American legal history.”³ It includes fourteen essays, thirteen presented at a conference sponsored by the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture in Williamsburg, Virginia, in the fall of 1996. Uniformly competent, empirically rich, and, if somewhat short of theory, often analytically powerful, these essays treat a wide variety of subjects arranged under four subordinate headings. In a section entitled “Atlantic Crossings,” James Muldoon explores the theoretical foundations of John Adams’s argument for English possessions in America; Mary Sarah Bilder, the legal and ecclesiastical roots and development of the culture of appeal in early New England; David Barry Gaspar, the relationship between English law and the law of slavery in seventeenth-century Jamaica; and David Thomas Konig, the tensions between judge-made law and statute in colonial and Revolutionary America. Under the rubric “Intercultural Encounters,” Katherine Hermes examines Indian relations to New England courts in the seventeenth century; James Brooks, the operation of customary justice in colonial New Mexico; and Ann Marie Plane, the relationship between native customary law and the English common law tradition among Narragansett Indians. Under the heading “Rules of Law: Legal Relations as Social Relations,” Christine Daniels examines the way servants in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Maryland used the courts to protect their contractual rights; Linda L. Sturtz, how Virginia settlers’ use of powers of attorney functioned to accord women legal agency; John G. Kolp and Terry L. Snyder, the political implications of the fact that male franchise rights in colonial Virginia often depended on wife-owned property; and Holly Brewer, changing ideas about child testimony in colonial judicial practice. In the category “Rules of Law: Legal Regimes and Their Social Effects,” Cornelia Hughes Dayton examines Calvinist influences on 2. Christopher L. Tomlins and Bruce H. Mann, eds., The Many Legalities of Early America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001). For earlier complaints, see Stanley N. Katz, “Introduction,” to “Explaining the Law in Early American History—a Symposium,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser., 50 (Jan. 1993): 5; see also in that issue, Cornelia Hughes Dayton, “Turning Points and the Relevance of Colonial Legal History,” 17; and Richard J. Ross, “The Legal Past of Colonial New England: Notes for the Study of Law, Legal Culture, and Intellectual History,” 39, 41. 3. Christopher Tomlins, “Introduction: The Many Legalities of Colonization: A Manifesto of Destiny for Early American Legal History,” in Tomlins and Mann, eds., Many Legalities, 1.

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the construction and operation of the New Haven legal regime; William M. Off utt Jr., the cultural foundations and limits of court authority in the middle colonies from 1670 to 1710; Richard Lyman Bushman, the extensive reliance of farmers on courts in Orange County, North Carolina, during the regulator era; and A. G. Roeber, the relation between charity law and state formation in early America. Early American legal history scholars have long complained about the absence of a “compelling overall narrative” in their field, and Tomlins uses a masterly introduction both to try to bring some coherence to the mélange of work contained in this volume and to propose a “new colonization synthesis” in which “considerations of law as a central actor in processes of colonization” provide the basis for the development of “a coherent and compelling interpretation of early American legal history.” Focused upon two principal themes, “the interaction and transformation of peoples” and “the occupation and transformation of places,” this synthesis, as Tomlins sets it forth, emphasizes the role of law in structuring encounters with native and other non-European peoples, in projecting European political, social, and economic forms upon American physical circumstances, and in constructing and maintaining settler societies.4 This approach yields two immediate benefits. First, the concept many legalities opens up the possibility of developing an infinitely more comprehensive and inclusive legal history. While the noun legality focuses upon not just formal law but “the myriad ways in which people ordered their relations with one another, whether as individuals, groups, classes, communities, or states,”5 the adjective many directs attention to the rich variety of legalities at play in colonial British America. As explicitly or implicitly adumbrated by essays in this volume, these include (1) the many Amerindian legalities or jurispractices, at least some of which continued to display vitality and to operate within Amerindian communities long after European settlement; (2) the independent (independent, that is, from one another) legal systems that existed in each separate political jurisdiction (and each of the thirty British colonies in America in 1770 had its own separate legal system); (3) the varieties of European inheritances that contributed to the construction of these settler legalities; (4) the differential operation of these settler legalities upon social categories of the population as determined by age, gender, legal status (servants, slaves), race, and possession of property; and (5) the arrangements for private governance associated with families, households, farms, plantations, and artisanal or mer4. Ibid., 11–13. 5. Bruce H. Mann, “Afterword: The Death and Transfiguration of Early American Legal History,” in Tomlins and Mann, eds., Many Legalities, 447.

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cantile establishments. Equally promising, this concept also includes an important form of legality which the volume itself almost wholly neglects: the growing body of metropolitan law generated by the British Parliament and Privy Council that, at least in most metropolitan eyes, applied to and was law in the colonies. Within this broad multitude of legalities, of course, settler law, as David Konig, one of the most penetrating of the new legal historians, has remarked, “was supreme in its own jurisdiction.”6 Invariably, however, and this is the important larger point emphatically underlined by so many of the essays in this volume, settler law was shaped by a continuing process of interaction and negotiation with peoples who lived under that and other forms of law. Second, the colonization synthesis, which puts the development of colonial British America into the larger context of European colonization since the fifteenth century, creates the potential for freeing legal history studies from their traditional subordination to the nation-state paradigm. Until they can divorce themselves from this paradigm, colonial historians, legal and otherwise, can never hope to escape marginalization in a historiography that has for its grand narrative the rise of the American republic. They will always be battling, as Cornelia Dayton has put it, to show the “relevance of pre-1776 developments to the character of the nation that arose from the American Revolution.”7 One of the principal benefits of such a divorce is that it permits us to entertain the possibility that colonial legal history might be better served by incorporating it into an entirely different master narrative, one that provides us with the perspective necessary to develop a much fuller and deeper appreciation of the significance of that history for colonial history in general. Indeed, Tomlins’s new colonization synthesis represents a useful first step toward the construction of an alternative master narrative that focuses upon the social and cultural transformation of the Americas, a narrative in which settlers of all nations participated. In this narrative as it is applied to colonial English/British America, individual European settlers and African slaves and their creole descendants slowly substituted, for an indigenous landscape and system of political, social, and cultural arrangements, an English one. Beginning on the eastern seaboard, they replaced the extensive agricultural and hunting villages of the Amerindians with intensive agricultural settlements laced with roads, intermixed with country market towns that were tied to sizable overseas trading posts on the coast, and increasingly characterized 6. David T. Konig, “A Summary View of the Law of Early America,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser., 50 (January 1993): 47. 7. Dayton, “Turning Points,” 7.

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by sophisticated commercial and social infrastructures, including courthouses, stores, taverns, and churches. In the process, they inscribed the landscape with property lines and created civil polities with legal institutions to enforce property divisions and govern relations among the inhabitants. Unmoved by its tragic effects upon the indigenous inhabitants they were driving before them, those involved in this process, settlers and land developers, conceived of it as a massive civilizing project. Deeply aware of the profound transformative effects of what they were doing, they thought of themselves as engaged in a laborious but noble effort to conquer and render productive a wilderness by felling trees, creating new fields, orchards, and pastures, substituting domestic for wild animals, and otherwise bringing the land under their mastery. In the process, they changed landscapes that to them appeared rude, uncultivated, and barren into civil, cultivated, productive, and improved spaces, spaces that represented the outermost extensions of the English or other European places on which they relied for their norms and standards of a civil society. From the eastern to the western edge of the American continent, from the beginning of English settlement in 1607 through the founding of the American nation and on to the passing of the frontier in the 1890s, this story of the transformation of the wilderness was the principal story that informed, connected, and gave meaning to the lives of the millions of people who took part in it. From the perspective of this story and of the colonial British context in which it was acted out—for 175 years in the case of the thirteen colonies and for much longer in the case of the others—we can, finally, begin to think about the problem of how to reconceive of the colonial era in a way in which law will have a more central place. In the reconception I propose, agency shifts from the metropolis to the settlers. I deliberately use the term settler, which has long been a common term of analysis in the colonial histories of other settler nations that arose out of the British Empire (Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and South Africa), because it avoids the dependency implications associated with the word colonists (among metropolitans, as I have argued elsewhere, colonists were always a category of others)8 and enables us to move beyond the concept elite (another term used indiscriminately and loosely) to take in a much broader spectrum of people who had a deep stake in developing property structures and some voice in their own governance, including all landholders, would-be landholders, and family members of such groups. 8. Jack P. Greene, “Empire and Identity from the Glorious Revolution to the American Revolution,” in P. J. Marshall, ed., The Eighteenth Century, vol. 2 of The Oxford History of the British Empire, ed. William Roger Louis, 5 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998– 2000), 224–25 (see chap. 11 in this volume).

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In colonial English America, the earliest settlers did not so much bring authority with them across the ocean as licenses to create, if they could, authorities on the ground in America; authority in the colonies did not, therefore, devolve from England but was created on the spot by participants in colonizing enterprises.9 If these participants only rarely purchased land from the Amerindians, as John Adams claimed in his Novangulus essays,¹0 they did, as many of their descendants argued throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth century and during the pre-Revolutionary debates, purchase it through the application of their capital, energy, and labor; and within the settler enclaves they were creating, they established pockets of authority by constructing settler legalities to preside over those purchases. The lack of resources, both technical and coercive, on the part of the English state meant that these settler republics—a concept I have deliberately chosen with full comprehension of its radical implications for a reconception of colonial history—were neither closely nor consistently monitored by the parent country and had wide latitude to construct whatever sorts of legalities best suited them. But settlers were not altogether free agents. They had to operate within two broad sets of constraints. The fi rst were imposed by the special character—the demands and possibilities—of the emerging societies they were seeking to organize and in which they participated, a topic to which I will return shortly. The second was the English legal inheritance, those many English legalities, they brought with them to America. Let us examine the nature of these English legalities more closely. As a system they had several rather clear properties or characteristics. First, they were consensual. Modern conceptions of law as command stress the extent to which law flows down from a sovereign authority. To quote Sir William Blackstone, the great eighteenth-century legal theorist and an early exponent of this conception of law, “law always supposes some . . . superior who is to make it”; “obedience to law depends not upon our approbation, but upon the maker’s will.”¹¹ Yet, Blackstone’s own text subverts, or at least significantly qualifies, this conception of law. His extensive analysis of English legal processes—of the customary foundations of the common law, which, as 9. This point is developed further in Jack P. Greene, “Negotiated Authorities: The Problem of Governance in the Extended Polities of the Early Modern Atlantic World,” in Greene, Negotiated Authorities: Essays in Colonial Political and Constitutional History (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1994), 1–24. 10. James Muldoon, “Discovery, Grant, Charter, Conquest, or Purchase: John Adams on the Legal Basis for English Possession of North America,” in Tomlins and Mann, eds., Many Legalities, 46. 11. William Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England, 4 vols. (London, 1764–69), 1:39, 43, 46.

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he informs us, got its “binding power” from “common consent” as evidenced by “long and immemorial usage” and its “universal reception throughout the kingdom”;¹² of juries of peers as vehicles for rendering “the unanimous consent of twelve . . . neighbours and equals”;¹³ and of the consensual foundations of parliamentary statutes—powerfully underlines the consensual basis of much English law and suggests that Blackstone too quickly discounted the role of public approbation in the making of legalities. In early modern English law, I would suggest, legality, as it was practically constructed, required both the maker’s will and the approbation or consent of the populations to which it applied, populations that had to acknowledge it, obey it, and look to it for guidance and protection. The fact that legality required public approbation as well as command calls attention to settler agency and to the profoundly important consensual element in colonial (and early modern English) authority structures. Second, the system as a whole was pluralistic. English law was not a uniform body of law handed down from on high, but a law emanating out of the many communities of England and adapted to the special needs of those communities. Over the course of the early modern era, England’s central common law courts no doubt expanded “their jurisdiction at the expense of the many competing legalities of English culture.”¹4 Yet, even during the closing decades of the eighteenth century, common law procedures, jury deliberations, and judicial practices could all vary according to local circumstances, habit, and opinion. Nor was English law enormously determinant; rather, indeterminacy gave litigants, judges, and juries wide scope. In short, the English legal system was highly flexible, adaptable, and responsive to opinion—all of which reinforced its consensual nature. Third, law was dynamic, capable of developing new procedures, forms, and instruments to meet new demands or conditions, such as the market expansion of the sixteenth century, and of silently permitting outmoded statutes or common law practices to fall into desuetude. Fourth, the English law was diverse in its sources. It came from Parliaments through statutes, from court decisions by magistrates and juries, from prerogative decrees by the Crown, and from authoritative commentators on the law, such as Fortescue, Coke, Hale, and Blackstone. Fifth, finally, and most important for the argument I am setting forth, it was defining. The maxim, by their laws shall ye know them, applies equally to 12. Ibid., 1:64, 68, 77, 183. 13. Ibid., 2:379. 14. David T. Konig, “Legal Fictions and the Rule(s) of Law: The Jeffersonian Critique of Common-Law Adjudication,” in Tomlins and Mann, eds., Many Legalities, 102.

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all peoples. As Montesquieu and Hume, among many other modern contemporary thinkers, appreciated, no single body of sources provides a better index to the identity of a people than their laws. But in constructing their identities during the early modern era, English people assigned an especially prominent and even determinative role to the English system of laws and liberties. The impressive recent work on early modern English (or British) national selfconceptions by Richard Helgerson,¹5 Liah Greenfeld,¹6 Kathleen Wilson,¹7 and Linda Colley¹8 points to many elements in the construction of Englishness, including Protestantism, abundance, commerce, naval might, social openness, and intellectual achievements. With the exception of Colley, however, most of these analysts agree that in the eyes of the early modern English, the peculiar system of English law and liberty was what principally distinguished them from other peoples. The proud boast of the English—a boast dating at least as far back as Fortescue—was that, through a variety of conquests and upheavals and in marked contrast to the rest of Europe, they had retained their identity as a free people who had secured their liberty through their passionate dedication to the rule of law. During the second wave of European imperialism in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, European law frequently served the conquerors as an instrument of domination and control. In this phase of European expansion, a relatively small group of colonizers, acting as the agents of European states and self-appointed bearers of European culture, sought with varying degrees of success to subject the colonized, often vast populations with ancient and complex legal systems of their own, to European legal traditions and institutions. In relation to Amerindians, this process also characterized colonizing movements in the early modern era. However, among the many settler societies established by Europeans, first in America beginning in the sixteenth century and then in other sections of the globe starting in the nineteenth century, law also functioned as the principal instrument of cultural transplantation. Intending to create offshoots of the Old World in the New, the large numbers of emigrants to the colonies insisted upon taking their law with them and making it the primary foundation for the new societies they sought to establish. For the settlers in these settler societies, 15. Richard Helgerson, Forms of Nationhood: The Elizabethan Writing of England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). 16. Liah Greenfeld, Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992). 17. Kathleen Wilson, The Sense of the People: Politics, Culture, and Imperialism in England, 1715–1785 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). 18. Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1837 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992).

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European law thus became less “a tool of imperialism,” a device to dominate whatever indigenous populations remained in their midst, than “a concomitant of emigration. It was not imposed upon settlers but claimed by them.” To live under European law was a privilege often not granted or granted only with significant conditions to indigenous peoples, a vivid and symbolically powerful signifier of the emigrants’ deepest aspirations to retain in their new places of abode their identities as members of the European societies to which they were attached, identities that, in their eyes, both established their superiority over and sharply distinguished them from the others, the seemingly rude and uncivilized peoples they were seeking to dispossess.¹9 As English settlers began in the early seventeenth century to construct their grand narrative of the civilizing process, law was thus at the very center of their conception. They were representatives and bearers of a national culture that, to a major extent, identified itself in terms of its legal culture. To retain their Englishness, to be able credibly to define the societies they were constructing as English, they had to impose an English legal system upon them. If the English state exerted little power over settlers, their English inheritance exerted a great deal more. A people law-minded and rights-minded had no choice but to establish their societies on legal foundations. From a long line of jurisprudential writers and political theorists, from a national discursive community on law, and from their own experience, they had learned that, in Blackstone’s words, “the wants and fears of individuals,” a mutual “sense of their weakness and imperfections,” was the “solid and natural foundation, as well as the cement, of society,” and that government and a system of “human law” were the essential devices through which people could achieve the “principal aim” of political society: the protection of individuals in the enjoyment of those “absolute rights” of personal security, personal liberty, and private property that, they believed, had been vested in them by the “immutable laws of nature” but could only be secured to them by a system of “civil liberty” that, by the “united force of the law,” provided rules of civil conduct, kept society in order, and promoted “the happiness of each individual.”²0 If, however, this law-minded and the rights-minded ideology which, as Konig once said, “came to dominate Early America,”²¹ was to a major degree 19. See Jorg Fisch, “Law as a Means and as an End: Some Remarks on the Function of European and Non-European Law in the Process of European Expansion,” in W. J. Mommsen and J. A. De Moor, eds., European Expansion and Law: The Encounter of European and Indigenous Law in 19th- and 20th-Century Africa and Asia (Oxford: Berg Publishers, 1992), 21. 20. Blackstone, Commentaries, 1:40, 47, 120, 244. 21. David T. Konig, “Legal Fictions and the Law’s Rule(s): Modalities of Stability in Colonial Virginia,” 20, unpublished paper presented at the conference “The Many Legalities of Early America,” Williamsburg, Va., November 22–24, 1996.

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inherited—and settlers thought of it as both an inheritance and a possession— it was socially reinforced by the settlers’ efforts to reorganize the physical and social landscapes in which they were settling and to maintain the societies they were creating in those landscapes. Initially, they had to constitute themselves or at least to provide a framework through which, in the classic English manner, they could over time constitutionalize their political societies along English lines and within the framework of the English legal inheritance, an important foundational aspect of the construction of colonial legalities to which Many Legalities devotes little space. Second, and fundamentally important, they had to organize a set of institutions, the principal function of which was to devise a series of rules to govern property and social relations. To paraphrase a passage from Blackstone, they had to establish the course in which lands would descend by inheritance; the manner and form of acquiring and transferring property; the solemnities and obligations of contracts, including marriage; the rules of expounding wills, deeds, and legislative acts; the respective remedies of civil injuries; the several species of temporal offences, with the manner and degree of punishment; and an infinite number of minuter particulars.²² In these societies, pronouncements from the distant state across the Atlantic carried little weight, and the designs of colonial enterprisers in England worked only to the extent that their objectives and philosophies were internalized and congruent with the social purposes of settlers. Colonial jurisprudence was almost entirely “a provincial practitioners’ jurisprudence.”²³ In other words, a kind of radical voluntarism equivalent to that found by Stephen Foster to be characteristic of seventeenth-century New England Puritan churches was at work.²4 Not surprisingly, the law was an instrument of settler desires. It served settler interests as a device for estate building, a device, to paraphrase Konig, for securing and conserving real property and preserving the family unit.²5 Courts, Bushman argues, were instruments of property owners, who, intent on carving out “little kingdoms” for themselves and their families, “dominated society so completely that no one could conceive of an alternative.”²6 Legal 22. Blackstone, Commentaries, 1:68. 23. Konig, “Legal Fictions and Rule(s) of Law,” 106. 24. Stephen Foster, Their Solitary Way: The Puritan Social Ethic in the First Century of Settlement in New England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1971), 67–98, 155–72. 25. David T. Konig, “The Virgin and the Virgin’s Sister: Virginia, Massachusetts, and the Contested Legacy of Colonial Law,” in Russell K. Osgood, ed., The History of the Law in Massachusetts: The Supreme Judicial Court 1692–1992 (Boston: Supreme Judicial Court Historical Society, 1992), 96. 26. Richard L. Bushman, “Farmers in Court: Orange County, North Carolina, 1750– 1776,” in Tomlins and Mann, eds., Many Legalities, 412.

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institutions thus viewed societies’ “well-being in terms of property-holding free white males,” and, as Bushman persuasively argues in his examination of Orange County, North Carolina, farmers, as long as legislatures and courts acted to maintain settler liberty to acquire and dispose of property, both those who had acquired and those who aspired to acquire property had a profound interest in maintaining the authority of those institutions.²7 All over colonial British America, settler consent and support were thus the principal foundations for public authority. As Hendrik Hartog long ago instructed us, legal institutions got their authority far less from the centralized system to which they were attached than from the broader public they served.²8 Colonial polities had relatively weak coercive resources. As William Off utt argues, “Colonial courts possessed extremely modest abilities to compel obedience.” Not just in their early days but for decades thereafter, courts “lacked institutional histories, long-established and respected court personnel, capital (in the form of buildings, books, money, and competence), and manpower for enforcement.” Such courts by definition had to “rely heavily on the widespread participation of the populace . . . to serve in various roles,” on the “voluntary usage of courts to settle disputes, civil and criminal,” and, I would add, on the voluntary support of the settler populations they served for their authority.²9 The weakness of their coercive resources meant that their authority had to be consensual or, to turn this point around, that consent was the principal basis for their capacity to compel. Institutions so dependent on a consensual base could scarcely avoid operating through what Konig has called a “jurisprudence of ordinary people.”³0 To achieve a semblance of hegemony, they had to be responsive. Obviously, the jurisdiction of polities, the reach of their writs, was limited to the effective reach of their power. The polity of, for instance, Massachusetts or Virginia extended no farther than the area of settler control within a much vaster claimed area. By focusing on both the extent to which law in the colonies was a settler instrument and the degree to which variation and flexibility were characteristic of the colonists’ English legal inheritance, we can also begin to appreciate how 27. Ibid., 388–413. 28. Hendrik Hartog, “Distancing Oneself from the Eighteenth Century: A Commentary on Changing Pictures of American Legal History,” in Hartog, Law in the American Revolution and the American Revolution in the Law (New York: New York University Press, 1981), 235. 29. William M. Off utt Jr., “The Limits of Authority: Courts, Ethnicity, and Gender in the Middle Colonies, 1670–1710,” in Tomlins and Mann, eds., Many Legalities, 357; Off utt, “The Limits of Colonial Court Authority: Legal Subgroups and the Avoidance of the Law in the Middle Colonies,” 6, unpublished paper presented at the conference “The Many Legalities of Early America,” Williamsburg, Va., November 22–24, 1996. 30. Konig, “Summary View of the Law of Early America,” 46.

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settler legal systems could vary so much one from another and still be unmistakably English. A legal system in which, to use Blackstone’s words, “particular customs” and “particular laws”³¹ were so characteristic could only encourage localization and creolization of the law in English American enclaves. Particularity and the toleration of particularity were routine in the old English world. For new societies operating in different physical and social contexts, this diversity encouraged selectivity and contextualization. As Konig has said, “Provincials picked and chose—and glorified—those aspects of a corpus that made sense to their particular experiences.”³² In this way, as in so many others, they were very English. That is the way the English common law had functioned immemorially. In America, vastly different local conditions produced vastly different legalities, the variations largely being a function of the context and of the social, political, economic, and religious demands of that context. This capacity for variation and contextualization meant that settler legal systems could, on the one hand, be open to the influence of Amerindian cultures, as Hermes shows in her chapter,³³ and, on the other, that they could draw upon a plurality of sources, including medieval discussions of legitimacy,³4 Calvinist theology,³5 Roman law, the Anglican ecclesiastical system,³6 and what Robert Ross has referred to as a “hodgepodge” of local customs emanating from France, Ireland, the Netherlands, Scotland, and Germany.³7 It meant that some alien groups could accommodate without being required to assimilate entirely to settler law and that others, among them many Quakers, could distance themselves from the legal system. It meant that reforms of the kind undertaken by seventeenthcentury New Englanders were possible and that innovations involving the legal construction of racial categories,³8 modifications in servitude,³9 redefinitions 31. Blackstone, Commentaries, 1:63. 32. Konig, “Summary View of the Law of Early America,” 49. 33. Katherine Hermes, “ ‘Justice Will Be Done Us’: Algonquian Demands for Reciprocity in the Courts of European Settlers,” in Tomlins and Mann, eds., Many Legalities, 123–49. 34. Muldoon, “Discovery, Grant, Charter,” 25–46. 35. Cornelia Hughes Dayton, “Was There a Calvinist Type of Patriarchy? New Haven Colony Reconsidered in the Early Modern Context,” in Tomlins and Mann, eds., Many Legalities, 337–56. 36. Mary Sarah Bilder, “Salamanders and Sons of God: The Culture of Appeal in Early New England,” in Tomlins and Mann, eds., Many Legalities, 47–77. 37. Ross, “Legal Past of Colonial New England,” 36. 38. Ann Marie Plane, “Customary Laws of Marriage: Legal Pluralism, Colonialism, and Narragansett Indian Identity in Eighteenth-Century Rhode Island,” in Tomlins and Mann, eds., Many Legalities, 181–213. 39. Christine Daniels, “ ‘Liberty to Complaine’: Servant Petitions in Maryland, 1652–1797,” in Tomlins and Mann, eds., Many Legalities, 219–50.

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of patriarchy,40 the adoption of racial slavery,4¹ and the creation of local and provincial legal fictions4² would be relatively easy whenever and wherever social conditions seemed to demand them.4³ It meant, as Stanley Katz has often emphasized, that settler legalities were emphatically not stable and unchanging during the colonial era but were in a more or less constant state of fluctuation and negotiation. It meant, as Tomlins writes, that early American legal cultures were characterized by a “rich variety of innovation and transformation in social practice and daily occurrence.”44 As Konig notes in the case of mideighteenth-century Virginia, the common law remained “a supple tool in the hands of jurists.”45 Like identity, law changed according to time and space. It was elastic, malleable, adaptable, and dynamic—just like the societies it was being constructed to serve. The dynamic and consensual basis of colonial law meant that it would long remain surprisingly accessible. Many of the chapters in Many Legalities show settlers to have been participants in a jurisprudence not just of the learned but of ordinary people. Certainly, the law was neither mysterious nor overawing to potential participants. Dayton has posited a long-term trend away from “a communal, informal mode of resolving disputes” in the seventeenth century “to a rationalized, lawyerly mode that corresponded increasingly to the needs of a narrowing, commercially oriented audience” in the eighteenth century,46 while Off utt has traced a process by which, in the middle colonies, courts increasingly came to respond “more exclusively to the needs of those closest to the center of colonial society” and no longer found it “necessary to negotiate with those on the periphery or to encourage their participation.”47 Similarly, Tomlins and Mann note “an explicit crystallization and routinization of doctrine, practice, procedure, and administration” marked by “an increasingly uniform legal culture, modeled on and influenced by that of eighteenth-century England—professionalized, formalized, committed to the technicalities of 40. Dayton, “Was There a Calvinist Type of Patriarchy?,” 337–56. 41. David Barry Gaspar, “ ‘Rigid and Inclement’: Origins of the Jamaica Slave Laws of the Seventeenth Century,” in Tomlins and Mann, eds., Many Legalities, 78–96. 42. Konig, “Legal Fictions and Rule(s) of Law,” 97–117. 43. It cannot be emphasized too strongly that many of these innovations involved the imposition of severe restraints upon the liberties of the dependent population of the colonies. See Jack P. Greene, All Men Are Created Equal: Some Reflections on the Character of the American Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976). 44. Tomlins, “Introduction,” 19. 45. Konig, “Legal Fictions and the Rule(s) of Law,” 110. 46. Dayton, “Turning Points,” 10. 47. Off utt, “Limits of Authority,” 385.

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common-law practice and procedure.”48 I do not doubt that some such trends were under way or at least that participation was broader in newer places like mid-seventeenth-century New Haven, late seventeenth-century Pennsylvania, or mid-eighteenth-century Orange County, North Carolina, than it was in older places, but I doubt that this trend was universally complete throughout the colonies by the mid-1770s. By putting so much emphasis on the variations among the many legalities of settler British America, I do not mean to suggest that there were not also many commonalities. Quite the reverse. Colonial legalities shared many commonalities produced not only by common internal legal needs and common external pressures49 but also by a common desire among settlers throughout the colonial era to define themselves and their societies as English, not just in their imports and their official language but particularly in their legalities. Indeed, if, for a moment, we can think of the American Revolution less as the first step in the creation of the American nation and more as a settler revolt within the British Empire, we can see that language was far less important to the settlers’ sense—that is, definition—of themselves than law, perhaps because it never came into question. What was problematic, what, in their view, was being called into question by many actions of the metropolitan government, was the entitlement of American settlers to the English system of law and liberties and to the English/British identity implicit in that system. By effectively treating the settlers as a category of others—not like the civil and independent freeholders they had become and the transplanters of English civility to the New World, but like the rude and savage people they had engaged to dispossess and like the laborers they had brought from Africa to bear the heavier burdens of their civilizing project—various metropolitan measures in the 1760s seemed to threaten the settlers’ inherited rights (or rights constructed by processes sanctioned by that inheritance) and thus their identities as English/British peoples. In a 1993 forum on law, Stanley Katz described the settler legalities of settler British America “as a complex, pluralistic, asymmetrical, gendered, and multicultural set of systems.”50 They were indeed all that. What I have been trying to suggest here is that they were also deeply consensual, indeterminate, flexible, dynamic, accessible, locally self-fashioned, expressive of the dominant settler aspirations and interests in the polities and societies they had been constructed to serve, capable of wide adaptation and contextualization, and, most 48. Christopher Tomlins and Bruce H. Mann, “Rules of Law: Legal Regimes and Their Social Effects,” in Tomlins and Mann, eds., Many Legalities, 333. 49. Konig, “The Virgin and the Virgin’s Sister,” 89–90. 50. Katz, “Introduction,” 6.

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important of all, definitional of the settlers’ deepest senses of self and identity. For settlers who defined themselves and their societies as English and believed themselves to be engaged in a glorious project to transform and render civil a vast wilderness, law was not simply “one social institution among many,”5¹ it was central to what they thought about their place in time, the nature of the societies they were creating, and their identities as agents of a culture that prided itself on a unique system of law and liberty. 51. Mann, “Afterword,” 442.

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— thirteen —

Liberty, Slavery, and the Transformation of British Identity in the Eighteenth-Century West Indies

I

T

he earliest stages of English overseas expansion occurred during the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods, the very era when English opinion leaders were elaborating an identity for the emerging English nation.¹ Protestantism, social openness, intellectual and scientific achievement, and prosperity and trade were all important components of that identity, but liberty, as fostered and defined by the unique English system of law and government, had long been and continued to be its principal foundation. As early as the late fifteenth century, contemporary English and many foreign observers agreed that the English people’s distinctive system of law and liberty was what principally distinguished them from all other people on the face of the globe. The proud boast of the English was that through a variety of conquests and upheavThis chapter was written for presentation at a conference celebrating the fi ftieth anniversary of the establishment of the University of the West Indies, at a session entitled “Caribbean Intellectual Traditions,” at the University of the West Indies at Mona, Jamaica, November 1, 1998. It was subsequently offered as a paper for a conference entitled “States and Societies in North America, 1600–1820,” University of California Humanities Research Institute, University of California, Santa Barbara, April 10, 1999, and as a lecture at The John Carter Brown Library, Providence, Rhode Island, February 24, 2000, and at the Department of History, University of Florida, Gainesville, March 3, 2000. It is here republished with permission from “Liberty, Slavery, and the Transformation of British Identity in the Eighteenth-Century British West Indies,” Slavery and Abolition (April 2000): 1–31. 1. See Liah Greenfeld, Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992), 27–87; and esp. the rich and penetrating study by Richard Helgerson, Forms of Nationhood: The Elizabethan Writing of England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), of the process of national self-fashioning undertaken during the half century from 1575 to 1625 by English intellectuals, who in a variety of discursive communities— poetry, law, chorography, travel writing, drama, and religious discourse—self-consciously sought to identify what was distinctive about the emerging English national state and the people who lived in it.

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als they, in marked contrast to most other political societies in Europe, had been able to retain their identity as a free people who had secured their liberty through their dedication to the supremacy of law. As a preliminary effort to analyze how this identity transferred to the slave regimes of the American colonies and how the presence of slavery affected this process through the middle decades of the eighteenth century, this article will examine the extensive formal political literature produced by settler political leaders in the British West Indies, particularly in Barbados and Jamaica, from the 1680s to the late 1770s.² II Beginning in the early decades of the seventeenth century, immigrants, at first mostly from England but later and increasingly from elsewhere in the British Isles, began to establish settlement societies in North America and the West Indies. Chapter 11 has elaborated upon the extent to which European immigrants to colonial British America carried with them English culture identities, their efforts to construct their societies and polities upon English models, and the conditions that enhanced such impulses among their creole descendants. Chapter 11 also stressed the special importance of English claims that the English people’s profound devotion to law and liberty was the principal hallmark of English or, after 1707, British identity and the attention English people migrating overseas paid to asserting their Englishness by building their settlements upon English legal foundations, the result of which was the creation in America of several local systems of authority modeled on that of the English and firmly under the control of the dominant settler populations. The English settlements established in the West Indies and North America provide a striking case study of the way this process worked.³ 2. To date, the extensive political literature qua political literature produced in or about Britain’s West Indian colonies has received no systematic analysis, albeit it has been used extensively in Jack P. Greene, Peripheries and Center: Constitutional Development in the Extended Polities of the British Empire and the United States, 1607–1789 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1986), and selected portions of it cursorily by George Metcalf, Royal Government and Political Conflict in Jamaica, 1729–1783 (London: Longmans, 1965); Jack P. Greene, “The Jamaica Privilege Controversy, 1764–1766: An Episode in the Process of Constitutional Definition in the Early Modern British Empire,” Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 22 (1994): 16–53; Andrew J. O’Shaugnessy, “The Stamp Act Crisis in the British Caribbean,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser., 51 (1994): 203–26; and Selwyn H. H. Carrington, The British West Indies during the American Revolution (Dordrecht: Koninklyk Instituut Voor Taal Land, 1988). 3. For a more expanded treatment, see Greene, Peripheries and Center, 7–76. Several paragraphs from this published article have been eliminated to avoid repetition with passages in chap. 11 above.

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III Beginning in the 1650s and continuing in recurrent phases for the next century and beyond, London officials sought to impose metropolitan authority upon these local centers of power. Everywhere, these metropolitan intrusions into colonial affairs provoked a profound mistrust of central authority among the settlers and intensified the determination of property holders within the expanding colonies to secure both their new estates and their claims to an English identity by obtaining metropolitan recognition that, as English people or the descendants of English people, they were entitled to enjoy all the rights and legal protections of English people in the home island. Thus, in protesting metropolitan efforts to take away the legislative initiative of the Jamaica legislature during the late 1670s and early 1680s, did Samuel Barnard, Speaker of the Assembly, express the determination of Jamaica settlers to continue under our old form of Government, which his Majesty had been pleased to constitute at [the] first [political organization of the colony], as near that of his Realm of England, as so great a Volume could be comprised in so small an Epitome, and to preserve the quiet fruition of those Estates which our industry (blest be divine Providence) had acquired, under the same method of making Laws, as is observed in our Native Country, from which, as the famous Roman saith, there is descended, a greater Inheritance to us, than from our Parents.4

Their insistence upon English forms of governance inspired settlers to undertake an extensive constitutional discussion intended to identify explicit legal defenses that would put colonial claims to English rights and legal protections on a solid foundation and thereby protect the colonies from such wholesale intrusions of metropolitan power. In these discussions, colonial spokespeople articulated an elaborate argument to strengthen their early claims to what they thought of as their inherited rights as English people. According to this argument, the original settlers and their descendants were all equally “honest free-born Subjects of England,” who, with authorization from the English monarchy, had voluntarily left their “native country” for “a waste and howling wilderness.” “With great danger to our persons, and with very great charge and trouble,” they said, they had turned that wilderness into thriving and wellinhabited settlements and had thereby, at little or no cost to the English government, significantly “enlarged the English Trade and Empire” and brought England . . . its greatest Riches and Prosperity.” While they were thus creating 4. Speech of Samuel Barnard, Sept. 21, 1683, in A Narrative of Affairs Lately received from his Majesties island of Jamaica (London, 1683), 3.

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the new and valuable “English Empire in America,” they retained their English identity and remained, as a Barbadian settler declared in 1698, “no other but English Men: . . . your Countrey-Men, your Kindred and Relations,” who, said another, “pretended to have as good English Bloud in our Veins, as some of those that we have left behind us.” It followed that their continuing identity as English people entitled them to all the “hereditary Rights” of English subjects, rights that they could not lose merely “by Transporting themselves” to America, rights, moreover, that had been confirmed to them by their charters and were secured by their respective civil governments—governments which, they pointed out, had been formed on their own initiative on “the nearest model of conformity to that under which our predecessors of the English nation have lived and flourished for above a thousand years.” To be in any way diminished in their rights simply because of their “great Distance . . . from the Fountain of Justice” in England, they believed, would deprive them of “their Birthright and the Benefits of the Laws and Priviledges of English Men” and reduce them to a species of “slavery far exceeding all that [any of ] the English nation hath yet suffered.”5 Settler efforts to secure their English rights and identity against the claims of the Crown were continuous from 1660 to 1760. In general, colonial political spokespeople pursued this quest by denying metropolitan contentions, first articulated by English bureaucrats during the third quarter of the seventeenth century, that the colonies had “no Constitution . . . but what the king is pleased to give us” and that their constitutions, including their rights to representative government, were founded only on royal charters and commissions.6 Settler 5. The Liberty and Property of British Subjects Asserted (London, 1728), 28, 32; Samuel Nadgorth to Secretary Morrice, Oct. 26, 1666, in W. Noel Sainsbury et al., eds., Calendar of State Papers, Colonial, 44 vols. (London: His Majesty’s Stationary Office, 1860–), 1661–68: 417–18; N. Darnell Davis, The Cavaliers and Roundheads of Barbados, 1650–1652 (Georgetown, British Guinea, 1883), 198–99; Edward Littleton, The Groans of the Plantations (London, 1689), 15–17, 23, 26; A State of the Present Condition of the Island of Barbados (London, 1698), 3; Maryland Gazette (Annapolis), Mar. 16, 1748; The Case of the Inhabitants and Planters in the Island of Jamaica (London, [1714]). 6. Zacharius Plaintruth, New-York Gazette Revived in the Weekly Post-Boy, Jan. 27, 1752; [Nicholas Bourke], The Privileges of the Island of Jamaica Vindicated with an Impartial Narrative of the late Dispute between the Governor and House of Representatives (London, 1766), 45; Thomas Prince, A Sermon on the Sorrowful Occasion of the Death of His Late Majesty King George (Boston, 1727), 26; Thomas Foxcroft, God the Judge, pulling down One, and setting up Another (Boston, 1727), 27, 39; Jared Eliot, Give Cesar his Due: or, The Obligation the Subjects are under to Their Civil Rulers (New London, 1738), 36–38; New-England Weekly Journal (Boston), Mar. 18, 1728; Isaac Norris, The Speech Delivered from the Bench in the Court of Common Pleas held for the City and Court of Philadelphia (Philadelphia, 1727), 2; A Freeholder, Maryland Gazette (Annapolis), Mar. 10, 1748; The Inhabitant, South Carolina Gazette (Charleston), Dec. 10, 1764; [Edward Rawson], The Revolution in New England Justified (Boston, 1691), 42–43.

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partisans insisted, in paraphrasing Sir Edward Coke, that the charters, like Magna Charta itself, were only declaratory of old English rights and that every colony, as “the Progeny of ” Britain, therefore had “an undoubted Right to the Liberties of its’ [sic] Mother Country.” Because the colonists were thus entitled to “the same fundamental Rights, Privileges, and Liberties” as the “People of England,” “no difference [could be] made, between the Rights and conditions of subjects in the colonies, and those in England.” Moreover, because their rights ultimately rested upon “the same grand Charter with the People of England,” the colonists believed, their claims to those rights were every bit as secure as the king’s title to the crown, which was founded precisely on the same document. In the colonies, as in Britain, “the Prerogatives of the Crown, and the People[’]s Liberty” were thus “regulated by and under the Protection of the same [fundamental] Laws.”7 IV Throughout colonial British America, in the West Indies as well as upon the continent, settler political spokesmen participated fully in the construction of this specifically colonial variant of English political thought. Through a series of political and constitutional struggles—in Jamaica over metropolitan refusal to provide settlers with explicit guarantees of their entitlement to English laws; in Antigua, Barbados, and Jamaica over efforts by royal governors such as Daniel Parke Custis, Robert Lowther, Henry Worsley, and Lord Archibald Hamilton “to govern, in a more absolute and unlimited manner” in the colonies “than ever the Queen her self can, according to Law, or ever did attempt to exercise in Great Britain”;8 in Barbados over continuing protests about metropolitan misuse of colonial revenues; and in Jamaica during the late 1740s and early 1750s over metropolitan efforts to curtail the autonomy of the provincial government—West Indian settlers continued, usually with vehemence, to proclaim their Englishness. Insisting that they were not “Aliens” but “English Men,” albeit English7. William Bollan’s Petition to the House of Commons, Aug. 6, 1749, Massachusetts Archives, Boston, 20:501–6; [Bourke], Privileges of the Island of Jamaica Vindicated, 28; [William Smith], Mr. Smith’s Opinion Humbly Offered to the General Assembly of the Colony of New York (New York, 1734), 13, 34, 45; Opinions of Richard West, 1720, and Charles Pratt and Charles Yorke, n.d., in George Chalmers, ed., Opinions of Eminent Lawyers (Burlington, Vt., 1858), 206–7; James Otis, A Vindication of the Conduct of the House of Representatives of the Province of Massachusetts-Bay (Boston, 1762), 51–52; Pennsylvania Assembly Journals, Pennsylvania Archives (Harrisburg, 1852–1935), 8th ser., 5:4176–77; Boston Evening Post, Apr. 27, 1761; [Rawson], Revolution in New England Justified, 42–43. 8. The Groans of Jamaica: Express’d in a Letter from a Gentleman Residing there to his Friend in London (London, 1714), vi.

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men “Beyond Sea,” “Free-born Subjects” of the British Isles, who, “by removing to the Colonies,” had by no means “forfeited their Pretensions to” those English rights to which they were “entituled . . . by Birth,” settler spokesmen interpreted most efforts at enhanced metropolitan authority in terms similar to those applied to the first Navigation Act by the Barbados Assembly, as “Slavish imposition[s] beyond what [any] Englishmen ever yet suffered.” They protested against recurring efforts to treat them as “Strangers,” as “Tenants at Will,” or “as a conquered People” without legitimate claims to an English heritage, identity, or rights and expressed their determination to remain “ freemen (whithout [sic] which) our lives will be but lothsome to us.”9 To these ends, West Indian settler protagonists took special pains to refute metropolitan suggestions that they were conquered polities whose rights and liberties depended, not on the national inheritance of their English settlers, but on royal favor. Barbados, explained the Barbadian lawyer Jonathan Blenman in 1742, had certainly “not [been] . . . acquired . . . by Conquest.” Rather, at the time it “was settled by Englishmen,” it had been “a Country not inhabited, but overgrown with Wood.” “To the great Emolument of the Kingdom, as well as their own private Profit,” Barbadian settlers, said Blenman, at “their own Trouble and Expence,” had eventually “brought” this “waste and desolate Place . . . to Perfection.”¹0 By contrast, settler partisans could not deny that Jamaica had come “to England by Conquest.” But they argued that the English settlers who took and subsequently began to people and develop the island had been, not the conquered, but the conquerors, and they protested the absurdity of looking upon the “Conquerors themselves . . . as a conquered People,” who by bringing “Countries under the Dominion of England, and maintain[ing] the possession [of them], should by doing so lose their own English Liberties” and the identities implicit in those liberties.¹¹ In these contentions, West Indian settler protagonists were expressing their pain at metropolitan reluctance fully to acknowledge their Englishness, a phenomenon that they could only put down to ignorance. With the anonymous author of The Groans of Jamaica, published in 1714, West Indian writers frequently deplored the tendency of many people in the home islands to entertain 9. Littleton, Groans of the Plantations, 20; A Declaration Set forth by the Lord Lieutenant Generall to the Gentlemen of the Councell & assembly (The Hague, 1651), 2; Groans of Jamaica, vi; [ James Knight], The State of the Island of Jamaica (London, 1726), 36; William Duke, Some Memoirs of the first Settlement of the Island of Barbados and other the Carribee Islands (Barbados, 1741), 32. 10. Jonathan Blenman, Remarks on Several Acts of Parliament Relating More especially to the Colonies abroad (London, 1742), 91. 11. Littleton, Groans of the Plantations, 16.

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“very mean Notions and Sentiments of the Births, Education, Manners, Principles, and other Qualities of the Inhabitants of those Plantations.” Explaining that, although many Persons of obscure Births or very indifferent Characters went, or were, from time to time, sent and transported thither, as Occasion required, . . . some thousands of Persons of very creditable Families, good Education, and loyal Principles, went there likewise; some through the Narrowness of their Circumstances; some to avoid the Miseries of the Civil War at home; and others to improve such paternal or acquired Fortunes and Estates, as they thought convenient to carry along with them,

they insisted, shrilly, that the “present Inhabitants” were “generally Her Majesty’s natural born Subjects, Natives of England, Scotland, or Ireland, or born of such, in the Plantations,” many of whom were “Gentlemen of very liberal Education, some even at Universities,” who “by their own, or their Forefathers[’] Industry” had “acquired the Property and possession of very considerable Plantations and Estates.”¹² V West Indian writers were under no illusions that the settlers for whom they spoke had achieved these ends merely by dint of their own industry. In the same 1682 petition in which it appealed to the English monarch to restore their old constitution, the Jamaican Assembly also thanked him for his “favour in ordering us supplies of Negroes at reasonable rates.” West Indian settlers knew that their plantations had been cleared and were subsequently “work’d and cultivated mostly by the hands of Negroes,” work that they or their predecessors had quickly persuaded themselves “would be hard to do . . . by any” other hands.¹³ That people of African descent constituted by far the greater proportion of the population of every colony in the British West Indies and as an enslaved people had no access to the rights and did not partake of the privileges that formed the foundation of the liberty English people claimed as the essence of their identity, they did not trouble to deny. How societies composed so largely of slaves could claim to be free was not a question that, before the final third of the eighteenth century, many West Indian political writers would explore in any detail. 12. Groans of Jamaica, iv–v. 13. Narrative of Affairs, 3; A Letter from a Merchant at Jamaica To A Member Parliament in London. Touching the African Trade To which is added. A Speech made by a BL ACK of Guadeloupe at the Funeral of a Fellow-Negro (London, 1709), 14.

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A 1710 pamphlet published anonymously by a Jamaica merchant represents an impressive exception to this generalization. In A Letter from a Merchant at Jamaica to a Member of Parliament in London, Touching the African Trade; To which is added, A Speech made by a BL ACK of Guadeloupe at the Funeral of a Fellow-Negro, published in London in 1710, the writer offered a scathing indictment of Jamaican slave society that both anticipated most of the objections antislavery writers would make later in the century and called into question the humanity, if not the Englishness, of free West Indian settlers. Much of this pamphlet consisted of a withering attack upon West Indian slave owners and the labor system they had devised. That system, the writer charged, had reduced the enslaved to “a base servile tedious Life, a Life beneath the State of Brutes,” a life of “perpetual Bondage” characterized by “hard Labour, and harder Fare,” and “cruel Punishments.” To support his suggestion that the institution of slavery made a mockery of the settlers’ much vaunted commitment to liberty, he turned, not to the English inheritance, but to natural rights theory. As men, Africans and their creole descendants, he argued, citing the Dutch theorist Hugo Grotius, “had a plain and natural Right to Life and Liberty” and ought never to have been deprived of “the just Rights and Libertys of Mankind ” upon the sorts of weak legal grounds that supported slavery in the early modern Atlantic world. Contending that “Life and Liberty” were “hardly things” that could be purchased or sold at such “a low rate, that they’re to pass as lightly from the [legitimate] Owner, to whom God gave the sole certain Property, as Beasts, or Birds, or [other] Things Inantimate,” he questioned whether sellers, in either Africa or the colonies, had anything more than “a weak, presumptive, or a may-be Title.” Without either “know[ing] or regard[ing]” the legitimacy of the sellers’ titles, slave purchasers, he charged, had bought slaves “at randome, without Regard to Right or Wrong.” Even if such purchases were sanctioned by the “Laws of [the] particular Societys” to which the purchasers belonged, he contended that “by Reason’s Law” these purchasers could “at best” have a title only “[un]till they’re reimburs’d the Cost and Charge they’ve been at” in the original purchase. “That for so small a Sum, so soon repaid,” slave owners would reduce adult people and all their “guiltless Children” to “perpetual Slavery” and thereby “exact what makes” their “Fellow-Creature[s], from whom,” they had “nought to fear, so miserable for life,” seemed to the author of the Letter to be a blatant sacrifice of humanity and justice to interest and avarice.¹4 Such a discriminatory system, the author suggested, was hardly commensurate with English traditions of the rule of law. By those traditions, even those 14. Letter from a Merchant at Jamaica, 4, 19–21, 23–25, 30.

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parts of the population who had no direct voice in making laws—women, servants, and the unpropertied free—could not, at least in theory, be deprived of life, liberty, or property without due process of law. In England, even the lowliest could count on the protection of the law, or so jurisprudential writers said. But that was obviously not the case in the slave colonies of English America. There, slave owners, the author charged, were in their governance of the enslaved “bounded by no Fences of human Law.” Devised entirely by free settlers to promote their own individual and collective interests, “the Law” in the colonies gave the enslaved absolutely “no Protection or Redress.” Rather, in direct violation of English jurisprudential traditions, it “indulg’d or conniv’d at” the slave owners “being Judges in” their “own Cause.” For the enslaved, the owners’ “Will’s” were thus the enslaved’s only “Law.”¹5 To enforce this draconian system, slave owners resorted to “all the wanton Cruelty they” could “devise.” “To attempt the recounting all our Methods of dealing, our many Ways of punishing those miserable Creatures,” the author of the Letter lamented, “were as endless as what Avarice and Iniquity can suggest, or what Caprice and Cruelty of Men . . . can invent and execute.” To justify “their inhuman Acts” against the enslaved, these “haughty cruel Men” told “the European World” that Africans had “not the common Facultys and Passions” of other people but were “of such brutal Natures, that nought” would “govern” them “But downright Force and Fear; That like the Horse,” they had to “be broke and ride[n] with Whip and Spur, but with far closer Reins,” thus leaving the enslaved with “no Motives to Industry and Obedience, but a base servile Fear.”¹6 Such treatment, the writer implied, betrayed only the basest ingratitude on the part of the slave owners. While the “hard Labour . . . and weary’d Limbs” of the enslaved had produced for the owners “well-planted Fields and full Coffers” and “help[ed] to make us some of the happiest People in the World,” he complained, the owners had “in return” made “them the most unhappy, the most wretched and miserable part of the Creation.”¹7 Such a harsh system of labor and social relations emphatically called into question not just the settlers’ humanity but their very entitlement to identification as Christian and civilized peoples. How, the author asked, could “those who call themselves Men, good-natur’d Men and Christians” conspire to deprive “so many” human creatures of their liberty and thereby render them so “miserable”? Such behavior, he suggested, might find many counterparts among “cruel Barbarians.” But the rest of “the Christian, I might perhaps says all the Civiliz’d World,” he declared, had long since “intirely laid aside the Custom of Slavemaking,” accounting “it barbarous and inhuman” either “to kill a Pris15. Ibid., 10–11, 13–14, 28.

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16. Ibid., 10–11, 28–29.

17. Ibid., 14, 26.

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oner, or treat him ill after you give him Quarter.” And, if it was “inhuman to take his Life,” it was “almost as bad to take from him the Liberty of a rational Creature, and to spare his Life no longer than he blindly submits his Understanding, and all his Facultys both of Mind and Body, to the imperious Dictates of my Will, how unreasonable or extravagant so ever.” Thus did “the Lust of Dominion and Desire of possessing, seizing [other] Men[’]s Brains” and bodies make slave owners break “thro’ the Ties of Nature and Humanity.”¹8 If the anonymous author of A Letter from a Merchant at Jamaica used the slave systems of the West Indian colonies to raise profound questions about the credibility of the settlers’ oft-claimed identities as English people, no spokesperson for settler interests bothered to answer him, and for the next half century few people explored the relationship between Englishness and slaveholding, between freedom and slavery. Calling himself Sempronius, an anonymous Barbadian author, observing that “a great Part of our Interests here consists of the property we have in human Creatures,” published in the Barbados Gazette in 1735 a learned discourse on the “Nature of Servitude” among the ancient Romans and expressed his interest in discussing “several other Matters concerning Slavery in general” and taking “into particular Consideration the present trade to Africa.” “Apprehensive that” his “Notions on that Head” were “too unpopular for this Part of the World,” however, Sempronius instead chose to suppress them.¹9 The relationship between slavery and the identity of settlers as freeborn English people had clearly become a taboo subject, the implications of which were too dangerous and disturbing for systematic public discussion. When before the late 1750s the enslaved did appear in political literature, they usually, as had been the case since the introduction of chattel slavery in the colonies, did so as a security issue. Thus did Edward Littleton in 1689 worry that Barbados’s loss of white population would render settlers incapable of defending themselves “either against a Forrain Enemy, or against our own Negroes.”²0 Thus in 1716 did William Wood, noting that Jamaica contained over 80,000 blacks and only a few thousand whites, deplore the “weak Condition” of Jamaica’s settler population and its vulnerability “to Insurrections of Negroes,” who might “at any time rise and destroy the White People.”²¹ Thus in 1726 did James Knight express the fear that slaves might take advantage of the expiration “of the several Laws . . . made to keep them in due Order and 18. Ibid., 4, 9–12, 19. 19. Sempronius, Dec. 17, 1735, in Samuel Keimer, ed., Caribbeana, 2 vols. (London, 1741), 2:105–6, 115. 20. Littleton, Groans of the Plantations, 14. 21. William Wood, A View of the Proceedings of the Assemblies of Jamaica, For some Years past, With some Considerations on the Present State of that Island (London, 1716), 15, 33.

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Subjection.”²² Thus in 1755 did an anonymous writer calling himself Veridicus anxiously predict that foreign invaders would “easily find 10,000 Corromantees, and 30,000 other able-bodied Negroes and fighting Men, who . . . would embrace the Opportunity with all their Hearts, and perhaps not fail to fight with their Hands, in order to change Condition with their Masters.”²³ VI But such security concerns were never powerful enough to inhibit settler leaders from contending among themselves or with metropolitan authorities. In contest after contest, in Barbados before the late 1740s and in Jamaica between 1710 and 1730 and again for a decade and a half beginning in the late 1740s, they showed that they were prepared to go to extraordinary lengths to defend their identities as English or British people by standing up to London authorities, royal governors, and any local supporters who threatened, as a Barbadian author declared in 1720, “to infringe upon those Privileges which . . . the Laws of my Country have given every Britton an undoubted Title to,” privileges and rights that, perhaps more than anything else, defined their Britishness. Celebrating, throughout these contests, the fact that “British Blood runs in our Veins, and the Spirit of Englishmen, in our Hearts,” they invariably insisted that their actions were “consistent with the Principles of our happy [English] Constitution, and the Liberties and Privileges of Englishmen,” and they contrasted their good fortune in this regard with the neighboring French or “Spaniards, who [had] never tasted the Sweets of English Liberty.” The author of the Barbadoes Packett, published in London in 1720, was one of the few analysts to suggest that “God and Nature seem[ed] to have design’d” the rights enjoyed by British people “for all Men,” a dangerous defense for people who had made human beings property. Rather, West Indian settler writers usually eschewed natural rights theory in favor of English jurisprudential traditions, which provided clearer support for making categorical legal distinctions among various classes of people in the same society.²4 The most systematic exposition of settler West Indian political thought, 22. [Knight], State of the Island of Jamaica, 38. 23. Veridicus, The Merchants, Factors, and Agents, residing at Kingston in the said Island, Complainants, Against The Inhabitants of Spanish-Town, and of the four adjacent Parishes, and against the Members of the honourable Assembly, annually and constitutionally held at Saint Jago de la Vega, and against the Planters, Freeholders, Settlers, and chief Body of the People of the Island of Jamaica, Respondents: The Respondents Case (London, 1755), 30. 24. The Barbadoes Packett (London, 1720),[i–ii]; A Letter from a Citizen at Port-Royal in Jamaica, to a Citizen of New-York (Dublin, 1756), 19; An Historical Account of the Sessions of

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indeed one of the two or three most impressive expositions of early modern colonial British American political thought in general, was a pamphlet published in Kingston in 1765 and in London in 1766 and entitled The Privileges of the Island of Jamaica Vindicated. Apparently written by Nicholas Bourke, an Anglo-Irishman who about 1740 had emigrated to Jamaica, acquired a very large estate, and after the late 1750s serve as a prominent member of the Jamaica Assembly, this pamphlet presented the Assembly’s view of the controversy with Governor William Henry Lyttelton over the nature, extent, and origins of the parliamentary privileges of the Assembly. The most profound constitutional crisis in Jamaica since at least the 1720s, this controversy raged for more than eighteen months from December 1765 through the summer of 1766, brought legislative governance in the island to a complete halt, and resulted in the attempted impeachment and eventual recall of Lyttelton.²5 In a dazzling display of learning in English, Irish, and Jamaican constitutional, legal, and parliamentary history, Bourke laid out the traditional colonial case about the political status of colonial settlers within the larger British imperial polity. Arguing that “by settling in a British colony,” no “British subject became a slave, or forfeited any of the Rights and Privileges of an Englishman,” he asserted, taking the classic settler political position, that Jamaica’s “Inhabitants”—a term which did not for him include the island’s enslaved majority—were “all British subjects, entitled to the laws of England, and to its Constitution, as their inheritance; possessing those Rights and Privileges, by as free and certain a tenure, as that [tenure], by which they hold their lands, as that [tenure], by which the King holds his crown.” Not, then, as Lyttelton had contended, “concessions from the crown, but the right and inheritance of the people,” another term that did not include the enslaved, were the sources of the Assembly’s privileges, which, in Bourke’s view, were absolutely essential to provide the British “people of this Colony [with] that protection against arbitrary power, which nothing but a free and independent Assembly can give.”²6 The situation invited flattering comparisons with English and earlier Jamaican political and constitutional history. Associating Lyttelton’s position with “the absurd and slavish Doctrines of divine and hereditary right and Assembly, for the Island of Jamaica (London, 1757); [Knight], State of the Island of Jamaica, 36; Jamaicanus, The Jamaica Association Develop’d (London, 1757), 17. 25. I have treated this controversy at length in “The Jamaica Privilege Controversy, 1764– 66: An Episode in the Process of Constitutional Definition in the Early Modern British Empire,” Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 22 (1994): 16–53, which is reprinted in Jack P. Greene, Negotiated Authorities: Essays in Colonial Political and Constitutional History (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1994), 350–93. 26. [Bourke], Privileges of the Island of Jamaica Vindicated, 2, 27.

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passive obedience and non-resistance” championed by the Stuart kings in seventeenth-century England, Bourke depicted Jamaican legislators as “men zealous for the constitution and liberties of their country” and compared them favorably to those “great Men” in the English House of Commons, men like Sir John Eliot, Sir Edward Coke, Sir Edward Littleton, Sir Robert Phelips, and Sir William Jones, who at various times “stood forth at that critical period, in defence of the Constitution,” men whose efforts alone, wrote Bourke, were responsible for the fact that “the Subjects of Britain” were “not at this day as much enslaved as those of France and Spain.” By steadfastly resisting Lyttelton, moreover, Jamaican legislators in the 1760s had proved themselves worthy heirs, not just of their English heritage, but also of their brave predecessors in Jamaica, who in the early decades of the colony had “nobly withstood every attempt [by Stuart ministries] to enslave us.”²7 Bourke left no doubt that the stakes in this controversy were high: they reached to the very British identities of the settlers themselves. “If our lives, liberties, and properties are not our inheritance, secured to us by the same laws, determined by the same jurisdictions, and fenced in and defended by the same constitution, as the wisdom of our ancestors found it necessary to establish, for the preservation of these blessings in our mother country; then,” Bourke wrote, the condition of British colonists resembled that of “our neighbours, the American Spaniards” in terms of the “oppression, injustice or hardship” they “do at this time endure.” Indeed, they were, “to all intents and purposes, . . . as much” “slaves . . . as the aforesaid unhappy Spaniards, or any other slaves.” If “the [British] subjects of the Colonies” did not enjoy the traditional rights of English people, Bourke declared, then they were “not freemen but slaves; not the free subjects, but the outcasts of Britain; possessing these invaluable blessings, only as tenants at will, the most uncertain and wretched of all tenures; and liable to be dispossessed, by the hand of power.” Elaborating on “the distinction between freedom and slavery,” Bourke made the implicit parallel between political slavery and chattel slavery explicit. Whereas “a freeman” had “his life, his liberty, and his property, secured to him by known laws, to which he has given his consent; and” could not “be divested of any right, but by a judgment of a lawful court, and for breach of some law of the land,” “a slave” held “every thing at the pleasure of his master, and has no law, but the will of his tyrant.” The “power which any man has of taking my life, my liberty, or property without my consent,” wrote Bourke, “constitutes and defines slavery.”²8 To impose any “form of Government, repugnant to the English constitution” and incompatible with an English identity upon Jamaica without the 27. Ibid., xv, 8, 11, 17, 64–66.

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28. Ibid., 44–45, 57.

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consent of Jamaican settlers, Bourke contended, would be to degrade Jamaica’s settler population “from the rank of Englishmen, and” reduce them “to a condition of Slavery.” Jamaica, he suggested, was at a pivotal crossroads. If Jamaican settlers “retain[ed] any degree of love for the laws of England and for civil liberty,” he thought, they had to demonstrate their entitlement to an English identity by standing up, in the classic manner of Englishmen, for their liberties. Having received those “liberties, as an inheritance from our fathers,” they were, in his view, “bound to transmit them to” their “children unimpaired.” To do so, they had to demonstrate “a manly resolution and constancy, in defence of ” their privileges. For the free inhabitants of a slave society, the alternative was unthinkable. They knew, as Bourke observed, that it was “the part of slaves, to submit to Oppression,” and if Jamaican settlers had become “base enough to . . . give up” the liberties long associated with their English inheritance, they must themselves have become slaves.²9 VII The possible sources of such baseness had been discussed in some detail by an anonymous author, perhaps Jamaica governor Edward Trelawny, almost two decades earlier. The title of this 1748 work, An Essay Concerning Slavery, and the Danger Jamaica Is expos’d to from the Too great Number of Slaves, and the Too little C AR E that is taken to manage THEM , And a Proposal to prevent the further Importation of Negroes into that Island, announced the author’s purpose: to persuade Parliament to cut off the slave trade to the British colonies and to persuade Jamaican planters to manage their slaves more carefully, perhaps even to take measures that would lead to the gradual emancipation of some privileged slaves.³0 As the title made clear, the author’s principal concern was the security of white settlers. Seemingly incapable of not “indulging themselves both in their Indolence and fond Desire of more and more Negroes,” the planters, he complained, all seemed to think “that if they can, by hook or by crook, Money or Credit, get Negroes enough, and that let them be in ever so great a Distress, the buying more Negroes will bring them out of it,” so that “more Negroes” was “like the grand Arcanum, to work Wonders, do every Thing, supply every Want, and answer every Expectation.” As a consequence, Jamaica had far “too 29. Ibid., 44, 48, 57, 66. 30. An Essay Concerning Slavery, and the Danger Jamaica Is expos’d to from the Too great Number of Slaves, and the Too little C AR E that is taken to manage THEM , And a Proposal to prevent the further Importation of Negroes into that Island (London, 1748).

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great [a] Number of Negroes in Proportion to white Persons, being at least ten to one.” To compound this problem, settlers, driven by indolence, stupidity, and “a narrow Selfishness, and total Unconcern for every Thing that doth not regard their immediate [economic] Interest,” took far “too little Care to manage those Negroes.” “If some Stop [were] not . . . put to” the “Rage that Planters have for buying Negroes” and more “Care or Conduct . . . used in the Management of them,” the author observed, “the Island must [sooner or later] be over-run, and ruined by its own Slaves.” No wonder, then, that Jamaican white settlers were “not only alarm’d by every trifl ing Armament of the Enemy [in the West Indies], but under the greatest Apprehensions frequently from their own Slaves.” Clearly, he wrote in appealing for parliamentary action to save the settlers from themselves and Jamaica for the British Empire, the settlers were “playing with Edge-Tools, which they cannot manage, and,” like children, “should be prevented from cutting themselves.”³¹ But the author of the Essay Concerning Slavery moved, if somewhat cautiously, beyond such security concerns to what he called “the moral one.” Denouncing the slave trade as a trade “in human flesh, in the Lives and Liberties of our own Species,” he drew a parallel between the fictitious nation in Montesquieu’s Persian Letters, in which the inhabitants “caught hold of every Foreigner that came near them, and kill’d them for the sake of the Grease, which” they used “in boiling their Soap,” and Jamaica in its use of slaves. “To kill a man for the sake of his Grease, or to make him melt it away in hard Labour for another’s Profit,” he observed, was “not so very unlike.” By actively encouraging and sanctioning both the slave trade and such a brutal violation of human rights, he suggested in invoking natural rights theory, the British nation—including Parliament, “All the merchants, all the trading towns, and all the makers and dealers in goods sent to Africa or the West Indies”—had effectively indulged colonial white settlers with a liberty based upon the slavery of others, a “Liberty [that was] contrary to the Laws of God and Nature.” “Are Men’s Lives so to be sported with?” he asked rhetorically. “Are Men to be so much at the Mercy of another Man? Are the Lives of human Creatures, I say, to be play’d with in such a Manner, just as a giddy thoughtless Planter thinks fit?”³² That such a system of trade and labor should be employed by English people seemed to the author of the Essay Concerning Slavery totally out of character. “That the Frenchman, a Slave himself, Should think it no great Matter to make others so,” he wrote, was “not at all surprising; that the Dutchman should sacrifice every thing to Gain” was “not to be wonder’d at; but that the generous 31. Ibid., i–ii, v, 18, 22, 37.

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32. Ibid., v, 24–26, 31, 38.

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Free Briton, who knows the Value of Liberty, who prizes it above Life, who loves and enjoys it, and loves it the more he does enjoy it,” he asserted in an early effort to distance Englishness from slavery, “that he should for vile Lucre make a Traffick of Liberty, that he should be instrumental in depriving others of a Blessing he would not part with but with Life, that he should Slave, this,” he declared, “doth surprise, grieve and torment me!”³³ To explain this contradiction between British self-conceptions and British willingness “to enslave other peoples,” the author of the Essay Concerning Slavery turned to the peculiar nature of the slave societies that developed in early modern plantation America. Settler “West-Indian[s],” he observed, seemed to “know no Medium in Things; a Man with you must be either absolutely a Slave, or licentiously free, free [even] from all Restraints of Law.” In a society composed mostly of enslaved people, he suggested with this observation, the need to draw a sharp distinction between free men and slaves provided an especially powerful impulse for settler claims, of the most extreme variety, to an identity as freeborn Britons. But such claims, the author appreciated, required settlers to justify their enslavement of others on other than legal grounds. They could only be founded on the assumption that the enslaved were incapable of achieving such an identity. “One would imagine,” he observed in articulating the implicit cultural assumptions that underlay the slave trade and slavery, “that Planters really think that Negroes are not of the same Species with us, but that being of a different Mold and Nature, as well as Colour, they were made intirely for our Use, with Instincts proper for the Purpose, having as great a Propensity to Subjection, as we have to command, and loving Slavery as naturally as we do Liberty.”³4 VIII Like the 1710 Letter from a Merchant at Jamaica, the Essay Concerning Slavery received no immediate answer from any protagonist of West Indian settler societies, but this deafening silence on the relationship between settler identities as freeborn Britons and the massive employment of slave labor in the colonies was broken in 1772 in the wake of the Somerset Case. To question the decision by the Court of King’s Bench at Westminster to free the enslaved Somerset, West Indians produced three substantial pamphlets: Can33. Ibid., 27. 34. Ibid., 19, 53. Ten years later, in 1768, the Reverend James Ramsay of St. Christopher prepared a memorial in a similar vein, but Ramsay did not publish this manuscript until 1784. See Christopher Brown, “Empire without Slaves: British Concepts of Emancipation in the Age of the American Revolution,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser., 56 (1999): 286–87.

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did Reflections Upon the Judgement lately awarded by The Court of King’s Bench in Westminster-Hall, on what is ccommonly called The Negroe-Cause, published in 1772 by Edward Long, a Jamaican who just two years later would publish his three-volume History of Jamaica;³5 Considerations on the Negroe Cause Commonly So Called. Addressed to the Right Honourable Lord Mansfield, Lord Chief Justice of the Court of King’s Bench, published in 1772 and in a much expanded edition in 1773 by Samuel Estwick, a Barbadian;³6 and A Short Treatise on the Slavery of Negroes in the British Colonies, by Samuel Martin Sr., an Antiguan noted for his treatise on agricultural improvement in sugar culture.³7 These pamphlets differed considerably in approach and in their legal and political sophistication. The Martin tract was typical of the conventional proslavery diatribes that would appear in abundance in later decades in response to an increasingly aggressive antislavery literature. Depicting the Middle Passage as “a redemption from the most cruel slavery [in Africa] to a milder and more comfortable state of life than in their own country,” Martin argued that transportation to the colonies delivered the enslaved “from arbitrary power and barbarity, to live under just and wholsome laws, by which their lives and properties” were “secured from murder, rapine, or theft” and they were provided with the opportunity to be weaned “from the vilest idolatry of Snakes and other reptiles.”³8 But both the Long and Estwick pamphlets marshaled learned and sophisticated arguments that explored the legal, historical, and cultural foundations of slavery, not just in the colonial but also in the metropolitan British world. In these efforts, they attempted to reconcile colonial settler claims to an identity as freeborn Britons with their enslavement of the vast majority of their colony’s inhabitants. Mounting a broad attack upon, not just the views of Lord Mansfield, the principal judge in the Somerset Case, but also the arguments offered by a growing antislavery literature that, since the late 1750s, had been demanding the extinction of the slave trade and slavery within the British world, these West Indian proslavery writers did not deny either that English law tended, as Long put it, to favor “liberty” or, as Estwick suggested, that slavery, at least in some 35. A Planter [Edward Long], Candid Reflections Upon the Judgement lately awarded by The Court of King’s Bench in Westminster-Hall, on what is ccommonly called The Negroe-Cause (London, 1772). 36. A West Indian [Samuel Estwick], Considerations on the Negroe Cause Commonly So Called, Addressed to the Right Honourable Lord Mansfield, Lord Chief Justice of the Court of King’s Bench (London, 1772), and 2nd ed. (London, 1773). 37. Samuel Martin Sr., A Short Treatise on the Slavery of Negroes in the British Colonies (Antigua, 1775). 38. Ibid., 5.

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measure, appeared to be “inconsistent with the principles of the constitution” of England. They also admitted that, as Estwick wrote, because “Negroes” were “human creatures, it seemed logical “that they should be allowed the privileges of their nature; which” for Britons meant “in part the enjoyment of person and property.”³9 But they argued that, not only colony slave codes, but the principles and customs of British commerce, the English common law of property, and many parliamentary statutes provided sturdy legal foundations for slavery throughout the British world. From its first appearance in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Long and Estwick argued, the slave trade and slavery had been grounded upon and operated within existing European commercial and English common law traditions that, in Long’s words, were thoroughly “compatible with the spirit of English commerce.” Because the slave “trade esteemed Negroe labourers merely a commodity, . . . fit objects of purchase and sale, transferrable like any other goods or chattels,” he explained, slave owners always “conceived their right of property to have and to hold, acquired by purchase, inheritance, or grant, to be as strong, just, legal, indefeasible, and compleat, as that of any other British merchant over the goods in his warehouse.” “In this kingdom of commerce,” that is, in Greater Britain, Estwick reminded his readers, “Whatever” was a “matter of Trade” had to be a “matter of property,” and British traders had to have “an absolute property in their merchandize.” Quoting Sir William Blackstone to the effect that “the regard of ” English common “law for private property” was “so great” that it would “not authorize the least violation of it; no, not even for the general good of the whole community,” they argued that wherever property had been “once legally vested, it must legally remain; until altered or extinguished by some power coequal to that which gave it.” The “original and fundamental law concerning Negroes” in the wider British world was, then, “the law of property, consentaneous to the law of England,” by which “Negroes . . . were made real estate, for the purposes of descent, and goods and chattel quoad the payment of debts.”40 Not just “the custom and the usage of merchants” and “the rules of common law” but also parliamentary statutes supported the definition of slaves as property. As Long noted, “the parliament of Great Britain” had “uniformly adhered to” this conception. In “sundry acts of parliament,” he observed, “Negroes [had been] . . . expressly declared merchandize.” By these acts, he contended, “the 39. Long, Candid Reflections, 42; Estwick, Considerations on the Negroe Cause, 34–35, 2nd ed., 86. 40. Long, Candid Reflections, 4, 45, 74; Estwick, Considerations on the Negroe Cause, 11, 16–17, 25–26.

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legal nature of Negroes” as property had been “fully established, and clearly ascertained.” Indeed, Estwick pointed out, a 1766 statute regulating new posts in Africa gained at the conclusion of the Seven Years’ War had made even “the King, as well as [a] . . . corporation of merchants, . . . possessed . . . of a very considerable number of Negroes, under the description of canoemen, castleslaves, women, children, carpenters, and other artificers,” of which they still “remained the actual and rightful owners.” Thus did “the law of the land” stipulate “that Negroes under the law should . . . be considered [not] as human beings,” but as “chose in merchandize.”4¹ For both Long and Estwick, the case for metropolitan complicity in slavery seemed overwhelming. “From the summary deduction I have given,” said Long, “it appears, that the Negroe slave trade has been prosecuted by the English, either by private persons, by chartered or other Companies, for upwards of two centuries past.” During this period, he insisted, it had “received the confirmation of our Kings, and our Parliaments;” had “been a fundamental article in treaties solemnly ratified with other nations; and, in short,” had “been stamped with the consent of the whole kingdom; not only because the consent of the whole Parliament is taken to be every one’s consent, but as the whole body of the people have in some degree or other been benefitted by the advantages which it has ultimately produced.” If, as private individuals, “some persons” had “thought fit to question the right of property acquired by the British planters in the slaves they” had “purchased; yet it” was “manifest, that the British Legislature” had “not only declared the existence of that right of property, by . . . several statutes,” but had “in particular, by one of them, put this matter beyond all doubt, by becoming themselves the purchasers of Negro slaves.” Thus, Long concluded, had the slave trade and slavery, institutions “countenanced and ratified by Parliament, by our treaties, so long an usage, and the spirit of our commerce,” been “incontestably built upon, and agreeable to,” both “the laws of the kingdom” and “the general sense of the people.”4² Nor was colonial law anomalous within the British-speaking world. If “negro slave-holding” was “inconsistent with the laws of England,” then, Long asserted, was “every colony law . . . touching this supposed property, whether by securing it to the planter, by making it deviseable in last wills, inheritable by his heirs, liable as assets for payment of his debts, subject to mortgage or other grants and alienations . . . entirely void and null in themselves, to every intent 41. Long, Candid Reflections, 4, 12, 37; Estwick, Considerations on the Negroe Cause, 13–14, 2nd ed., 71. 42. Long, Candid Reflections, 29–30, 40, 69; Estwick, Considerations on the Negroe Cause, 2nd ed., xvi.

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and purpose, as being repugnant to the laws of England.” Because the Navigation Act of 1696 explicitly provided “that no law, usage, or custom” should “be made or received in the plantations, repugnant to the laws of England,” observed Estwick, “the lex loci of the colonies” had to be “founded on [and consistent with] the lex loci of England.” If, therefore, he concluded, “property . . . in Negroes . . . was repugnant to the law of England, it could not be the law in America; because, by the same statute, wherever this repugnancy is, there the law” was “ipso facto null and void.” Because English law and colonial law were thus isomorphic, Long contended, a slave owner could have no “better right . . . to reclaim a fugitive Negroe in” a “colony than in Britain,” the “laws of meum and teum” being “alike in both; and,” both metropolitans and colonials being “Englishmen,” their rights in property of all varieties were “the same as if the lands of both [metropolis and colonies] were one continuity.”4³ Both Long and Estwick admitted that there was no counterpart to colonial slavery in the contemporary British Isles, but they insisted that “slavery” had been “part of the constitution” in “the antient law of England,” that, as Estwick wrote, “slavery was the law, and slaves the object of that law.” In medieval England, they noted, when even “ freemen owed service to their lords” and therefore enjoyed only a limited “liberty which was not many removes from slavery,” the “class of people called Villeins” labored under a “severe bondage” in which almost “the only right . . . they had by the Lex Terre, or common law, [was] that of not being detained in prison without some cause shewn.” Noting “that neither Magna Charta, nor” the “several statutes reiterating of confirming it” applied to villeins, they pointed out that “ freemen were alone the chief objects of these statutes,” none of which “impeached the power which a master” exercised over “his Villein; but, on the contrary, that other statutes were passed contemporary with the latter, to aid and enforce this power.” Quoting Lord Chancellor Hardwicke “that the state or situation of Negroes towards their masters or owners arose out of, and was founded upon, the remains of the antient laws of villenage in this country,” they argued that in conditions in which Africans “were instruments necessary for the colonizing of America” settlers had had no choice but to render them the legal equivalents of the villeins of medieval England.44 Like medieval England, then, colonial British America, according to Long and Estwick, consisted of two principal and quite distinct categories of people, 43. Long, Candid Reflections, 23, 44, 58–59; Estwick, Considerations on the Negroe Cause, 2nd ed., 22–23, 55 note g. 44. Estwick, Considerations on the Negroe Cause, 27, 2nd ed., xiv, 85, 94–95; Long, Candid Reflections, 3, 5, 7, 10.

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one legally free and the other subjected to harsh legal disabilities. If, they contended, the colonial and metropolitan British worlds were indeed part of the same general legal system and were governed upon the same legal principles, and if enslaved people of African descent were, as they claimed, legally similar to medieval English villeins, then, Long and Estwick reasoned, it seemed, as Long phrased it, “preposterous to say,” as did Mansfield in the Somerset Case, that “Negro slaves emigrating from our plantations to this kingdom” were not commodities, “the absolute property of the purchasor[s],” but “ free subjects of the realm,” who were “entitled to all the rights, liberties, and privileges of natural, or free-born subjects.” At most, Long suggested, “this class of men,” that is, the colonial enslaved, could be placed “in no higher degree of franchise than was allowed . . . to villeins” under “Magna Charta, and the subsequent statutes passed in confirmation of this Great Charter.”45 To settler protagonists such as Long and Estwick, this essentially legal distinction between the free and the enslaved was powerfully reinforced by cultural or biological differences between Europeans and Africans. Antislavery writers, said Estwick, might suppose “an universal sameness in Human nature; that is to say, in fact, that . . . to all natural intents and purposes,” Englishmen were “Negroes, and Negroes” were “Englishmen.” But, he insisted, Negroes differed “from other men, not [merely] in kind, but in species.” Denying either that people who were already enslaved in Africa had any “natural right of their own country” to “Liberty” or that Africans in general had made any progress from rudeness to refinement over the previous two thousand years, they suggested that Africans had “nothing of humanity about them but the form.” Quoting the historian and philosopher David Hume on the “natural capacity and incapacity” of men, Estwick denied that Africans showed any sign of having “the moral sense” identified by the Scottish philosopher Francis Hutcheson as the essence of humanity, and he asserted the “unerring truth” of Alexander “Pope, that Order is heaven’s fi rst law; and this confest, Some are, and must be, greater than the rest.”

Thus did Estwick seek to enlist the divine order to justify basic colonial legal distinctions between the free and the enslaved.46 But the principal concern of Long and Estwick was to show that colonial slavery and the slave trade were not simply colonial aberrations in an otherwise free British world. The “whole nation,” Long emphasized, had been “in some 45. Long, Candid Reflections, 4–5, 33. 46. Estwick, Considerations on the Negroe Cause, 2nd ed., 79, 82, 84; Martin, Short Treatise, 5.

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way or other interested in the advantages drawn from this trade” and from the many plantation commodities produced “principally by means of [enslaved] Negroe labour.” For that reason, he thought, not only the colonies but the home islands had all, as he put it, “participate[d] a benefit from the sweat of the Negroe’s brow.” Whatever was “the state and condition on Negroes” in the British world, declared Estwick, responsibility “for it . . . [was]” therefore “a British and not [simply] an American question; as well it might be, since, if I may be allowed to reason chymically upon this occasion, whatever property America may have in its drugs, it is Great Britain that receives the essential oyl extracted from them.”47 Because the home islands had been so deeply involved in both the slave trade and slavery, it seemed to settler protagonists profoundly hypocritical for the metropolitan English to suggest that “English feelings were to revolt at American punishments,” and they vehemently expressed their objections to the “horrid and frightful picture[s] of the barbarity, and cruelties, that were exercised on” the enslaved “in the colonies.” They professed total dismay that, as Martin wrote, “Some of our lecturers, both English and Scotch, upon the laws of nature, delight much in displaying their eloquence, and venting their spleen, on the abuse of our colonists, concerning whom (from any good authority) they seem to be totally ignorant.” Arguing that “masters [were] bound by the laws of humanity and self-interest to protect, feed, and cloath” the enslaved, both Estwick and Martin suggested that the “state of Negroes . . . in America” was “preferable, nay infinitely more desirable, than the condition of the poorer sort of people residing even in” the “boasted happy isle” of Great Britain.48 Estwick expanded upon this point. America, he wrote, did “not afford that scene of barbarity, which misrepresentation would have painted upon it.” To expose the moral hypocrisy of the metropolitan English, he pointed to the situation in the new British colony of St. Vincent, an island where at that very moment “English troops, trampling on the laws of God and man,” were “slaughtering even to extirpation a guileless race of Caribs, the aborigines of the country.” Indeed, Estwick insisted, citing the impressment of seamen and the frequent imposition of martial law in metropolitan Britain, “cruelties and distress” were “to be found in much greater excess even in this elysium of liberty.” If, Martin added, the poorer sorts of English people thought of themselves and were 47. Long, Candid Reflections, 40, 69; Estwick, Considerations on the Negroe Cause, 2nd ed., xvi. 48. Estwick, Considerations on the Negroe Cause, 29, 2nd ed., 58, 60; Martin, Short Treatise, 5, 9.

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“called the Sons of Liberty,” they and their counterparts in Scotland, Ireland, and continental Europe were in reality “the Slaves of Necessity.”49 In making this case for metropolitan complicity in slavery and metropolitan hypocrisy in condemning the slave systems in the colonies, these writers were not only expressing their distress that “the Planters, who” were “natural-born subjects of the realm, . . . rightly and lawfully entitled to equal protection, and in the fullest extent, with respect to their goods,” should be denied the rights ordinarily extended even to alien merchants, who routinely enjoyed “liberty of ingress and egress” and protection in their goods; they were also underlining the dangers inherent in the circulation of the “enthusiastic notions of liberty” advocated by antislavery proponents. Not only, said Martin, might those notions “occasion revolutions in our colonies, and consequently the eff usion of much blood,” not only, wrote Long, might they “operate as a direct invitation to three hundred thousand blacks, now scattered over our different colonies, to mutiny, and transport themselves by every means into this land of Canaan, where,” he said mockingly, “by only swallowing one single mouthful of British air, they may enter upon the rights of free-born Britons, and sleep in peace beneath the sacred shield of Magna Charta and the Habeas Corpus,” but they also threatened, Long added, “Nothing less . . . than a total sacrifice of our African trade and American possessions, to their fantastic idea of English liberty.”50 The destruction of slavery, they predicted, would also ruin the economies of the colonies, which, they believed, could produce nothing of value without slave labor. Without the advantages Britain obtained from the colonies, “Britain itself,” Martin suggested, would “become a poor, wretched, defenceless country, and very soon a province of France.” By cautioning against those “pretended reformers of the age; who, under a cloak of furious zeal in the cause of religion and liberty, do all they can to throw down those essential pillars, commerce, trade, and navigation, upon which alone must depend their own enjoyment of any freedom, civil or religious,” and by raising the fear that, “by setting free the Africans, Britons” would open themselves to French subjection and thereby themselves become “wretched slaves to arbitrary power,” these writers explicitly acknowledged that, not just in the West Indies, but in Britain itself the freedom of whites rested on the enslavement of blacks.5¹ Long elaborated upon this admission. Because the colonial enslaved were 49. Estwick, Considerations on the Negroe Cause, 2nd ed., xvi, 51–52; Martin, Short Treatise, 6–7. 50. Long, Candid Reflections, 41–42, 58–60; Martin, Short Treatise, 12. 51. Long, Candid Reflections, 71; Martin, Short Treatise, 11.

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property, because the sanctity of property was one of the principal rights of freeborn Britons, and because colonial slave owners were freeborn Britons, he said, “the pretended magical touch of the English air” could not, “like the presto of a juggler, turn” slave owners’ “gold into counters” without divesting them of a property that had been “solemnly guaranteed by the consent of the nation in Parliament.” Such a development, he believed, would deprive slave owners of their British rights, deny them their inherited identities as Britons who were absolute masters of their properties and their liberties, including their liberty to own slaves, and render them as far from a free condition as their own slaves. In caste societies such as those that had taken shape in early modern plantation America, the need to distinguish free people from the enslaved provided an especially powerful impetus for settler claims to an identity as freeborn Britons.5² Both Long and Estwick directed their attention to the question of how slavery in British societies might eventually be resolved. By pointing out that the “condition of villenage in England” had not been abolished by judicial action or positive statute but only “grew into desuetude by the gradual extension of our national commerce, and the introduction of wealth and independence, by this means, among the inferior orders of the people,” Long implied that commercial expansion might similarly put an end to slavery. Acknowledging that slavery was inappropriate for a fully civilized country such as Great Britain, Estwick actually proposed its exclusion by parliamentary statute from Great Britain and suggested that, just as “civilization” had “extinguished” slavery in England, it would eventually do the same in America, “when America” had become “what England is.”5³ IX Even before Long and Estwick used the Somerset Case to reaffirm the Britishness of West Indian settlers, other events and developments were forcing still other West Indian settler protagonists to consider the disturbing question of whether the wide extent and deep entrenchment of chattel slavery in West Indian societies had already effectively transformed the identity of the settler populations by reducing them to a degree of dependence on the parent state that was incompatible with their claims to an identity as freeborn Britons. This development can be explored through an analysis of the West Indian response to the great debate on the constitutional status of the colonies that divided the British world in the 1760s and 1770s. 52. Long, Candid Reflections, 41. 53. Long, Candid Reflections, 3; Estwick, Considerations on the Negroe Cause, 2nd ed., 95.

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The reaction of the settler leaders of Barbados to the Stamp Act crisis is a case in point. While almost all of the other American colonies, including Jamaica, were protesting that measure, the Barbadian Assembly, alone among the legislatures of the older colonies, contented itself with entering a “dutiful representation” against the act in a letter from its committee of correspondence to the island’s agent in London. Although the committee protested the act as a “deprivation of our old and valuable rights,” it emphasized that the colony had “submitted, with all obedience, to the act of Parliament” out of “a principle of loyalty to our King and Mother Country.” Condemning the “violent spirit raised in the North American colonies against this act,” it characterized North American behavior as “rebellious opposition to . . . authority.” Although the committee subsequently decided to omit the word rebellious from the version actually sent to London, the initial draft found its way to North America, where reaction was swift and negative.54 In An Address to the Committee of Correspondence in Barbados, the Pennsylvania lawyer John Dickinson both denounced Barbadians for having at once “cast a most high and unprovoked censure on a gallant, generous, loyal people” and raised questions about the legitimacy of Barbadian settler claims to an identity as Englishmen. By submitting to the detestable Stamp Act, Dickinson charged, Barbadian settlers had reduced themselves “to the miserable dilemma of making a choice between two of the meanest characters—of those who would be slaves from inclination, tho they pretend to love liberty—and of those who are dutiful from fear, tho they pretend to love submission.” Refusing to believe that any British people would actually choose to be slaves, Dickinson concluded that Barbadian settlers were “loyal and obedient, as you call yourselves, because you apprehend you can’t safely be otherwise.” Suggesting that this preference for safety over liberty could only be the product of frightened “dreams of submission,” Dickinson dismissed the Barbados committee’s letter as “the timid murmurs of slaves” and declared that such “unmanly timidity” belonged “not to Britons or [to] their true sons.”55 For Barbadian settlers, “Gentlemen, and the Descendants of Britons,” to be thus accused of being no different from their own slaves and “painted as Slaves prostrate in the Dirt” was unbearable, and settler leaders rushed to defend themselves in three separate pamphlets, including one written by the Speaker 54. Charles Price et al. to Stephen Fuller, Dec. 1764, Lyttelton Papers, BA 5806/12 (iii), 926, Worcester Record Office, Worcester, England; “A Letter from the Committee of Correspondence of Barbados, to their Agent in London” [Apr. 1766], in The Writings of John Dickinson, ed. Paul Leicester Ford (Philadelphia, 1895), 254–56. 55. John Dickinson, An Address to the Committee of Correspondence in Barbados (Philadelphia, 1766), in Writings of Dickinson, 259, 265–68, 275–76.

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of the Assembly, John Gay Alleyne. Though one of the authors criticized the committee for the “doubting, pausing, and hesitating” tone of its protest and for evidently “not knowing what is Privilege, what is Justice, a Right or Liberty” and admitted that Dickinson had to some extent written with “the Voice of Truth,” the contention of these works was that the Barbadian response to the Stamp Act by no means deserved to be “branded . . . as slavish and detestable.” Indeed, so far from constituting “a voluntary and timid Submission to Slavery,” it had, according to Alleyne, been “founded on the wisest Policy, without being in the least open to any Kind of Censure for an unmanly Fear.”56 Yet Alleyne admitted that the character of the Barbadian response had been determined by the island’s weakness. Whereas “North America, boundless in its Extent of Territory, and formidable in its Numbers,” had sufficient “resources of Empire within itself ” to be “fearless of the Consequences of Resistance,” Barbados was only “a small island, containing only a Handful of [free] Men.” In “struggling for the Liberties she demanded,” the former “might possibly have arrived at a State of Independence.” But Barbados, “a well-cleared . . . little Spot” with “no Woods, no Back-Settlements to retreat to,” Alleyne declared, “could only have suffered by a Revolt.” Highly vulnerable to naval attack and to some extent dependent on the outside world for supplies of food, clothing, and the slave labor necessary to produce its principal export, Barbados “could not so much as exist without the constant Protection and Support of some superior State.” Thus condemned “ever [to] be dependant,” Barbadians could expect nothing from a more spirited resistance than the loss of the liberties they already enjoyed and “the Horror of an unavoidable Subjection.”57 “To resist one Evil, with not only the Hazard, but the Certainty, of bringing down more and greater Evils on our Heads,” Barbados’s settler defenders thus argued, was “both absurd and frantick.” They agreed that the Stamp Act was oppressive. But they could not, they insisted, permit oppression to rob them “of their Senses, because if it had, that must have exposed them to be robbed of every Thing else.” “Too weak to succeed by any Thing but pacific Arguments,” Barbadians resisting the Stamp Act thus had to eschew “an active Courage” and gain “by Policy what we wanted by Strength.” For “a small and helpless Colony” to express its objections “with some Reserve and Modesty” was only a testimony to the “good Sense and just Discernment” of its representatives. If 56. [ John Gay Alleyne], A Letter to the North American, on Occasion of his Address to the Committee of Correspondence in Barbados (Barbados, 1766), 9–10, 23, 46; A Native of Barbados, Candid Observations on Two Pamphlets lately published . . . (Barbados, 1766), 6, 11; [Kenneth Morrison], An Essay Towards the Vindication of the Committee of Correspondence in Barbados (Barbados, 1766), 4. 57. [Alleyne], Letter to the North American, 10–12, 27.

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such measures had failed, Alleyne assured his readers, “some other Means should then have been resolved upon for our Relief.” But, he insisted, “those Means would have had nothing of Violence in them.” “Rash, fool-hardy” conduct was inconsistent with Barbadian settler character. “Common prudence” and persuasion, not violence, was the Barbadian way. Contending that the “English Nation” had “long been celebrated” not only for its “Love of Justice, and . . . Love of Liberty” but also for its “Moderation” and insisting that the “Sons of the Parent have a Right to imitate [all] her Virtues,” the defenders of Barbados denied that “a dutiful Submission to lawful Authority” could ever be “thought . . . to indicate any Inclination to Slavery.” In direct challenge to Dickinson’s suggestion that they had become slavish through fear, they praised themselves as exhibiting “two of the most virtuous Characters,—of those who are unwilling to part with any of their Civil Rights, though they will not easily be prevailed upon to throw off their Allegiance,—and of those who can shew themselves to be dutiful on Principle, though they will not yield, without a proper Remonstrance, to Oppression.”58 By thus turning the defenses of Barbadian behavior during the Stamp Act crisis from an apology for their own timidity to a celebration of their own prudence and realism, these Barbadian settler defenders adroitly used this episode both to sharpen and to reinforce the image of themselves as a people among whom moderation was “the Prevailing Principle.” Disdaining “the Rashness of the Mob, and all unlawful Opposition to legal Authority,” they told themselves that, in marked contrast to colonists on the American continent, they understood that genuine British liberty, like true virtue, was “found as far from an unbridled Freedom, as from downright Slavery” and interpreted their steady attachment to Britain as an example of this middle way.59 In redefining Britishness to include moderation as well as liberty, these writers did not abandon ancient settler claims to traditional British liberty. When the anonymous author of Candid Observations on Two Pamphlets lately published, one of the three Barbadian pamphlets issuing out of the paper war with Dickinson, included an extended rumination on the meaning of political liberty for the empowered classes within the British world, his discussion 58. Ibid., 10–11, 13, 22, 30–31, 42; [Morrison], Essay Towards the Vindication, 18, 20, 26; Candid Observations, 36. 59. Candid Observations, 36; [Alleyne], Letter to the North American, 47; Henry Frere, A Short History of Barbados from its First Discovery and Settlement to the End of the Year 1767 (London, 1768), 75–76. For a more extended discussion of this point, see Jack P. Greene, “Changing Identity in the British Caribbean: Barbados as a Case Study,” in Nicholas Canny and Anthony Pagden, eds., Colonial Identity in the Atlantic World, 1500–1800 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), 159–212.

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represented a reaffirmation and an extension in the new context created by the Stamp Act of traditional settler concerns. Turning to Joseph Addison’s Spectator for what he regarded as “the best definition of political liberty,” the author quoted Addison that liberty was the exemption of “one Man from Subjection to another, so far as the Order and Oeconomy of Government will permit” and especially emphasized Addison’s contention that liberty was “best preserved . . . when there is no part of the people that has not a common interest with at least one part of the legislators.” Because there did “not subsist that common Interest, Mr. Addison speaks of, between our Inhabitants and any one Part of the English Legislature,” the author of Candid Observations contended, colonial settlers could not “be said to enjoy . . . Liberty, the Blessing of the English Constitution,” if the metropolitan parliament legislated for the colonies. Spelling out the implications of a century and a half of settler discourse, the author boldly argued that for colonial settlers to enjoy British liberty they had to have their own “separate” and largely “independent Governments” and the British Empire had to be a polity in which “the Form of Government in the People abroad,” though “founded on similar Principles,” was “as little connected with that of the English, as the Counties or Soils themselves which both People inhabit.”60 The liberty that concerned the author of Candid Observations was thus the liberty of colonial settlers in relation to the parent state, specifically the settlers’ entitlement to the traditional English liberty to consent to the laws that bound them. In the process of articulating this concern, however, he approvingly quoted Addison to the effect that “Liberty should reach every Individual of a People, as they all share one common Nature; If it spreads only among particular Branches [those who have their Representatives for Instance] there had better be none at all, since such a Liberty only aggravates the Misfortunes of those [the Colonists] who are deprived of it by setting before them a disagreeable Subject of Comparison.” Betraying no awareness of the implications of this quotation for a society like that of Barbados, both free and enslaved, the author of Candid Observations obviously did not mean to include the slaves when he referred to the Barbadian “People.” “Provided it be consistent with public Peace and Tranquility,” a system of equal liberty, Addison thought, was desirable because it was “most conformable to the Equality that we find in human Nature,” but the author of Candid Observations certainly did not believe that free Barbadians, in Addison’s words, “share[d] one common Nature” with their slaves. Nor, apparently, despite its obvious applicability, was he thinking of the enslaved when he endorsed Addison’s observation that a liberty confined 60. Candid Observations, 17–20.

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to a “particular” section of the population operated as “a disagreeable Subject of Comparison” for those segments that were deprived of that liberty. For free settlers in the slave societies of the West Indies and elsewhere in British America, a system of equal liberty would not have been compatible with their own “public Peace and Tranquility” or with their exclusive identity, an identity sustained by its denial to the enslaved, as freeborn Britons. Nonetheless, the author’s use of this quotation from Addison inadvertently called attention to the settlers’ dilemma in claiming freedom for themselves while living in societies in which the vast majority of inhabitants were enslaved. In so doing, he implicitly anticipated the problem posed for free West Indians by the Somerset Case a few years later.6¹ Though Alleyne hinted darkly at “other Considerations . . . arising out of Circumstances of Distress and Hazard from within” that tempered Barbadian opposition to the Stamp Act, none of these writers made an explicit connection between the moderate character of that opposition and the Barbadians’ longstanding fears of servile revolt. That connection was reserved for the Jamaica Assembly in the crisis that immediately preceded the American Revolution. In December 1774 that body formally petitioned the British crown to “become a mediator between your European and American subjects” and to persuade the British Parliament to abandon its claims to bind the colonies by legislation.6² Such claims, the Jamaica Assembly announced in reiterating a well-developed tradition of British colonial political thought, represented a profound violation of the settlers’ identities and inheritances as English people. Declaring that “the settlers of the first Colonies, but especially of the elder Colonies of North America, as well as the Conquerors of this Island, were a part of the English people in every respect equal to them, and possessed of every Right and Privilege at the time of their emigration, which the people of England, were possessed of, and irrefragably, to that great Right of consenting to the Laws which should bind them,” it asserted, as “the first established principle of the constitution,” that “the people of England have a right to partake, and do partake of the Legislation of their country, and that no laws can affect them, but such as receive their assent, given by themselves, or their representatives,” and argued that by this principle “no one part of your Majesty’s English subjects, either can, or ever could legislate for any other part.” Demanding, “as a guarantee of ” the “just rights” of their constituents, “on the faith and confidence of which, they have settled, and continue to reside in those distant 61. Ibid., 17–18. 62. [Alleyne], Letter to the North American, 12; The Humble Petition and Memorial of the Assembly of Jamaica to the King’s most Excellent Majesty in Council (Philadelphia, 1774), 8.

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parts of the empire, that no laws” should “be made and attempted to be forced upon them, injurious to the rights, as Colonists, Englishmen, or Britons,” the Assembly asked the king “to avert that last and greatest of calamities [for English people], that of being reduced to an abject state of slavery, by having an arbitrary government established in the Colonies.”6³ By acknowledging in its petition that, notwithstanding its endorsement of the position of the resisting colonies in North America, Jamaica was too “weak and feeble” ever to offer any physical “resistance to Britain,” the Jamaica Assembly implicitly confessed to the whole world that its own settler population had already effectively reduced the colony to that “abject state of slavery” which it sought to avoid. In contrast to the continental colonies, the Assembly confessed, Jamaica’s “very small number of white inhabitants, and its peculiar situation from the encumbrance of more than two hundred thousand slaves,” had put it in a condition in which its proud settler population could no longer fully act like freeborn English people. Rather than standing up for their rights in the tradition of independent English people, settler Jamaicans, like their own despised dependents, had merely to petition “humbly” for them.64 By this confession, the Assembly called attention to the degree to which in the West Indies the institution of chattel slavery, broad in its extent and deep in its entrenchment, had functioned to creolize settler identities as freeborn Britons, and powerfully raised the question of to what extent peoples so dependent on the parent state for protection against their own enslaved population could maintain credible claims to such an identity. 63. Humble Petition and Memorial of the Assembly of Jamaica, 4, 7. 64. Ibid., 3.

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— fourteen —

Alterity and the Production of Identity in the Early Modern British American Empire and the Early United States

I

D

uring a house of commons debate in November 1775 over what, in light of its army’s misadventures in Massachusetts the previous spring, Britain should do to deal with colonial resistance to parliamentary authority, William Innes, member of Parliament for Ilchester, spoke at length in favor of strong coercive measures. Emphatically questioning whether the colonists were even “the offspring of Englishmen, and as such entitled to the privileges of Britons,” he denounced them as a promiscuous “mixture of people” who consisted “not only . . . of English, Scots, and Irish, but also of French, Dutch, Germans innumerable, Indians, Africans, and a multitude of felons from this country.” Few members of such a population, he insisted, could possibly have a legitimate claim to status as full Britons deserving of the rich inheritance and identity enjoyed by independent Britons in the home islands. Colonial British Americans, he charged, had created and continued to live in societies that bore little resemblance to that of the home island, citing in particular the massive importation of slaves and the “despotic” exploitation of them. Societies thus drawing their “sustenance from the very bosom of slavery,” he declared, “surely [have] nothing in them similar to what prevails in Great Britain.”¹ In these remarks Innes built upon a well-established, if diff use, language of alterity or otherness that dated back to the earliest days of English overseas enterprise. In metropolitan Britain, the celebration of empire as an enormous stimulant to Britain’s wealth and a major element in its international stature

Written for a volume edited by David Ryan and M. Patrick Cullinane and entitled The ‘Other’ in US History and Foreign Policy (New York: Berghahn Books, forthcoming), this chapter is published here for the fi rst time. 1. William Innes, speech, Nov. 8, 1775, in R. C. Simmons and P. D. G. Thomas, eds., Proceedings and Debates of the British Parliaments Respecting North America, 1754–1783, 6 vols. (White Plains, N.Y.: Kraus, 1982–86), 6:203.

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and the conception of colonization as a noble enterprise to bring civilization to savage and rude new worlds had never been unqualified. If the colonies themselves had been an obvious boon to Britain, the settlers who inhabited them often seemed, to those who remained at home or directly interacted with them, to be far less worthy of praise. The discourses of empire that took shape in Britain during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries included a dash of heavy-handed skepticism about the character of the settlers who inhabited the plantations and the societies that they created. From very early on, a significant strand of metropolitan imperial thought used what modern analysts would call the language of alterity to depict the colonies as receptacles for those who had failed at home: the poor, the unemployed, the unwanted, the outcasts, the very dregs of English society. Throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, this language ran as a strong undercurrent in metropolitan conceptions of empire. The colonial process thus involved not just encounters with exotic indigenous and imported others but also the creation of an entirely new category of others into which to lump colonial participants and thereby distinguish them from the more successful and refined populations of the metropolis.² While by no means universal, this unfavorable image of colonials and the social spaces they created was ubiquitous in British publications—in commercial tracts, critiques of colonial slavery, imperial histories, travel memoirs, fake chorographies, novels, poetry, plays, magazine and newspaper essays, political pamphlets, and parliamentary speeches—and it took a variety of forms. Rooted in a conviction that no one would leave England except under compulsion, this image stressed the lowly social origins of migrants and their religious and social deviancy. Furthermore, the distinctly non-English and often unhealthy places that colonials chose to settle, sharing the wilderness with uncivil, savage peoples, and the questionable societies that they created in the process seemed to put these overseas English people in a separate and inferior category. With little learning or religion (or a deviant form thereof), and with few of the other cultural amenities of English life, colonial societies were so crude that cultural degeneration was inevitable, not a few metropolitans thought. Moreover, the settlers’ lowly origins, unsavory characters, and narrow pursuit of economic gain, metropolitans charged, produced societies deeply dissimilar to what they 2. For a superb study of English/British encounters with non-European worlds, see P. J. Marshall and Glyndwr Williams, The Great Map of Mankind: Perceptions of New Worlds in the Age of the Enlightenment (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1982). Martin Daunton and Rick Halpern, eds., Empire and Others: British Encounters with Indigenous Peoples, 1600–1850 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), is a collection of illuminating case studies on this subject.

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had left behind. With their populations exhibiting little concern for traditional English social mores, colonial societies seemed to be characterized by vicious labor regimes, sharp business practices, and political and legal orders catering to the self-interest of the upstart socioeconomic groups who were dominant within the colonies, groups bent upon subverting any metropolitan efforts to regulate them. These characteristics provided a sturdy foundation on which metropolitans could construct a language of alterity for application to the American colonies. Less harsh than the well-developed languages of savagery and barbarity that were only occasionally applied to colonial settlers, and less comprehensively exclusive than the language of alienization used to identify foreigners, this language lacked a contemporary name to encompass all of the many elements that combined to form a language of social derision or condescension that expressed metropolitan misgivings about the genuine Englishness of England’s overseas offshoots. Despite the rapid development, especially after about 1720, of these societies into viable economic and political entities with expanding social amenities, competent leaders, and tightening cultural ties with the parent state, such misgivings persisted throughout the colonial era, to the great disquiet of colonial settler leaders, who, almost as much as they sought to gain fortunes for themselves and their families, were intent upon establishing offshoots of old England in new American worlds. Thus, the continuing process of metropolitan “othering” did not stimulate the emergence of oppositional identities that would favorably contrast colonial worlds with the metropolis. Even as they created, through a process of cultural adaptation, distinctive provincial identities that were rooted in peculiarities of place, specific socioeconomic and legal structures, and the inhabitants’ collective experiences over time, settlers held tightly to their identities as Britons. As a result, metropolitan “othering” operated throughout the colonial era to reinforce among settler leaders a determination to prove themselves and their societies worthy of the British identity to which they had ever aspired, a situation that did not change until midway through the great debate that led, between 1764 and 1783, to the separation of thirteen of Britain’s more than thirty American colonies from the British Empire.³ 3. On the importance of metropolitan cultural models for English colonists, see Jack P. Greene, “Search for Identity: An Interpretation of the Meaning of Selected Patterns of Social Response in Eighteenth-Century America,” in Greene, Imperatives, Behaviors, and Identities: Essays in Early American Cultural History (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1992), 143–74. On the formation of provincial identities, see Greene, “Reformulando a identidade inglesa na América britânica colonial: Adaptaçâo cultural e experiência provincial na construçào de identidades corporativas,” Almanack Braziliense 4 (Nov. 2006): 5–36 (see chap. 2 in this volume).

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The stereotype of the colonies as receptacles for those who had failed at home was already deeply entrenched by the middle of the seventeenth century, and by the early 1690s, when the economic writer Sir Josiah Child took up the subject, it was commonplace. Child elaborated in some detail upon the view that colonists scarcely came from the cream of old English society. Rather, he wrote, most of the colonies, singling out Virginia and Barbados as examples, had been “first peopled by a sort of loose vagrant People, vicious and destitute of the means to live at home (being either unfit for labour, or such as could find none to employ themselves about, or had so misbehaved themselves by whoring, thieving, or other debauchery, that none would set them on work).” Nor, despite the emigration of some refugees of higher social standing during the English Civil War, in Child’s view, were subsequent emigrants to the colonies much different. “The constant supply that the said Plantations have since had,” he insisted, “has been by such loose vagrant people, . . . picked up, especially about the streets and suburbs of London and Westminster, and by Malefactors condemned for crimes, for which by the law they deserved to die; and some of those people called Quakers, banished for meeting on pretence of religious worship.”4 But it was not just the suspect origins of the colonists that contributed to their poor reputation in England. While promotional writers hailed the colonies as inviting places of opportunity, and chorographers and historians reported on their steady development as improved and anglicized social and political spaces, other writers, employing a variety of other genres, limned portraits of them as societies so oriented toward the pursuit of economic gain as to be viciously exploitative of all dependent peoples and barren of most traditional amenities of metropolitan English life. The callous mistreatment of servants and slaves was a prevalent theme. For instance, from the 1659 tract of Marcellus Rivers and Oxenbridge Foyle, two men accused of royalism and rebellion and shipped to the colonies as servants, English readers could learn that American planters were the “most inhuman and barbarous persons,” who in the quest for riches worked their servants hard, fed them meagerly, and in general reduced them to the “most deplorable, and (as to Englishmen) . . . unparalleled condition,” treating them no better than beasts.5 If Christians had to endure such a harsh labor regime, the enslaved Afri4. Sir Josiah Child, A New Discourse of Trade, 4th ed. (London, 1695), 197–99. 5. Marcellus Rivers and Oxenbridge Foyle, England’s Slavery, or Barbados Merchandize (London, 1659), 1–7.

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cans who after 1650 made up a steadily growing share of the colonial labor force, first in Barbados and the other West Indian colonies and then on the mainland in Virginia, Maryland, and the Carolinas, reportedly fared even worse. For a small but highly vocal group of critics writing between 1670 and 1710, the system of chattel slavery that was developing in the colonies and the social and cultural systems that supported it constituted exhibit A in an emerging portrait of the colonies as places of cultural regress and social deviation from English norms. These included the Anglican minister Morgan Godwyn, who had lived in both Virginia and Barbados for extended periods in the 1670s and 1680s,6 and Thomas Tryon, a merchant and social reformer who had resided in Barbados for much of the late 1660s.7 These writers were careful not to challenge the legality of slavery, their principal concerns being to awaken the consciences of American slaveholders to the harsh usage that the enslaved endured on the plantations, to persuade slave owners that enslaved people could be instructed in Christianity and converted without material prejudice to their owners’ property interests and without subverting colonial societies, and to alert metropolitan readers to the disturbing character of the societies that were taking shape in the English slave colonies, societies that in their covetousness, inattention to religion, brutal labor regimes, disordered families, and sexual licentiousness constituted monstrous distortions of metropolitan English society. Given the colonists’ “extraordinary Ambition to be thought well of ” in England, Godwyn hoped that exposing their social deviations in the metropolis and getting them “decryed here” might eventually “shame them into better Principles.”8 In the meantime, however, he denounced colonial societies as “a 6. Morgan Godwyn, The Negro’s and Indian’s Advocate (London, 1680); Godwyn, A Supplement to the Negro’s [and] Indian’s Advocate (London, 1681); Godwyn, Trade prefer’d before Religion and Christ made to give place to Mammon represented in a sermon relating to the plantations (London, 1685); and Godwyn, “A Brief Account of Religion, in the Plantations, with the Causes of the Neglect and Decay thereof in those Parts,” in Francis Brokesby, Some Proposals towards Promoting of the Gospel in our American Plantations (London, 1708). The most perceptive analysis of Godwyn’s writings is Alden T. Vaughan, “Slaveholders’ ‘Hellish Principles’: A Seventeenth-Century Critique,” in Vaughan, Roots of American Racism: Essays on the Colonial Experience (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 55–81. 7. Thomas Tryon, The Planter’s Speech To His Neighbours & Country-Men of Pennsylvania, East & West Jersey (London, 1684); Tryon, Friendly Advice to the Gentlemen Planters of the East and West Indies (London, 1684); and Tryon’s Letters, Domestick and Foreign (London, 1700). Philippe Rosenberg, “Thomas Tryon and the Seventeenth-Century Dimensions of Antislavery,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser., 61 (2004): 609–42, provides the fullest analysis of Tryon’s writings on the colonies. 8. Godwyn, Negro’s and Indians Advocate, 13, 22, 39–40; Godwyn, Supplement, 8.

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reproach and dishonour to the English Nation, and Government.”9 If the original settlers, as conventional metropolitan images had long suggested, had been people of low social origins and “small Stocks,” some of their descendants had “grown wonderfully rich,” but they had not improved their characters along with their fortunes, and, as presented in the works of Godwyn and Tryon, the societies they had built did nothing to alter metropolitan conceptions of colonists as the dregs of English society. At the close of the seventeenth century, many metropolitans yet held, in Tryon’s words, “but an indifferent Opinion of those Settlements” and the settlers who inhabited them.¹0 As slavery became ever more entrenched in the American colonies and the slave trade ever more voluminous and profitable to Britain during the first half of the eighteenth century, overt criticism of slavery and American slave societies became more muted in metropolitan Britain. But the conception of the plantations as places of exceptional cruelty and of the Europeans who presided over them as a category of others continued to be fostered by the repetition of the touching story of Inkle and Yarico, first told by Richard Ligon, a visitor to Barbados, in the 1650s in his A True and Exact History of the Island of Barbadoes, published in London in 1657,¹¹ and repeated and substantially elaborated by the Irish writer Richard Steele in The Spectator in 1711. In this story, Thomas Inkle, a young Englishmen on his way to Barbados “to improve his Fortune by Trade and Merchandize,” escaped an Indian ambush “on the Main of America” and subsequently received shelter, sustenance, and affection from Yarico, a young Indian maiden “of Distinction.” The two of them fell in love, with Inkle proposing to take Yariko off to England to lead a civilized life with him. When they finally managed to hail down an English ship, Yarico willingly accompanied him to Barbados, where Inkle, a young man bred up on “an early Love of Gain” and worried about the monetary losses he had sustained during his long stay with Yarico, betrayed his lover and, despite the fact that she was pregnant, sold her to a Barbadian merchant as a slave.¹² As the popularity of this story reveals, metropolitan unease with chattel slavery and the rectitude of colonial settlers overseas never disappeared and could easily be reanimated, as happened briefly in the mid-1730s, when several London magazines published an anonymous speech purportedly written by Moses Bon Sàam, identified as a learned Jamaica Maroon, which called for 9. Godwyn, Supplement, 6; Godwyn, Trade prefer’d before Religion, 7, 19, 21, 23, 25–26; Godwyn, Negro’s and Indian’s Advocate, 160. 10. Tryon, Friendly Advice, 122, 160; Tryon’s Letters, 188, 192. 11. Richard Ligon, A True and Exact History of the Island of Barbadoes (London, 1657), 55. 12. Richard Steele, The Spectator, no. 11 (Mar. 13, 1711).

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slave resistance and revived images of American planters as cruel and “insolent Enslavers,” whose lives of pomp and wantonness were bought by the sweat of the enslaved.¹³ This publication stimulated the Reverend Robert Robertson, a longtime resident of Nevis, to produce a spirited complaint about metropolitan condemnations of colonial slaveholders. Acknowledging that the slave system within the colonies and the commercial and naval structures that supported it left no doubt that “very few such Pieces of Wickedness have ever been acted on the Face of the Earth,” he insisted that African and British traders bore equal responsibility with American planters for its perpetuation and pointed out that the British government had done nothing to discourage such a profitable system.¹4 In view of the deep complicity of metropolitan Britain in the imperial system of slavery, Robertson protested that the role of American planters in its development had “brought, and daily brings them under the severest Censure in England,” where, as he complained in another publication six years later, they were invariably stigmatized “as Enemies to the Negroes, Oppressors, ungrateful and merciless Masters, insolent Enslavers, imperious Torturers, Insulters of the Negro Colour, and proud Spoilers of the Work of God, who dare make Beasts of human Forms.” This entrenched “Way of thinking or speaking on this Subject” powerfully revealed the profound extent to which colonial involvement with slavery had contributed to serve as support for the ancient view that both the white inhabitants of the colonies and the social entities they had built were distorted and inferior versions of the free society from which they emanated.¹5 Literary works also contributed to this view. Perhaps no such work was more important in cementing the metropolitan image of colonists as others and of colonial societies as only marginally English than the scatological “travel” accounts of the magazine editor and humorist Edward (Ned) Ward. In 1698 he published his widely read A Trip to Jamaica, which went through at least seven editions over the next quarter century, and in 1699 the more modestly successful A Trip to New-England. Almost certainly, Ward never visited either of these places, but the appeal of his volumes was not their accuracy but their satiric bite, which left the reader with a vivid sense that the areas he purported to describe were crude, provincial, socially dysfunctional, and populated by the 13. “The Speech of Moses Bon Sàam” (1735), as reprinted in Thomas W. Krise, ed., Caribbeana: An Anthology of English Literature of the West Indies, 1657–1777 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 101–7. 14. Robert Robertson, The Speech of Mr. John Campo-bell, A Free Christian-Negro, to His Countrymen in the Mountains of Jamaica (London, 1736), 72–73. 15. Ibid., 73; Gentleman’s Magazine 11 (Mar. 1741): 145.

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outcasts of England. Whatever favorable things Ward had to say about either Jamaica or New England, no reader could leave these texts without a profound sense of the extraordinary cultural distance between them and England. In these largely unflattering assessments of Jamaica and New England, Ward catered to and confirmed existing stereotypes about the people and societies of colonial English America. At his hands, Jamaican and New England colonists appeared every bit as exotic as the native American Indians or Africans among whom they lived. By treating two colonies at the end of a geographic and social continuum that stretched from the wealthy and slave-rich, tropical and staple-producing island colony of Jamaica to the well-settled (with Europeans) farming, trading, and religiously oriented northern continental colonies of New England, these volumes might, had the second volume been as successful as the first, have led to a series of Wardean Trips to all of England’s prominent colonies. Ward appreciated that the colonies were distinctive, one from another, but his larger point was the more important distinction between England and the colonies as a whole, each of which, he suggested, represented a peculiar and shocking deviation from metropolitan England. Indeed, in Ward’s text, whatever social continuities existed between metropolis and colonies involved the very worst features, the underside, of English society. To the extent that Ward’s Trips were fictional, they were precursors of the emergence in the 1720s of the American colonies as an appropriate setting for belletristic literature. The American colonies, specifically Virginia, England’s, or after the union between England and Scotland in 1707 Britain’s, oldest colony, and its neighbor, Maryland, figured heavily in two Daniel Defoe novels published in 1722: The Fortunes and Misfortunes of the Famous Moll Flanders and The History and Remarkable Life of the Truly Honourable Colonel Jacque. The first told the story of a child born in Newgate Prison to a mother under sentence of transportation. Grown up, Moll married several times, became a highly successful shoplifter, and was eventually caught and sentenced to transportation to Virginia, where she used her gains from shoplifting to buy herself and her highwayman husband out of service, established a successful tobacco plantation, and finally achieved the status of a gentlewoman.¹6 The second was a tale of an unwanted child, who turned to a life of crime and in his late teens was kidnapped and sold as an indentured servant in Virginia. There, he worked hard, caught his master’s eye, was promoted to overseer, and after being discharged from his servitude became a successful planter, who, wealthy enough 16. Daniel Defoe, Fortunes and Misfortunes of the Famous Moll Flanders, ed. Albert J. Rivero (New York: Norton, 2004).

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to indulge his desire to see the larger world, spent a quarter century in Europe as a soldier before retiring to his plantation in Virginia.¹7 In these two novels, Defoe treated Virginia and Maryland as places of opportunity and redemption. Six characters, three in each novel, found themselves transported or kidnapped to Virginia, where they put their lives of poverty and crime behind them and became respectable property holders with large independent resources. Indeed, in Colonel Jacque, Defoe explicitly touted Virginia and Maryland as places where English felons and unfortunates could replicate Jacque’s experience, explaining how the customary system of land grants and credit offered to servants upon expiration of their terms provided them with a start on the road to independence and respectability, and having Colonel Jacque express the opinion that “every Newgate wretch, every desperate forlorn creature, the most despicable ruined man in the world, has here a fair opportunity put into his hands to begin the world again, and that upon a foot of certain gain and in a method exactly honest, with a reputation that nothing past will have any effect upon.” “Some of the most considerable planters in Virginia, and in Maryland also,” the colonel declared, had “raised themselves—namely, from being without a hat or a shoe to estates of £40,000 or £50,000; and in this method, I may add, no diligent man ever miscarried, if he had health to work and was a good husband; for he every year adding more land and planting more tobacco, which is real money, he must gradually increase in substance, till at length he gets enough to buy negroes and other servants, and then never works himself any more.” Moll’s mother, with whom she is reunited during an early stay in Virginia, tells her daughter much the same thing, recounting how “many a Newgate Bird” has become “a great Man” in Virginia. “Several Justices of the Peace, Officers of the Train Bands, and Magistrates of the Towns they live in,” she says, have “been burnt in the Hand” as transported fellows.¹8 Yet, if Defoe presented Virginia and Maryland as lands of opportunity for European felons, servants, and free people, his accounts did little to undermine the metropolitan image of the American colonies as places of excessive cruelty and cultural deviance and of American colonists as people of low social origins. Although Moll’s mother and Colonel Jacque were fortunate in being bought by men “of humanity,” the colonel noted that most “masters in Virginia” were “terrible things,” that white servants “worked hard, lodged hard, and fared 17. Daniel Defoe, The History and Remarkable Life of the Truly Honourable Colonel Jacque, in 2 vols., in The Works of Daniel Defoe, 16 vols. (New York, 1925), vols. 10–11. 18. Defoe, Colonel Jacque, 1:234–36, 2:4–5; Moll Flanders, 70–71.

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hard,” and that “the cruelty so much talked of, used in Virginia and Barbadoes, and other colonies, in whipping the negro slaves” was “the accustomed severity of the country.” Indeed, the colonel’s claim that his reforms in treating slaves with mercy and as rational beings rather than beasts had rendered Chesapeake slavery “less cruel and barbarous” as well as less dangerous than it was in Barbados and Jamaica testified to the continuing prevalence of violence and cruelty in the slave systems of the British American world. Similarly, the colonel’s description, following his acquisition of a little knowledge, of himself as being “buried alive in a remote part of the world, where I could see nothing at all, and hear but a little of what was seen, and that little not till at least half a year after it was done, and sometimes a year or more,” and his reluctance to return, for the same reason, further underlined for readers the cultural distance between Britain and its American colonies. Furthermore, both Moll’s and the colonel’s American histories and, more explicitly, Moll’s mother’s observation that “the greatest part of the Inhabitants of the Colony came thither in very indifferent Circumstances from England: that, generally speaking, they were of two sorts, either (1.) Such as were brought over by Masters of Ships to be sold as Servants . . . Or, (2.) Such as are Transported from Newgate and other Prisons, after having been found guilty of Felony and other Crimes punishable by Death,” could only underline and confirm for metropolitans the appropriateness of the language of otherness for Britain’s American colonists.¹9 Works from other genres published in Britain also spoke to the question of metropolitans’ lack of esteem for colonists and colonies. In 1708 John Oldmixon produced the first comprehensive history of the British American empire, which he published in two volumes in London and in 1741 revised and expanded in a new edition. Until 1755 it was the only such history. In this detailed colony-by-colony account, Oldmixon sought to call attention to “the great Increase in Wealth” enjoyed by Britain as a result of its successful and expanding empire. As he wrote in his dedication, however, he also conceived of his work as an attempt to show the falsity of the “Scandal which the Enemies of the Plantations maliciously throw upon them,” including especially charges about the “the vulgar Descent of the Inhabitants,” which he denounced as both “ridiculous” and “unjust.” Arguing that some colonists were “descended from . . . the most ancient and honourable Families in England,” he pointed out that many other colonists of lesser descent had “by their Prudence and Industry . . . rais’d Fortunes” and “acquire[d] Estates” in America sufficient to “ennoble them” if their achievements had been made in Britain, observing that such achievements were the essence of “true Nobility” and infinitely more 19. Defoe, Captain Jacque, 1:198, 204, 231–32, 265; 2:97–98, 130; Moll Flanders, 70.

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impressive than titles derived merely from “a long Roll of Ancestry,” without respect to either “Reason or Merit.”²0 Over the next half century, many other British analysts acknowledged the justice of Oldmixon’s protest. The economic writer Malachy Postlethwayt, for example, affirmed that, even though the colonies were “much frequented by unfortunate persons,” such people “oftentimes” eventually became “wealthy there.”²¹ “Nothing is more certain, or better known,” declared an anonymous political writer in 1766, “than that necessity has been the cause of almost every emigration that has happened, and that the beginnings of most American properties were remarkably slender.”²² But these and similar affirmations that the colonies provided opportunities for both metropolitan outcasts and ambitious settlers did little to transform the negative metropolitan image of the colonial world. Throughout the eighteenth century, metropolitan publications continued to depict the colonies as receptacles for the waste population of Britain, who would never overcome the stains of their social origins nor replicate in America the social milieus that had rejected them at home. Routinely, colonials objected, metropolitan commentators continued to show that they thought “meanly of the Colonies,”²³ to “spread the grossest Misrepresentations, and wickedly toil to make the World believe” that American settlers were “a Clan of Kidnappers, Pickpockets, Knaves, and Villains,” and to stigmatize them with “the black characters of Unhospitable, Brutal, Savage, Covetous and Barbarous” people. By “freely bestow[ing]” such “Epithets” upon settlers,²4 metropolitans effectively continued to categorize colonials as others who, despite their mostly British descent, were something less than genuine Britons, “a lower order of men in the scale than Europeans,” who, protested one American, deserved little more than “the sovereign contempt of their countrymen” in Britain.²5 Even Adam Smith subscribed to this image in his Theory of Moral Sentiments, published in London in 1759. In a section on the differences in customs between a savage and “a humane and polished people,” Smith observed that 20. John Oldmixon, The British Empire in America, Containing the History of the Discovery, Settlement, Progress and Present State of All the British Colonies, on the Continent and Islands of America, 2 vols. (London, 1708), 1:iv, xxxi, xxxvii. 21. Malachy Postlethwayt, Universal Dictionary of Trade and Commerce, 4th ed. (London, 1764), s.v. “Plantations.” 22. Application of Some General Political Rules, To the Present State of Great-Britain, Ireland and America (London, 1766), 75. 23. [ Jonathan Blenman], Remarks on Several Acts of Parliament Relating more especially to the Colonies abroad (London, 1742), v. 24. Roscommon, To the Author of those Intelligencers printed at Dublin (New York, 1733), 2, 8. 25. “A Friend of Liberty, this Colony and all Mankind to Mr. Hall,” Aug. 20, 1767, Providence Gazette, Sept. 5, 1767.

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there was “not a negro from the coast of Africa, who does not,” in respect to fortitude, “possess a degree of magnanimity, which the soul of his sordid master is scarce capable of conceiving. Fortune never exerted more cruelly her empire over mankind,” he added, “than when she subjected those nations of heroes to the refuse of the jails of Europe, of wretches who possess the virtues neither of the countries which they come from, nor of those which they go to, and whose levity, brutality, and baseness, so justly expose them to the contempt of the vanquished.”²6 Common to all British colonies, the legalization of slavery was the most glaring deviation from metropolitan British social norms, but a variety of other characteristics operated throughout the early centuries of empire to sustain a negative image of the American colonies as not quite British, or even as essentially foreign places, which, even though most of their free inhabitants had originated in Britain, were incapable of reproducing British society. Living in exotic places among the strange peoples whose land they had taken or who had been imported to labor for them, colonial settlers, as depicted from the metropolitan perspective through the language of alterity, seemed to be a separate breed, a mixture of poor laborers, former servants, transported felons, economic and social adventurers, and religious deviants who had been unable to make it in Britain and who had been demographically and culturally contaminated in America through their sexual liaisons with native peoples and imported Africans. That such people should create societies characterized by suspect sexual mores, religious deviance or irreligion, crudity, incivility, provinciality, and long-term cultural degeneration, presided over by social upstarts driven largely by material objectives, was, for metropolitans, only to be expected. III That elite colonials should find metropolitan usage of a language of alterity in reference to colonial free populations deeply offensive is unsurprising. Having always claimed the traditional rights of Englishmen as an essential part of their inheritance, they had long aspired to metropolitan recognition of their identity as British people living in demonstrably British societies and governed by British institutions. These aspirations had been a powerful consideration in the long-term contests and uneasy negotiations between colonial leaders intent upon preserving entire their constituents’ inherited rights and metropolitan representatives charged by the Crown with achieving objectives at times incompatible with those rights. 26. Adam Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments (London, 1759), 402–3.

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Of course, champions of the colonies labored to counteract the metropolitan image of the origins of their settler populations and the use of the language of otherness to characterize them. Thus did the Virginia planter Robert Beverley directly address Josiah Child’s remarks his History and Present State of Virginia, published in London in 1705. Granting Child’s point that “at first” the plantations were “for the most part . . . peopled by Persons of low Circumstances, and by such as were willing to seek their Fortunes in a Foreign Country” and acknowledging that no person who “cou’d live easy in England ” or had there a “plentifull Estate” would “voluntarily abandon a happy Certainty, to roam after imaginary Advantages in a New World” and confront “the infinite Difficulties and Dangers, that attend[ed] a New Settlement,” Beverley insisted that once a regular constitution had been “firmly established” and “after the advantages of the Climate, and the fruitfulness of the Soil were well known, and all the dangers incident to Infant Settlement were over, People of better Condition retir’d thither with their Families, either to increase the Estates they had before, or else to avoid being persecuted for their Principles of Religion, or Government.”²7 Almost six decades later, in 1764, the young Virginian Arthur Lee, a student in Edinburgh, sought to answer Adam Smith’s charges in An Essay in Vindication of the Continental Colonies of America. Perhaps more fully than any other writer published in London up to that time, Lee laid out the elements of the language of otherness that had long been used in the metropolis in reference to the colonies and expressed the depths of colonial resentment at the pervasive metropolitan application of that language to the American colonies and their inhabitants. By implying that American colonists consisted of “the refuse of their respective countries” and that they were “utterly destitute of every virtue, or abandoned to the influence of every infamous and detested vice,” Smith had, Lee complained indignantly, without “the least shadow of truth,” at least in reference to Britain’s American “continental colonies,” debased the Americans “into Monsters” who “should be treated with reproaches more rigorous than the severest justice, unmitigated by the least humanity, would utter against the most perfectly vicious.”²8 Such slurs, Lee declared, were “as bitter an invective as ever fell from the tongue of man.” In specific reference to his own native Virginia, he contended that “no colony had ever a nobler foundation,” its founders being “distinguished, even in Britain, for rank, for fortune, for abilities,” and pointed out 27. Robert Beverley, The History and Present State of Virginia, ed. Louis B. Wright (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1947), 58, 286–88. 28. Arthur Lee, An Essay in Vindication of the Continental Colonies of America, From the Censure of Mr. Adam Smith, in his Theory of Moral Sentiments (London, 1764), iii–iv.

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that the subsequent increase of free inhabitants had mostly come from people “from Britain, and other countries, who chose to seek their fortunes in a new and rising world.” He did not deny that Virginia had received its share of transported felons, but insisted that such people, when “transported to a country where there is little opportunity, and still less necessity for stealing,” usually reformed and became honest settlers. Moreover, he emphasized, “such persons” had “been rarely the founders of families which became afterwards eminent,” and few such families in either Virginia or any of the other American colonies could “be traced from so mean an original.” In short, Lee concluded, “the inhabitants of the colonies” were “descended from worthy ancestors, from whom,” contrary to Smith, they had not “degenerated.” To support this contention, Lee observed that many analysts had acknowledged the colonists “to be, at this period, a humane, hospitable, and polished people” entirely undeserving of “the ignominy of being styled, the refuse of jails, inhuman, brutal, and base.” How “the mind of a man of sense, a philosopher, a moralist,” could “be so strangely perverted,” Lee could explain only by his gullibility in being imposed on by “the reports of wretches” designed “to catch the ear of vulgar credulity.”²9 Arising in colonial societies that, like most early modern European colonies of settlement in the Americas, considered themselves extensions of the parent state, settler indignation of the sort expressed by Beverley and Lee did not lead to the explicit creation of counter identities constructed to emphasize the positive features of the colonial self. Rather, in the formation of colonial identities the metropolitan center continued to be normative. What colonials so painfully sought from fellow Britons at home was an admission that colonial creations measured up to metropolitan standards. Moreover, the immediate presence in the colonies of culturally different people both indigenous and imported from Africa also operated to sustain the cultural power of the center in the formation of collective identities on the peripheries. To be sure, provincial identities differed substantially from one colony to another, but they were all informed by an inherited set of values and institutions that made them both recognizably British and culturally similar, and they all possessed a deep pride in being part of an empire that was comparatively free, commercially successful, and, after Britain’s stunning victories in the Seven Years’ War, undeniably mighty, in association with which they had made rapid strides in economic and cultural improvement and had enjoyed a high degree of self-direction in their internal affairs. That they might maintain their connection with Britain on increasingly favorable and mutually beneficial terms was the animating hope of most colonists in the wake of the Seven Years’ War. 29. Ibid., 10, 18, 22–23, 25, 30–31.

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IV The metropolitan administration’s efforts to tighten the reins of colonial governance after the Seven Years’ War rapidly shattered this expectation. By endeavoring to tax the colonies for revenue and in other ways to diminish their authority over their internal affairs, new metropolitan initiatives effectively rendered the colonists’ ancient claims to a British identity and an equality of rights with metropolitan Britons highly problematic. Vigorously resisting such measures, the colonists explicitly challenged metropolitan conceptions of colonies as subordinate appendages of the parent state and roused latent fears that the colonists were intent on achieving an independence that would deprive metropolitans of the vast economic and strategic benefits that colonies supplied. This situation provoked widespread indignation among metropolitans and invited them to lapse into the language of otherness that Britons had long used to identify those who had left the home islands for America and other places overseas. The existing language made it easy for resentful metropolitans to condemn the colonists as the descendants of “a set of vagabonds and transports,” an “obstinate, senseless, and abandoned set of convicts,” to deplore their “baseless ingratitude,” to charge them with treason, and to label them as rebels.³0 The doggedness with which most of the continental colonies resisted each new round of metropolitan efforts to bring them to acknowledge the authority of the British Parliament over their internal affairs only intensified metropolitan resentment toward them. More and more, complained Benjamin Franklin, who resided in London through most of the 1760s and early 1770s, metropolitans used disparaging language to express a “settled Malice against the Colonies.” By such language, metropolitans continued, as so many had done for the past century and a half, to identify colonists as a category of others, “foreigners” who, however much they might aspire to be British, could never actually achieve those aspirations, and who on the scale of civilization were only slightly above the native Amerindians whose lands they had stolen and the African slaves whose bodies they had expropriated to work for them.³¹ 30. The General Opposition of the Colonies to the Payment of the Stamp Duty, and the Consequences of Enforcing Obedience by Military Measures, Impartially Considered (London, 1766), 16. 31. Benjamin Franklin to Thomas Cushing, June 10, 1770, in The Papers of Benjamin Franklin, ed. Leonard W. Labaree et al., 39 vols. to date (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1959–), 18:122; Franklin, “Fragments on the Stamp Act,” Jan. 1766, 13:77, 81; Franklin to Gazeteer and New Daily Advertiser, Dec. 28, 1765, 12:414, and Jan. 6, 1768, 15:13; Franklin to Public Advertiser, Jan. 2, 1766, 13:5, and Apr. 5, 1774, 21:185; Franklin to William Franklin, Mar. 22, 1775, 21:598; Franklin, Examination, 1766, 13:150. To prevent repetition, some sentences that can be found in chap. 11 have been eliminated from this paragraph.

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Not all Britons shared this low opinion of colonists, of course, and a vigorous Opposition sought unsuccessfully to counter it within Britain. Well into the mid-1770s, colonial leaders clung to the hope that men more favorably disposed to them might gain power, as they had briefly done during the Stamp Act crisis in 1765–66, change political course, and create an atmosphere in which colonials could achieve the British identity they had long sought. However, as during the crisis over the Coercive Acts in 1774, it became ever more clear that the administration was unlikely to back down from its demands for colonial acceptance of parliamentary authority, more and more Americans began to appreciate that the metropolitan government would never relent from its determination, as the young Alexander Hamilton put it in a 1774 pamphlet, to put Americans “of all ranks and conditions, opulent as well as indigent . . . upon a less favourable footing” even than those dependent people in Britain, who, said Hamilton, quoting Sir William Blackstone, were “in so mean a situation, that they are supposed to have no will of their own.”³² If this appreciation finally supplied a context in which colonial Americans could begin the slow process of developing a counter identity, British military and naval hostilities, launched in the spring of 1775 in an effort to quell colonial resistance, led directly to the widespread demonization in the colonies of the existing British ruling establishment, the movements for independence in thirteen contiguous continental colonies, and the early articulations of a broader American identity among the revolting republican states. Yet, this counter identity had two peculiar features. First, although their longstanding mutual attachment to their British heritage and their more recent mutual antagonism to Britain provided the preconditions for a union among the thirteen disparate states, the new American identity that began to take shape after 1765 existed in a symbiotic and unequal relationship with colonial/ state identities that were deeply entrenched and, for many decades, infinitely more powerful. Throughout the War for Independence, the Confederation era, and the first three-quarters of a century after the creation of a somewhat stronger national union with the Constitution of 1787, American identity would continue to be subordinated to and mediated through the provincial identities of the several states that composed it, as political leaders would show a preference for provincial over national interests and considerations, in foreign as well as in domestic affairs. Although it would affect political decisions for another century, the American antagonism to Britain developed during the War for 32. Alexander Hamilton, The Farmer Refuted, [Feb. 23], 1774, in The Papers of Alexander Hamilton, ed. Harold C. Syrett and Jacob E. Cooke, 19 vols. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1961–73), 1:1005–7.

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Independence lacked the staying power to remain central to the emerging national American identity.³³ Second, in contrast to later colonial projects, which left postcolonial nations with a legacy of exploitation, oppression, and underdevelopment, early modern English/British colonialism in America, at least for free settlers of European descent, was a highly positive experience, something to be embraced, not rejected. Just as the rapid demographic, economic, and political development of the colonies and their growing value to Britain had prevented the widespread metropolitan “othering” of the colonies from stimulating the development of oppositional identities during the colonial era, so their colonial experience provided Americans with a well-developed framework for self-realization at the provincial level and a blueprint for expansion across a huge continent. Their deep attachment to British ideas of consensual government, rule of law, sanctity of private property, and Protestantism, their self-serving conception of colonization as a noble endeavor to bring civility and civic improvement to previously rude and undeveloped worlds, and the embeddedness of British institutions and legal culture in their existing polities meant that any emerging counter identity would not require the wholesale repudiation of their British heritage.³4 Indeed, in an emphatic denial of a century and a half of metropolitan “othering,” Americans after 1776, constructing a new nation, could eschew monarchy and embrace republicanism while still thinking of themselves as the true heirs of Britishness.³5 33. For an elaboration of this argument, see Jack P. Greene, “State and National Identities in the Era of the American Revolution,” in Don H. Doyle and Marco Pamplona, eds., Nationalism in the New World (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2006), 61–79 (see chap. 15 in this volume). 34. On this point, see Jack P. Greene, “Colonial History and National History: Reflections on a Continuing Problem” and “Elaborations,” in William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 64 (April 2007): 235–50, 281–86 (see chap 4. in this volume); and Greene, “The Cultural Dimensions of Political Transfers: An Aspect of the European Occupation of the Americas,” Early American Studies 6 (Spring 2008): 1–26 (see chap. 18 in this volume). 35. I subsequently expanded the remarks on which this chapter is based and presented them in short papers entitled “State Identities, National Identity, and the Development of Nationalism in the American Federal State,” at the 51st International Congress of Americanists, Santiago, Chile, July 15, 2003; and at the conference “Nationalism in the New World,” at Vanderbilt University, Nashville, Tennessee, October 9, 2003.

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— fif teen —

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ow a nation forged out of a composite of old polities develops a national identity and sense of loyalty among its citizens is an intricate and fascinating problem that deserves more attention than it has so far had in the new literature on the history of early modern and modern state formation. This problem is perhaps even more intriguing when, as in the case of the United States, the new national state is an unintended consequence of an unplanned political movement. Obviously, there could have been no specifically American nationalism based upon loyalty to an American national polity before there was such a polity or at the very least the imminent prospect of such a state. And the new United States, initiated in the throes of political resistance against Whitehall and military resistance against a trained army, jointly intent on bending colonists to the metropolitan will, did not come into existence until 1776 and was not even in prospect before the fall of 1774. To unravel the problems of national identity emerging in the United States during the Revolutionary era—what kind of and how—it is first necessary to understand the nature of the corporate identities and loyalties extant in the several polities that came together to form the nation. Insofar as the inhabitants of these polities had a larger national identity, that identity was not, contrary to the implicit assumption of a couple of generations of American studies

This chapter evolved out of some brief remarks I made while chairing a roundtable discussion at the session “Nationalism, Loyalties, and Identities in the Era of the Early Republic” at the annual SHEAR Conference at Pennsylvania State University, University Park, on July 17, 1997. With substantial additions, this essay was published in English as “State and National Identities in the Era of the American Revolution,” in Don H. Doyle and Marc Pamplona, eds., Nationalism in the New World (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2006), 61–79, and in Portuguese as “Identitades dos estados e identidade national à época da Revoluçâo Americana,” in Marco A. Pamplona and Don H. Doyle, eds., Nacionalismo no novo mundo: A Formaçâo de Estados-Naçâo no Século XIX (Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo: Editora Record, 2008), 99–125. It is here reprinted with permission from the English version.

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students, pervaded by a longing for the nascence of an American national self, engendered by an American national state. Rather, it revolved around the colonists’ pride in their attachment to the highly successful national state of Great Britain. This attachment was a function of the very nature of early modern English colonization. As Richard Helgerson and Liah Greenfeld have recently emphasized, a distinctive and well-articulated sense of national identity was a product of the late Elizabethan and early Jacobean eras, the very time when English people were beginning to form the first English colonies in America. Protestantism and, increasingly during the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the slowly expanding commercial and maritime superiority of the English nation were significant components of this identity. Far more significant, however, was the English system of law and liberty. Epitomized by the consensual institutions of juries and parliaments and by the tradition of the subordination of the monarch to law, this system, contemporary English and many foreign observers agreed, constituted the principal distinction between English people and all others on the face of the globe.¹ The overwhelmingly English people who created and organized all of the English or, after 1707, British colonies in America took with them to their new homes explicit and deeply held claims to the culture they left behind and to the national identity implicit in that culture. Everywhere they went to colonize, they manifested their powerful determination to express and preserve their Englishness by reordering existing physical and cultural landscapes along English lines, imposing upon them English patterns of land occupation, economic and social organization, cultural practices, and political, legal, and religious systems, and making the English language the language of authority. This was true even of those settlements formed by those who, like Massachusetts Puritans, hoped to improve upon English institutions. Far from being moderated by the contemporary immigration of significant numbers of people from other parts of Britain, Ireland, and Germany, this anglicizing impulse seems actually to have been reinforced during the decades after 1740 by growing communication and commercial links between the colonies and Britain and by the colonies’ important participation in the imperial wars against Catholic, and allegedly despotic, France and Spain between 1739 and 1763. Probably at no time during the colonial era had colonial British patriotism and nationalism been more intense than they were at the conclusion of the Seven Years’ War. 1. See Richard Helgerson, Forms of Nationhood: The Elizabethan Writing of England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992); and Liah Greenfeld, Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992), 27–87.

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For English colonists and their descendants, however, a variety of conditions operated during the long colonial years both to render colonial claims to Englishness problematic and to enhance the urgency of such claims among immigrants and their descendants. These included the colonists’ great physical distance from England; the social and cultural contrasts, especially during the colonies’ earliest decades, between the simple and crude societies they were constructing and the complex and infinitely more polite society from which they came; their situation on the outermost edges of English civilization, in the midst of populations who to them appeared pagan, barbarous, and savage; the presence, if not the preponderance, in their societies of aliens, in the form of Amerindians and, later, Africans; their frequent reliance upon new institutions, such as plantations and chattel, race-based slavery; their persistent confl icts with the parent state over whether they, as colonists, were entitled to English laws and privileges; and, perhaps most important of all, a general tendency among people in the home islands to regard them as “others” who fell considerably short of metropolitan standards.² Nothing brought home more forcefully to colonists the problematic character of their claims to a British identity than the various measures at issue between the colonies and Britain between 1764 and 1776. At bottom, the colonists objected to being taxed and governed in their internal affairs without their consent precisely because such measures were contrary to the rights and legal protections traditionally enjoyed by free or “independent” Britons and thus called into question their identity as British people. The vociferousness of their objections proclaimed the profound importance they continued to attach to maintaining that identity. Indeed, what came to be known as the American Revolution was to a significant degree a direct outgrowth of colonial resistance to those measures and should be understood as a movement by colonial Britons to secure metropolitan acknowledgment of their British identity. Before the winter of 1775–76, when sentiment for independence became widespread, union among the colonies was principally a means to this end.³ Important as it was, the colonists’ shared identity as freeborn and Protestant Britons was always mediated through a set of colonial identities. Over the years, each colony, as a separate and semiautonomous social and political en2. These themes are elaborated more fully in Jack P. Greene, “Empire and Identity from the Glorious Revolution to the American Revolution,” in P. J. Marshall, ed., The Eighteenth Century, vol. 2 of The Oxford History of the British Empire, ed. William Roger Louis, 5 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998–2001), 208–30 (see chap. 11 in this volume). 3. This interpretation is developed at greater length in Jack P. Greene, The British Revolution in America (Austin: Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas, 1996).

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tity, evolved a specific corporate identity peculiar to itself. Rooted in a particular physical space, manifested in a specific form of socioeconomic organization, extended, modified, and refined by decades of collective experience, and internalized by several generations of creoles and immigrants, these colonial identities and the loyalties and commitments associated with them had, by the era of the American Revolution, become powerfully entrenched. If the colonists shared a common British identity, that identity thus everywhere existed in symbiosis with another identity that was locationally and socially based, historically grounded, explained, and justified, culturally transmitted from one generation to the next, and prescriptive. Briton was thus a category with many subcategories. To be a Virginian was to be different from a Pennsylvanian or a Rhode Islander. If colonists undertook political resistance to defend their claims to a British identity, they also brought to that resistance well-developed and deeply held provincial identities with which they were comfortable, of which they were proud, and about which they could be extraordinarily defensive. If attacks upon their entitlement to a British national identity drove the colonists to resist, the strength of their provincial identities helps to explain why they were not more hesitant in 1776 to give up their British identity. Long ago, in most cases, they had found ways to fold their British identity—with its emphasis upon Protestantism, liberty, rule of law, consensual governance, civility, and commerce—into their provincial identities. For that reason, when the colonists abandoned their formal connection with Britain, they did not so much forfeit their national British identity as reaffi rm their attachment to and exemplification of its principal components. Secure in their several provincial identities, colonial resistance leaders could relinquish the association with Britain and transform colonies into republican polities without fear of losing their longstanding and psychologically important sense of themselves as freeborn Protestant peoples and legitimate heirs to British traditions of consensual governance and rule of law. By asserting their distinctive provincial identities and pointedly carrying them over into the new states they created out of the old colonial polities, Revolutionary leaders everywhere effectively staked out a claim for those states as the genuine repositories of all that was admirable about the British national identity and thereby reiterated their continuing cultural identification with the larger British world to which they had so long been attached. Moreover, throughout the Revolutionary era—and in the founding states probably for several decades thereafter—these provincial identities represented the principal form of collective consciousness. Before the mid-1770s, the conventional wisdom, as expressed, for instance, by Benjamin Franklin in a 1760

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pamphlet published in London, was that the colonies were too dissimilar even to act in concert for their own defense, much less to amalgamate into a single polity. The colonies were “not only under different governors, but have different forms of government, different laws, different interests, and some of them different religious persuasions and different manners,” Franklin wrote, adding that the “Jealousy of each other” was “so great that however necessary an union of the colonies has long been, for their common defence and security against their enemies, yet they have never been able to effect such an union among themselves, nor even to agree in requesting the mother country to establish it for them.”4 When delegates from the continental colonies came together in the First and Second Continental Congresses in 1774 and 1775, this insight hovered in the background. Those who were most cautious about resistance to Britain, including especially the Pennsylvania lawyer and future loyalist Joseph Galloway, stressed the profound differences among the colonies and the probable effects of those differences upon their ability to maintain a common resistance. “Their different Forms of Government—Productions of Soil—and Views of Commerce, their different Religions—Tempers and private Interests—their Prejudices against, and Jealousies of each other—all have, and,” he predicted, “ever” would operate “to create such a Diversity of Interests[,] Inclinations, and Decisions, that they” would never be able “to unite together even for their own Protection.” In Galloway’s view, this disunity had two potentially harmful effects. First, it made the colonies “weak in themselves.” Many of them, he noted in calling attention to the pervasive institution of chattel slavery in North America, already held “an Enemy within their own Bowels ready to destroy” them. Second, it made them potential arenas for civil wars. When “Controversies founded in Interest, Religion or Ambition” erupted among them, Galloway warned, the colonies would become “an Easy Prey to every foreign Invader.”5 Nevertheless, the strong and surprisingly pervasive feelings of identification with the “common cause” in 1774–76 provided a foundation for the early articulation of aspirations for the creation of a broader American identity. Thus did the Virginia lawyer and orator Patrick Henry announce at the First 4. Benjamin Franklin, The Interest of Great Britain Considered (London, 1760), in The Papers of Benjamin Franklin, ed. Leonard W. Labaree et al., 27 vols. to date (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1959–), 9:90. 5. Joseph Galloway to Samuel Verplanck, Dec. 30, 1774, in Paul H. Smith, ed., Letters of Delegates to Congress 1774–1789, 26 vols. (Washington, D.C.: Library of Congress, 1976– 2000), 2:288. Unless stated otherwise, subsequent citations to delegates’ writings are to this collection.

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Continental Congress that the “Distinctions between Virginians, Pennsylvanians, New Yorkers, and New Englanders, are no more. I am not a Virginian, but an American.”6 Thus did the Pennsylvania physician Benjamin Rush in the days immediately after the Declaration of Independence urge his fellow delegates to give “up colony distinctions.” “We are now One people—a new nation,” he declared, arguing both that Americans were “not more divided” in their “Interests, language & trade” than were the people of Great Britain and that “the variety of interests” and productions among them was actually such an extraordinary “Advantage to us” as to suggest “that heaven [had] intended us for one people.”7 “One general Congress has brought the Colonies to be acquainted with each other,” Connecticut delegate Silas Deane waxed optimistically in early 1775, “and I am in hopes another may effect a lasting Confederation which will need nothing perhaps, but time, to mature into a complete & perfect American Constitution.”8 But such “national” enthusiasm always was tempered by recognition of the incredible diversity among the colonies. As the Rhode Islander Samuel Ward wrote to a correspondent back home, congressional delegates were certainly “very happy . . . that the common Good of our Country” seemed “to be the General Aim” of all the delegates9 and that, as the Virginian Richard Henry Lee declared, “all the old Provinces, not one excepted” were “directed by the same firmness of union, and determination to resist [Britain] by all ways and to every extremity.”¹0 As they became better acquainted with one another, studied their collaborators’ “Character and Tempers” and “Principles and Views,” and learned ever more about the distinctive patterns of “Trade, Policy, and Whole Interest of a Dozen [separate] Provinces,”¹¹ however, they also rapidly came to the realization that “the different Forms of Government in the several Colonies, different Educations, Books, & Company naturally occasion the viewing political Objects in a light not always the same.”¹² These differences provided the foundation for unfavorable comparisons and growing jealousies. As delegates sized up representatives from other colonies and found them wanting, they also developed an enhanced appreciation for what it was about their own provincial society that made it superior to 6. Patrick Henry, Speech, as reported in John Adams’s Notes on Debates, Sept. 6, 1774, 1:28. 7. Benjamin Rush’s Notes for a Speech, Aug. 1, 1776, 4:598–601. 8. Silas Deane to Patrick Henry, Jan. 25, 1775, 1:291. 9. Samuel Ward to Henry Marchant, Oct. 7, 1774, 1:162. 10. Richard Henry Lee to William Lee, May 10, 1775, 1:337. 11. John Adams to Abigail Adams, Oct. 7, 1774, 1:154–55. 12. Samuel Ward to Henry Marchant, Oct. 7, 1774, 1:162.

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those in other regions, thus powerfully reinforcing the provincial identities that they had brought with them to Philadelphia. This process did little to alter existing stereotypes and suspicions. As the object of the Coercive Acts of 1774, Massachusetts was at the center of the firestorm of resistance, and New England delegates “found a strong Jealousy of Us, from New England, and the Massachusetts in Particular.” Delegates from other regions, the Massachusetts lawyer John Adams wrote to his wife, Abigail, were suspicious that the New Englanders had “Designs of Independency,” that they wanted to create and dominate “an American Republic,” that they were religious bigots who acted on “Presbyterian Principles—and twenty other Things.” The appointment of George Washington, a Virginian, as commander in chief of the army in the spring of 1775, Adams hoped, would allay such jealousies and “have a great Effect, in cementing and securing the Union of these Colonies.”¹³ Washington’s appointment may indeed have cemented relations between Virginia and Massachusetts, the two colonies that over the past decade had vied with one another to take the lead in resisting British efforts to tax the colonies and tighten up colonial administration, but it by no means eliminated the deep fissures and jealousies among the colonies. When the British government showed every sign that it was determined to secure colonial obedience by force and when throughout the first half of 1776 colonial leaders increasingly began to think in terms of political independence, they remained uneasy, lest some recalcitrant colony break the unity of the resistance movement. Virginia, the two Carolinas, and the New England colonies all moved relatively quickly to support the movement for independence, but some of the middle colonies, including especially Maryland, Pennsylvania, and New York, acted with far more deliberation. This anxious situation aroused all the latent suspicions and distrust of one another. Thus did James Duane in May 1776 caution his fellow New York delegate John Jay against moving too quickly for independence. We should wait to see “the Conduct of the [other] middle colonies before we come to a Decision,” he wrote; “it cannot injure us to wait a few weeks: the Advantage will be great, for this trying Question will clearly discover the true principles & the Extent of the Union of the Colonies.”¹4 Such cautious behavior did not endear New Yorkers to their fellow resistance leaders. Before Maryland opted for independence, John Adams described it as “so eccentric a Colony—sometimes hot sometimes so cold—now so high, then so low—that . . . I have often wished it could exchange Places with Halifax[, Nova Scotia.]”¹5 But Adams reserved his most negative judg13. John Adams to Abigail Adams, June 17, 1775, 1:497. 14. James Duane to John Jay, May 18, 1776, 4:35. 15. John Adams to James Warren, May 20, 1776, 4:41.

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ments for New York, the last colony to opt for independence. “Is it Deceit, or Simple Dul[l]ness in the People of ” New York “which occasions their eccentric and retrograde Politicks,” Adams fumed to the New Hampshire politician John Sullivan in late June 1776.¹6 “What is the Reason that New York must continue to embarrass the Continent? Must it be so forever? What is the Cause of it?” Adams asked the Connecticut leader Samuel Holden Parsons at the same time. “Have they no Politicians, capable of instructing and forming the Sentiments of their People? Or are their People incapable of seeing and feeling like other Men. One would think that their Proximity to New England, would assimilate their opinions and Principles,” he observed. “One would think too that the [presence of units of the British] Army [in New York] would have some Influence upon them. But it seems to have none. N. York is likely to have the Honour of being the very last of all in imbibing the genuine Principles and the true system of American Policy. Perhaps,” he despaired, “she will never entertain them all.”¹7 In a letter to his friend Cotton Tufts, Adams penetrated to what he thought was the fundamental explanation for New York’s hesitant progress toward endorsing independence: its very character and collective identity. New York, he wrote, still acts in Character, like a People without Courage or sense, or Spirit, or in short any one Virtue or Ability. There is neither Spunk nor Gumption, in that Province as a Body. Individuals are very clever. But it is the weakest Province in point of Intellect, Valour, public Spirit, or any thing else that is great and good upon the Continent. It is incapable of doing Us much good, or much Hurt, but from its local situation. The low Cunning of Individuals, and their Prostitution plagues Us, the Virtues of a few Individuals is of some Service to Us. But as a Province it will be a dead Weight upon any side, ours or that of our Enemies.¹8

The more delegates to Congress came to realize that political disagreements among the various colonies to some important extent rested upon deepseated social and characterological differences, the more attractive became the sort of explanation offered by Adams, founded as it was on the assumption that every colony had a distinctive corporate identity and character. If culturally and politically the colonists were all in a general sense Britons, the category Briton, they discovered, came in many varieties. “The Character of Gentlemen in the four New England Colonies,” wrote John Adams, one of the most astute observers of his fellow delegates, 16. John Adams to John Sullivan, June 23, 1776, 4:296. 17. John Adams to Samuel Holden Parsons, June 22, 1776, 4:292–93. 18. John Adams to Cotton Tufts, June 23, 1776, 4:298.

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differ[s] as much from those in the others, as that of the Common People differs, that is as much as several distinct Nations almost. Gentlemen, Men of Sense, or any kind of Education in the other Colonies are much fewer in Proportion than in N. England. Gentlemen in the other Colonies have large Plantations of slaves, and the common People among them are very ignorant and very poor. These Gentlemen are accustomed, habituated to higher Notions of themselves and the distinction between them and the common People, than We are.

“An instantaneous alteration of that Character of a Colony, and that Temper and those Sentiments which its Inhabitants imbibed with their Mother[’]s Milk, and which have grown with their Growth and strengthened with their Strength,” Adams opined, could “not be made without a Miracle.” Although he held out hope that “An Alteration of the Southern Constitution, which must certainly take Place if the War continues,” would “gradually bring all the Continent nearer and nearer to each other in all Respects,” he expressed his dread of the short-term “Consequences of this Dissimilitude of Character.” “Without the Utmost Caution on both sides, and the most considerate Forbearance with one another and prudent Condescension on both sides,” he worried, “they will certainly be fatal.”¹9 “In such a Period as this, Sir, when Thirteen Colonies unacquainted in a great Measure, with each other, are rushing together into one Mass,” Adams wrote another correspondent, “it would be a Miracle, if such heterogeneous Ingredients did not at first produce violent Fermentations.”²0 The pronounced heterogeneity to which Adams referred proved to be a formidable challenge to those who hoped to create a durable political union. Although it did not prevent all the colonies from voting for independence and transforming themselves into republican polities, it profoundly affected the character of the general government they began to try to construct in the summer of 1776. In the weeks immediately after the Declaration of Independence when Congress first took up the intricate problem of creating a durable political union among the former colonies, it quickly discovered how fundamental these differences actually were. The delegates disagreed strongly over whether slaves should be counted as property or as people in apportioning government expenses, whether the carrying trade should be taxed, whether states with western land claims should give them up to the general government, whether voting in Congress should be by states or by population or wealth, and, most important of all, how authority should be distributed between the national government and the states. 19. John Adams to Joseph Hawley, Nov. 25, 1775, 2:385–86. 20. Johns Adams to Samuel Osgood, Nov. 14, 1775, 2:342.

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Some delegates joined with John Witherspoon, president of the College of New Jersey, in urging a strong and permanent union. Arguing that a “common danger is the great and only effectual means of settling difficulties, and composing differences” and pointing out the efficacy of the current confl ict with Britain “in producing such a degree of union through these colonies, as nobody would have prophesied and hardly any would have expected,” Witherspoon urged that there would never be a more propitious time for the colonies to put aside their jealousies, transcend their local interests and attachments, and effect a vigorous and lasting union. “If the colonies are independent states, separate and disunited, after this war,” he warned, “we may be sure of coming off the worse.”²¹ But many delegates took a shorter-term view. Thus did the Virginian Benjamin Harrison advocate a confederation “in which the objects of the war should be defined, the terms of closing it delineated, and the colonies of the union bound to each other to contribute their respective force to obtain these objects, and when these objects were attained, that any one colony should have a right to say they will go no farther.”²² Harrison’s advocacy of providing a clear exit strategy for those states which found confederation uncongenial scarcely betokened even a deep commitment to the idea of a permanent union, much less any deep sense of American nationalism. The debate over confederation laid bare a fundamental difference between those states in which slavery was of paramount economic importance and those in which it was not. Thus did James Wilson of Pennsylvania vigorously insist that slaves ought to be taxed the same as free people. Some states, he noted, had “as many black as white [people], and to exempt slaves from taxation” would mean that those states “would not pay more than half of what they ought.” Besides, he objected, such an exemption would “be the greatest Encouragement to continue Slave keeping, and to increase them,” and slaves, he observed, “prevent[ed] freemen from cultivating a Country” and were “attended with many Inconveniences.” “If it is to be debated, whether Slaves are their Property,” the South Carolina planter Thomas Lynch angrily retorted, “there is an End of the Confederation. Our Slaves being our Property,” he asked, “why should they be taxed more than Land, Sheep, Cattle, Horses, &c.?” Benjamin Franklin, Wilson’s fellow Pennsylvania delegate had a ready answer. Slaves, he said, “rather weaken[ed] than strengthen[ed] the State, and there is therefore some difference between them and Sheep. Sheep will never make any Insurrections.”²³ 21. John Witherspoon, Speech, July 30, 1776, 4:584–86. 22. Benjamin Harrison to , Nov. 24, 1775, 2:382. 23. Speeches of James Wilson, Thomas Lynch, and Benjamin Franklin, in John Adams’s Notes of Debates, July 30, 1776, 4:568–69.

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In these early days of the American national union, however, the extent of slavery was not the crucial divide. Delegates from the states from New York south had deep reservations about the designs of New England, or what they referred to as the “Eastern states.” Thus did the Maryland delegate Samuel Chase worry that the “great Advantage in Trade” enjoyed by the “Eastern Colonies would give them a Superiority.”²4 Thus in a letter to New York delegate John Jay did Edward Rutledge of South Carolina express his dread of the New Englanders’ “over-ruling Influence in Council” and “their low Cunning, and those levelling Principles which Men without Character and without Fortune in general Possess, which are so captivating to the lower Class of Mankind, and which will occasion such a fluctuation of Property as to introduce the greatest disorder.” “If the Plan now proposed should be adopted,” Rutledge declared in the summer of 1776, “nothing less than the Ruin to some Colonies will be the Consequence of it. The idea of destroying all Provincial Distinctions and making every thing of the most minute kind bend to what they call the good of the whole,” he observed, “is in other Terms to say that these Colonies must be subject to the Government of the Eastern Provinces.” Rutledge spoke for many delegates when he expressed his resolve “to vest the Congress with no more Power than what is absolutely necessary, and to use a familiar Expression to keep the Staff in our own [that is, the states’] Hands, for I am confident if [it be] surrendered into the Hands of others a most pernicious use will be made of it.” “Unless it is greatly curtailed,” he predicted, the confederation could “never pass, as it is to be submitted to Men, in the respective Provinces who will not be led or rather driven into Measures which may lay the Foundation of their Ruin [as provinces].”²5 Of course, the determination to keep the preponderance of power in the hands of the states was not entirely a function of state jealousies and fears of domination and ruin. It had solid intellectual underpinnings, arising from the logic of the American constitutional argument for exemption from metropolitan interference in the internal affairs of the colonies. No principle had been more important to the colonial case than the doctrine that government had to be founded on consent. As John Dickinson explained to the inhabitants of Quebec in late 1774, “the first grand Right” of British governance was the right “of the People” to have “a Share in the Government of themselves.” By this right, he wrote, “is secured to them their own Government by their Representatives chosen by themselves and in consequence thereof of being ruled by Laws which they have themselves approved, not by Edicts of Men over 24. Speech of Samuel Chase in John Adams’s Notes of Debates, July 30, 1776, 4:568–69. 25. Edmund Rutledge to John Jay, June 29, 1776, 4:338.

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whom they have no Controul.” At this early stage of nation building, relatively few questioned that the state governments—in Dickinson’s words, the people’s “own government”—and not some distant general government, were the best vehicles for the protection of life, liberty, and property and most directly expressive of the people’s interests and identities.²6 The depth of this attachment to state governments combined with the expanding awareness of the dissimilarities among the states and the mutual suspicions and jealousies arising out of those dissimilarities caused many delegates to despair of ever achieving a viable union. “I am inclined to think that we shall never modell” a confederation “so as to be agreed to by all the Colonies,” observed the North Carolina delegate Joseph Hewes in late July 1776.²7 “The Ideas of North & South (or as now properly called East & West),” reported Connecticut delegate William Williams in August 1776, were “as wide as yer Poles.” With “such clashing & jarring Interests, such diversity of manners &c. &c,” he declared, “I little expect any permanent Union.”²8 The Pennsylvania lawyer John Dickinson, author of the initial draft of the Articles of Confederation, was one of the earliest of many analysts who questioned whether a formal union could ever be sustained and “whether in 20 or 30 Years this Commonwealth of Colonies may not be too unwieldy—& Hudson’s River be a proper Boundary for a separate Commonwealth to the Northward.” “I have a strong impression on my Mind,” he said, that such a division “will take Place.”²9 At the same time that Congress was making so little progress in what John Adams called the “most intricate, the most important, the most dangerous, and delicate Business” of designing a workable national government,³0 the individual colonies were rapidly and successfully transforming themselves into republican polities. By the fall of 1776, as Benjamin Rush reported to a French correspondent, “New governments” had been “instituted in all the states, founded on the authority of the people.”³¹ By early 1777, only three states, New York, New Hampshire, and Massachusetts, had failed to adopt formal constitutions, and New York and New Hampshire would soon do so. Moreover, these constitutions were expressive of local loyalties and pride, for the most part being 26. John Dickinson’s Draft Letter to Quebec, Oct. 24–26, 1774, 1:238. 27. Joseph Hewes to Samuel Johnston, July 28, 1776, 4:555–56. 28. Williams Williams to Ezekial Williams, Aug. 23, 1776, 4:587. 29. John Dickinson, Notes for a Speech in Congress, July 1, 1776, 4:356. David C. Hendrickson, Peace Pact: The Lost World of the American Founding (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2003), 104–57, provides an excellent analysis of the jealousies and divisions that informed the construction of the Articles of Confederation. 30. John Adams to James Warren, May 15, 1776, 3:678. 31. Benjamin Rush to Jacques Barbeu-Dubourg, Sept. 16, 1776, 5:183.

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warmly endorsed by the local populace. For example, after the South Carolina Provincial Congress had promulgated a new constitution in the spring of 1776 and selected new officers, the people reportedly responded “with Transports of Joy.” When the new officers walked through Charleston attended by a company of horse, John Adams learned from two men who had recently come from South Carolina to Philadelphia, “[t]he People gazed at them, with a kind of Rapture. They both told me,” said Adams, “that the Reflection that these were Gentlemen of their own Choice, whom they could trust, and whom they could displace if any of them should behave amiss, affected them so that they could not help crying.”³² Although the several state constitutions were similar to the extent of founding the polity on popular consent, assigning the predominance of power to the legislature, and providing for annual elections of legislators, they differed from one another in many particulars. These “particulars” were an expression of the identities that each of the colonies had developed over the long colonial era. Indeed, the extent to which these constitutions replicated, with a formal republican twist, the governing arrangements with which the colonists had been familiar in the colonial era is remarkable. In general, those constitutions tended, as the North Carolina delegate William Hooper remarked in the fall of 1776, to be “as nearly as similar as possible to the old one[s], abolishing little else but the regal & proprietary powers and deriving all power from the people.”³³ In providing for a single-house legislature, which many delegates to Congress regarded as “a visionary system,”³4 even the Pennsylvania constitution, which contained the most innovations and elicited the most opposition, replicated Pennsylvania’s colonial constitution, which also operated without a second branch of the legislature. To be sure, some states undertook some changes. Thus, John Adams praised the North Carolina and Virginia constitutions, prematurely in the case of Virginia, for making “an Effort for the Destruction of Bigotry” by abolishing “their Establishments of Episcopacy so far as to give compleat Liberty of Conscience to Dissenters, an Acquisition in favour of the Rights of Mankind,” he thought, “which is worth all the Blood and Treasure which has been and will be Spent in this war.”³5 Throughout the colonies, however, constitution makers tended to stay with the familiar. They did not reconstruct political boundaries, change the nature of local governance, alter the structure of the judicial system, or undertake any wholesale 32. John Adams to Abigail Adams, May 17, 1776, 4:18. 33. William Hooper to Joseph Hewes, Oct. 27, 1776, 5:410. 34. William Hooper to North Carolina Provincial Constitution, Oct. 26, 1776, 5:402. 35. John Adams to James Warren, Feb. 3, 1776, 6:201–02.

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overhaul of the ancient legal systems that had evolved during the long colonial period to suit the specific conditions of life and the “genius” or identity of the inhabitants of each state. Rather, they seem to have acted in the spirit of an observation of Connecticut delegate William Williams, who averred that it would be “impossible for us to get a better [constitution] on the whole than our Fathers chose for Us & we have long practised upon with great Peace & Happiness, and that any alterations or Innovations wo’d be attended with dangerous Consequence.”³6 The rapidity with which the state governments seized power and established their authority effectively dictated that provincial distinctions, with all “the local prejudices, and particular interests,” and specific identities they involved, would gain in intensity and contribute to the perpetuation of those extreme “jealousies of each other” that had come to the fore in the early days of the Revolution.³7 This development both expressed and sharpened the older provincial identities by which people in all the original states continued to define themselves. In effect, the composite American federal state in its initial form thus created an arena for the reiteration and sharpening of provincial state identities. So fundamental were these identities and the distinctions on which they were based that many people came to think of them as definitional. Indeed, they came to believe that, as the Rhode Island merchant Stephen Hopkins remarked in the early debates over the confederation, “[t]he Safety of the whole” depended “upon the Distinction of the Colonies.”³8 The Revolution, as Silas Deane of Connecticut said early in the struggle, was fundamentally about securing “the particular, & local Privileges, Rights, & immunities of British American Subjects” as those rights had been enjoyed and legally embedded in the several colonies.³9 This deep attachment to local rights, manners, and identities enormously affected the nature of the national government and dictated that attachments people had to it would be secondary to the primary attachments they had to their own states. While the congressional debates over the terms of confederation dragged on, congressional delegates showed considerable scrupulosity about infringing on the rights of the states. Thomas Burke from North Carolina was particularly articulate on this subject, denying that “provisions made by Continental Councils” should ever “be enforced by Continental authority.” To do so, he asserted, would be to give “Congress a Power to prostrate all the Laws and 36. William Williams to Jabez Huntington, Aug. 12, 1776, 4:666. 37. John Witherspoon, Speech, July 30, 1776, 4:584–86. 38. Stephen Hopkins, Speech, John Adams’s Notes of Debates, Aug. 1, 1776, 4:592–93. 39. Silas Deane to Thomas Mumford, Oct. 16, 1774, 1:201.

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Constitutions of the states” by creating “a Power within each [state] that must act entirely Independent of them, and might act directly contrary to them.” “By virtue of this Power,” he warned, Congress could “render Ineffectual all the Barriers Provided in the States for the Security of the Rights of the Citizens[,] for,” he explained, if they gave “a Power to act Coercively it must be against the Subject of some State, and the subject of every state was entitled to the Protection of that particular state, and subject to the Laws of that alone, because to them alone did he give his Consent.”40 In a similar vein, James Smith, a Pennsylvania delegate, objected to efforts to give Congress authority to institute wage and price controls, because “such a recommendation would interfere with the domestic police of each State, which” was a subject “of too delicate a nature to be touched by the congress.”4¹ Given such attitudes, it is scarcely surprising that the Articles upon which Congress eventually agreed left the balance of authority with the states. Ever on the alert for any provision that might leave “it in the power of the future Congress . . . to explain away every right before belonging to the States, or to make their power as unlimited as they pleased,” Thomas Burke encountered surprisingly little opposition to his “amendment, which held up the principle, that all sovereign Power was in the States separately, and that particular acts of it, which should be expressly enumerated, would be exercised in conjunction, and not otherwise; but that in all things else each State would Exercise all the rights and powers of sovereignty, uncontrolled.” Only Virginia voted against him, with New Hampshire abstaining. In its final form, Burke’s amendment, which became Article 2 of the Articles of Confederation, provided that “Each State retains its sovereignty, freedom, and independence, and every power, jurisdiction, and right, which is not by this confederation expressly delegated to the United States, in Congress assembled.”4² Burke interpreted his triumph as a necessary step for the perpetuation of a weak national government, and he was delighted that it came so easily. “I was much pleased to find the opinion of accumulating powers to Congress so little supported, and I promise myself, in the whole business I shall find my ideas relative thereto nearly similar to those of most of the States,” Burke wrote to fellow North Carolinian Richard Caswell. “In a word, Sir, I am of opinion the Congress should have power enough to call out and apply the common strength for the common defence: but not for the partial purposes of ambition.”4³ Nor did he think even that the jurisdiction of the national govern40. Thomas Burke’s Notes of Debates, Feb. 25, 1777, 6:357–58. 41. Benjamin Rush’s Notes of Debate, Feb. 14, 1777, 6:274–75. 42. Thomas Burke to Richard Caswell, Apr. 29, 1777, 6:673–74. 43. Ibid.

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ment should extend over commerce. “The United States ought to be as One Sovereign (power) with respect to foreign Powers, on all things that relate to War or where the states have one Common Interest,” he argued in Congress in December 1777. “But in all Commercial or other peaceful Intercourse they ought to be as separate Sovereigns.”44 Following his victory, Burke referred to Congress as “the united Council of free, Independent, Sovereign States of America,” thus pointedly emphasizing its limited character.45 The overwhelming desire to maintain the “separate independence” and identities of the states thus dictated that the national government should both have limited powers and command little affection within the United States at large.46 Throughout the war and after, state and local governments continued to be the primary venues for the fulfi llment of people’s political goals and the principal sites at which citizens interacted with their governments. Even as the war itself drew attention to the common cause and stimulated the formation of a rudimentary national patriotism, these conditions operated to reinforce people’s ancient identification with their states. With the ratification of the Articles of Confederation in 1781, the United States attained a formal structure of national governance, but many congressional leaders doubted that it would last. When James M. Varnum became a delegate from Rhode Island in 1781, he found Congress hamstrung by the delegates’ concern to protect the rights and interests of their respective states. This concern, he reported, “frustrate[d] every Attempt to introduce a more efficacious System.” As a result, he complained, Congress spent its time “in trifl ing executive Business, while Objects of the greatest Magnitude” were “postponed, or rejected as subversive in their Nature, of democratical Liberty,” which the delegates equated with the continuing supremacy of the states. “A Prudent Caution against the Abuse of Power,” he noted, “is very requisite for supporting the principles of republican Governments, but when that Caution is carried too far, the Event may, and probably will prove alarming.” The “Time is not far distant,” he conjectured, “when the present American Congress will be dissolved, or laid aside as Useless, unless a Change of Measures shall render their Authority more respectable.”47 A few months later, the Virginia delegate James Madison recommended to the legislature of his state that it should “presume that the present Union will but little survive the present war.”48 Nor did the prospects for the continuance of the union change during the 44. Thomas Burke’s Notes on the Articles of Confederation, Dec. 18, 1777, 8:435. 45. Thomas Burke to the North Carolina Assembly, Apr. 28, 1778, 9:534. 46. Thomas Burke to Richard Caswell, May 23, 1777, 7:109. 47. James M. Varnum to William Greene, Apr. 2, 1781, 17:115–17. 48. James Madison to Thomas Jefferson, Nov. 18, 1781, 18:206.

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final years of the war or with the peace. Some states were notoriously slow to pay their shares of congressional requisitions for carrying on the war. Delegates committed to the perpetuation of union, like James Madison, argued in vain that such requisitions “were a law to the States, as much as the acts of the latter for complying with them were a law to their individual members: that the foederal constitution was as sacred & obligatory as the internal constitutions of the several States; and that nothing could justify the States in disobeying acts warranted by it.”49 But the states had the upper hand, and each one did as it pleased. “There was,” lamented James Wilson, “more of a centrifugal than centripetal force in the States.”50 This uncertain situation led to a demand to endow the national government with at least a limited taxing power, but such demands invariably encountered strong opposition. Thus did Arthur Lee, a delegate from Virginia, predict in the winter of 1783 that the states “would never agree to those plans which tend to aggrandize” national authority because they “were jealous of the power of Congress.” Acknowledging “himself to be one of those who thought this jealousy not an unreasonable one,” Lee asserted “that no one who had ever opened a page or read a line on the subject of liberty, could be insensible to the danger of surrendering the purse into the same hand which held the sword.”5¹ Lee evidently spoke for many delegates when he announced on a subsequent occasion that “he had rather see Congress a rope of sand than a rod of iron.”5² In this situation, many delegates thought that the union could not persist in its existing form. “It is now the general Idea in Congress,” Massachusetts congressman Stephen Higginson reported in the summer of 1783, “that the present Confederation will not answer any longer” and that “a dissolution must take its place, . . . & I expect it will by common sense like the old money be declared unfit & laid aside.”5³ Some people predicted civil war among the states.54 Others assumed that the thirteen states would break up into several smaller confederacies united merely for defensive purposes. Thus early in 1783 did Nathaniel Gorham of Massachusetts, arguing “that the Union could never be maintained on any other ground than that of justice” and pointing out “that some States had suffered greatly from the deficiencies of others,” declared “that if Justice was not to be obtained through the foederal system & this system was to fail as would necessarily follow, it was time this should be known [so] 49. James Madison, Speech, in James Madison’s Notes of Debate, Feb. 21, 1783, 19:720. 50. James Wilson, Speech, in Madison’s Notes of Debates, Jan. 28, 1783, 19:625. 51. Arthur Lee, Speech, in Madison’s Notes of Debates, Jan. 28, 1783, 19:630. 52. Arthur Lee, Speech, in Madison’s Notes of Debates, Feb. 21, 1783, 19:722. 53. Stephen Higginson to John Lowell, July 8, 1783, 25:751–53. 54. Philip Schuyler to Jeremiah Wadsworth, July 16, 1780, 15:455.

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that some of the states might be forming other confederacies adequate to the purposes of their safety.”55 Charles Thomson, long-time secretary to Congress, spelled out the forces and logic behind such a dissolution in the summer of 1783 and speculated about the form the separate confederacies would take and why. “The common danger which has hitherto held these states together being now removed, I see local prejudices, passions and views already beginning to operate with all their force,” Thomson wrote in underlining the continuing primacy of state identities in organizing the political consciousness of Americans, “And I confess I have my fears, that the predictions of our enemies will be found true, that on the removal of common danger our Confederacy & Union will be a rope of sand. There must & will undoubtedly be, for the sake of security, some confederation of states,” he continued, “But how many of the states will be comprehended in a Confederacy or how many confederacys there will be is yet uncertain.”56 In speculating about the number and nature of these confederacies, Thomson stressed the importance of similarities in interests, manners, demographic composition, and identities. He foresaw the formation of four separate confederacies. The “four eastern states” in New England, he predicted, “will form one confederacy” because their “manners, customs and government” were “very similar” and they were “an unmixed people, being all sprung from a common stock without any great accession of strangers or foreigners.” New York, he thought, would “be compelled to join the confederacy either voluntarily or by force not from any of the causes aforementioned; But because the eastern states will not think themselves secure if Hudson’s river & the northern lakes, which are the keys of the country, are kept by a people independent of and separated from them. For this purpose the state of Vermont, which has hitherto given NY some trouble, will be supported & encouraged & kept as a rod over the head of NY & if necessary used to chastise & compel it into the eastern Confederacy.” Because they were “all states whose boundaries are fi xed and confined and who have one common strong desire to possess a share of the great Western territory, which they now claim as their right and as an acquisition which the present confederacy has obtained by the expense of their blood and treasure,” the middle states of New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, and Maryland, Thomson conjectured, would form a second union.57 Thomson thought that Virginia, the largest and most populous of the states, would constitute a nation unto itself. “The haughtiness of Virginia, its great 55. Nathaniel Gorham, Speech, in Madison’s Notes of Debates, Feb. 21, 1783, 19:722. 56. Charles Thomson to Hannah Thomson, July 25, 1783, 20:453–54. 57. Ibid.

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extent and its boundless claims,” he wrote, would “induce it to set up for itself,” and “if ever royal government is set up in N. America,” Virginia would be the place where it would “first erect its throne.” Virginia’s “first quarrel,” he speculated, would “be with the middle confederacy about the western Country. Unless perhaps the people beyond the Allegheny Mountains should be induced first to set up for themselves and to claim an exclusive right to that country. In that case Virginia may attempt to subjugate them & the middle confederacy will support them against her. She may then attempt to form an alliance with the Eastern confederacy or the three Southern states.” Finally, Thomson suggested, the three southern states of North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia would probably “league together but without any close confederacy. For,” he explained, “such is the fiery pride of South Carolina, such the dissipation of her morals & her insolence occasioned by the multitude of slaves that she will not cordially join in any Union till she is taught wisdom by sore suffering.” Thus divided into rival confederacies, “America,” Thomson worried, “may be the theatre of war & her councils become famous for brigues [strife] & intreagues of policy.”58 Thomson and other observers who predicted the early demise of the first American national union after the peace were wrong. The Confederation did not collapse. Instead, it limped along much as it had done during the war. Theoretically, as Nathan Dane, a delegate from Massachusetts noted in 1786, the Confederation provided for “a Just division of power between a federal head and the Legislatures of the States,” with Congress holding “the weapons of war & the palms of peace” and the states having jurisdiction over all other aspects of public and domestic relations. But this relationship was far from equal. As he went on to explain, “the respective States” retained the upper hand. They held “the purse strings of the Union, the power of creating Congress annually . . . [,] recalling its members at pleasure and regulating the rewards of their Services.” As a result, delegates usually expressed the opinions and the identities of the states they represented. “We seldom see a member of Congress depart from the opinions of his State,” Dane wrote. “Even tho he may be fully convinced that that opinion is founded on mistaken facts and would be given up by the State had it possess’d itself of the true State of things and of the information he has,” Dane said, “he will ever harbour doubts whether it is in his power to induce his constituents to alter their opinion & think with him.” Yet, Dane had “little doubt that it will be always safest to leave the ballance of power inclining in favor of the respective Legislatures[,] it being then not quite so far removed from the people.”59 In the American scheme of governance as 58. Ibid. 59. Nathan Dane to John Choate, Jan. 31, 1786, 32:121.

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it operated between 1775 and 1787, Congress, as Nathaniel Gorham observed just over a year before the Federal Convention of 1787, was “but the shadow of a Government.”60 The national governments that presided over the war and Confederation periods were too feeble, too much in thrall to the states, and too remote from most peoples’ lives to generate a national sense of collective identity strong enough to challenge the identities of the separate states. Formed in the shadows of and coexisting with those older and infinitely more immediate identities, American national identity remained embryonic and superficial. The manifold literary and cultural expressions of American patriotism during and after the Revolution are misleading.6¹ In the new composite American national polity, state identities would long continue to be central. To understand in its fullest dimensions the nature of collective identity in the early republic, then, historians need to come to terms with its colonial roots and provincial variants. The powerful state identities inherited from the colonial era and the deep-seated provincial loyalties, habits, and prejudices they expressed represented a formidable challenge for those who hoped to create a durable national union. The war-oriented and contingent union thrown together in 1775–76 did little to foster a deep-seated rival national identity, and the Constitution of 1787 provided a framework in which state identities could easily coexist with an emerging American national sense of self and even retain much of their vitality. How during the early nineteenth century those state identities interacted with demands for a larger national identity and whether, when, and how they might have merged with or been transcended by such an identity are interesting and difficult problems that scholars have scarcely begun to address. The American Civil War might be taken as an indication of how fragile American national sentiment yet was after ninety years of nationhood. Perhaps the search for answers to these questions should concentrate upon a much later era. 60. Nathaniel Gorham to Caleb Davis, Mar. 1, 1786, 23:167. 61. Len Travers, Celebrating the Fourth: Independence Day and the Rites of Nationalism in the Early Republic (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1997), and David Waldstreicher, In the Midst of Perpetual Fetes: The Making of American Nationalism, 1776–1820 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), are the best recent studies of the development of American nationalism in the half century after 1776.

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part four

Social Construction •

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— sixteen —

Social and Cultural Capital in Colonization and State Building in the Early Modern Era Colonial British America as a Case Study

is a relatively new concept which political scientists and sociologists have developed to distinguish certain kinds of social resources from other kinds, namely financial or investment capital, physical capital in the form of fi xed or moveable material resources, and human capital in the form of individual knowledge and technical skills. As employed by modern social scientists such as Robert Putnam, social capital consists of the organizations and connections within societies which foster cooperation, trust, participation, the exchange of information, civil interaction, and coordinated activity in pursuit of social goals.¹ An expression of the traditional social science concern with outcomes, the concept has proven useful to explain or predict the emergence

S

OCI AL C APITAL

This chapter originated in a comment at the session “Civil Society and the American Foundings,” at the symposium “Law and ‘Civil Society,’ ” Indiana University School of Law, Bloomington, March 29, 1996, that was published under the title “Civil Society and the American Founding,” Indiana Law Journal 72 (Spring 1997): 375–81. This short piece was expanded into a full-blown essay entitled “Social Capital in Colonization and State Building in the Early Modern Era: Colonial British America as a Case Study” for the conference “Patterns of Social Capital: Stability and Change in Comparative Perspective,” organized by the editors of the Journal of Interdisciplinary History at the John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, December 5, 1997. It was also presented as a paper under the title “The Transfer of Social Capital in the Age of Early Modern Colonization” at the Newberry Seminar in Early American History, Newberry Library, Chicago, Illinois, May 28, 1998, and as a paper entitled “Social and Political Capital in Colonization and State-Building in the Early Modern Era: Colonial British America as a Case Study” at the University Seminar on Early American History and Culture, Columbia University, New York, October 13, 1998. It is here reprinted with permission from “Social and Cultural Capital in Colonial British America: A Case Study,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 19 (Winter 1999): 491–509, published simultaneously in Robert I. Rotberg, ed., Patterns of Social Capital: Stability and Change in Historical Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 153–71. 1. See Robert D. Putnam, Making Democracy Work: Civic Traditions in Modern Italy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993).

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of civil society, the development and growth of market economics, and the achievement of political democracy. Whether the concept social capital can be equally useful to historians remains to be seen. Far less concerned with how to attain the specific goals that modern society deems desirable, historians are principally interested in understanding and characterizing the myriad processes and dynamics that have made societies of all different shapes and sizes work in particular places at specific times. For their purposes, the present social science definition is too narrow, too instrumental, too whiggish, and too Western. To become a useful tool of analysis for historians, the concept of social capital must be rendered applicable to a wide variety of contexts over time and space. More specifically, this chapter suggests, it must be redefined and expanded to include not just traditions of civil interaction but the entire range of institutions, practices, devices, and learned behaviors that enable collectivities and individuals to render physical spaces productive and social and cultural spaces agreeable. In this expanded usage, social capital, or, perhaps better, social and cultural capital, refers to all those elements of the larger inheritance which cultures pass along to succeeding generations for later members to perpetuate, modify, discard, or reconstitute in new places. Using the English or, after 1707, British experience as a case study, this chapter examines the role of social and cultural capital in the construction of new overseas societies during the early modern era and the transformation of many of those societies into states beginning in the last quarter of the eighteenth century. More specifically, it focuses upon three aspects of this subject. First is the extent to which New World settlers relied upon their Old World inheritance in constructing European-style societies in the Americas. Second is the way in which the selective use of inherited forms of social capital and their subsequent refinement and elaboration provided the foundations for the emergence of recognizably civil societies in the New World well before some of those societies undertook to make themselves independent states. Third is the continuing importance of these colonial social creations in determining the character of the new federal nation formed by parts of British North America between 1776 and 1800. I The global dimensions of the Seven Years’ War focused the attention of European analysts as never before upon the scope, significance, and transformative character of European involvement overseas. Published in 1757 in two volumes, William Burke’s An Account of the European Settlements in America provided

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the first comparative history of European activities in the Americas.² In 1770 the French philosophe Guillaume Thomas François, the Abbé Raynal, issued his much more ambitious multivolume Philosophical and Political History of the Settlements and Trade of Europeans in the East and West Indies, which, as the title announced, covered not just the Americas but also Africa and Asia. Although both Burke and Raynal were deeply critical of European treatment of Amerindians and the enslavement of millions of Africans for labor throughout the New World, they also displayed a profound appreciation of the achievements of Europeans overseas: of their success in expanding their trade over much of the globe and in bringing much of the Americas and portions of Africa and Asia under their hegemony. As Raynal announced in the fi rst sentence of his first volume, the “discovery of the new world, and the passage to the East Indies by the Cape of Good Hope,” had obviously turned out to be “one of the most important events in the history of the human species.”³ What particularly impressed these and other contemporary analysts was what Adam Smith referred to as the extraordinary “progress of all the European colonies in wealth, population, and improvement.” Smith’s lengthy discussion “Of Colonies” in An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, issued in 1776, provided the most systematic and penetrating analysis of early modern European colonization in the Americas published up to that time. If, in Smith’s view, the English, many of whose colonies had demonstrated phenomenal growth and development over the previous half century, had been most impressive in this regard, the Portuguese in Brazil, he reported, had built “a great and powerful colony” that contained a larger “number of people of European extraction” than any other “colony in America,” while the Spanish, presiding over by far the widest extent of country, had built a populous and thriving empire with several cities that were larger than any to be found in the colonies of other nations, and the French colonies, following a series of slow starts, had exhibited “more rapid” development during the eighteenth century. Of the major colonizing powers, only the Dutch, Smith thought, had “been languid and slow” in their colonizing “progress.”4 Among the measures Smith used to chart this comparative “progress”— extent of occupied territory, “wealth, population, and improvement”—improvement was the most fundamental. Following scores of earlier observers 2. William Burke, An Account of the European Settlements in America, 2 vols. (London, 1757). 3. Guillaume Thomas François, Abbé Raynal, Philosophical and Political History of the Settlements and Trade of Europeans in the East and West Indies, trans. J. Justamond, 6 vols. (London, 1798), 1:1. 4. Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776), ed. R. H. Campbell and A. S. Skinner, 2 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976), 2:567–71.

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dating back to the earliest encounter between Europeans and Amerindians, Smith emphasized the primitive social state of the Americas at the time of the encounter and the backwardness of the Amerindians who occupied them. Columbus, he said, encountered “a country quite covered with wood, uncultivated, and inhabited only by some tribes of naked and miserable savages.” The whole of America contained only “two civilized kingdoms,” Mexico and Peru, and even they had “no cattle fit for draught,” the llama, an animal whose “strength” was “a good deal inferior to that of a common ass,” being the “only beast of burden.” With the plow being wholly “unknown among them,” Amerindians “were ignorant of the use of iron. They had no coined money, nor any established instrument of commerce of any kind. Their commerce was carried on by barter. A sort of wooden spade was their principal instrument of agriculture. Sharp stones served them for knives and hatchets to cut with; fish bones and the hard sinews of certain animals served them for needles to sew with; and these seem to have been their principal instruments of trade.”5 What contemporary European and European American observers found so remarkable was that in a little less than three centuries, Europeans and their descendants had transformed the “unwholesome,” thinly inhabited, largely uncleared, and almost wholly uncultivated “desert[s]” they had found in America into cultivated, cleared, populous, and improved spaces, many of which were experiencing rates of economic and demographic growth and degrees of social and cultural development without parallel in the known history of the West. Most observers, for instance, Burke and Raynal, were content simply to record these phenomena, occasionally pausing to condemn or to praise selected aspects of them. For Smith, however, these phenomena cried out for explanation, and perhaps no early modern writer thought more deeply or wrote more penetratingly about them than he.6 The explicit question Smith posed about Europe’s early modern overseas experience was why so many “new colonies” seemed to prosper, why, as he put it, the “colony of a civilized nation which takes possession, either of a waste country, or one so thinly inhabited, that the natives easily give place to the new settlers, advances more rapidly to wealth and greatness than any other human society.” As his phrasing of the question suggests, the destruction or retreat of Amerindian cultures provided part of the explanation. So also, he emphasized, did the generous resource endowment settlers often found in America and their situation far from the metropolitan states to which they were attached. While “plenty of good land” operated both as an invitation to settlement and 5. Ibid., 2:559, 567–69; see also Burke, Account of the European Settlements, 1808 ed., 1:21. 6. Smith, Wealth of Nations, 2:597–98.

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as an incentive to industry, their location placed “them less in the view and less in the power of their mother country” and thereby provided settlers with a maximum amount of “liberty to manage their own affairs their own way” and to construct economies, societies, and polities that would enable them to make all they “can of their own produce” and to employ “their stock and industry in the way that they judge most advantageous to themselves.”7 But the principal reason why Europeans turned out to have had such a tremendous competitive advantage over the Amerindians in the development of the Americas, Smith was persuaded, was the rich social and cultural baggage they brought to that project. When they emigrated to the Americas, he pointed out, Europeans carried with them the accumulated cultural inheritance of an old and, in Smith’s view, much more advanced and civil society. The principal elements of that inheritance singled out by Smith for special emphasis were “a knowledge of agriculture and of other useful arts,” a “habit of subordination,” and “some notion of the regular government” that took “place in their own country, of the system of laws” that supported that government, and “of a regular administration of justice.”8 Smith might have extended this list to include a wide range of social and economic skills, technological knowhow, established systems of land tenure and law, traditions of self-discipline and time management, as well as a variety of economic, legal, social, and civic institutions, tools and technologies, widespread literacy and numeracy, and a knowledge of animal husbandry. In effect, Smith called attention to the important extent to which their cultural inheritance provided European colonizers with a vast “storehouse of resources” that, in selective combinations, was, as Smith observed, far “superior to what” could have grown “up of its own accord in the course of many centuries among savage and barbarous nations.”9 Coming from societies that were already highly commercialized, Europeans, Smith thought, entered the contest for America with a decided advantage over the less advanced societies of the Amerindians. Reinforced by continuing access to metropolitan markets, knowledge, and inventions, that superiority, Smith suggested, at once provided settlers with the social and technical capacity to construct new “Europeanstyle” societies outside of Europe, ensured that they should be the ones to determine the shape of the social landscapes that developed in America as a result of interactions between themselves and the aboriginal inhabitants, and 7. Ibid., 2:564, 567, 572–73, 582. 8. Ibid., 2:564–65. 9. Ibid., 564; see also E. L. Jones, “The European Background,” in Stanley L. Engerman and Robert E. Gallman, eds., The Cambridge Economic History of the United States, vol. 1: The Colonial Era (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 125.

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enabled them to function effectively within the broader early modern Atlantic economy. In this view of the European experience in America, America, in the words of Smith’s fellow Scot David Hume, was a “noble” and wellendowed country that had been “kept desolate by the wild manners of the antient inhabitants.”¹0 With this analysis, Smith highlighted the crucial importance of social and cultural capital in European overseas successes during the early modern era. To employ the concept social and cultural capital in this context is to use it in the expansive way suggested in the introduction to this chapter. Building on Smith’s insight, this chapter will use the experience of the new societies of British America to make some preliminary suggestions about the role of social and cultural capital in the early modern colonizing and overseas state building process. Several attributes of social and cultural capital as it functioned in the colonizing process deserve remark. First was the transferability Smith emphasized. Settlers could carry social and cultural capital to new places, combine it with labor and investment capital, and transform—very often, radically— Amerindian social and cultural landscapes into English-style spaces complete with English-style economies, social systems, and cultural arrangements. A second attribute of social and cultural capital was its extraordinary adaptability. Settlers and other occupants could put the social and cultural capital they carried with them to a wide variety of uses in many different sorts of socioeconomic contexts and ecological zones. In early modern English America, these zones extended from the lush tropical island of Barbados to the bleak shores of Newfoundland. A third and closely related attribute of social and cultural capital was its partibility. Out of the rich storehouse of available social tools and knowledge, settlers could select whatever was most useful to their specific efforts at social reconstruction in a particular space. In the process, they discarded much and, in the course of adjusting to the new situations in which they found themselves, simplified or modified everything from economic practices and social organization to law and even language.¹¹ A fourth attribute of social and cultural capital as it operated in the colonizing process was its enhancibility. It could be enriched in two general ways. 10. David Hume, The History of England, 6 vols. (London, 1778), 6:186. 11. The classic and still most analytically impressive study of the selectivity and simplification of European social capital in a New World setting is George M. Foster, Culture and Conquest: America’s Spanish Heritage (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1960). See also R. Cole Harris, “The Simplification of Europe Overseas,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 67 (1977): 469–83.

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The first was by invention. By trial and error settlers gained knowledge about such fundamental concerns as crop production, product shipment, or housing forms to meet the new conditions they found or the specific objectives they developed in their new situations. The second was by imitation, learning from other peoples and cultures. To cite a few well-known examples, from Amerindians, they borrowed techniques of maize cultivation and processing; from the Portuguese, they imported the culture and technology of sugar production and the institutions of the plantation and chattel slavery; and from enslaved Africans, they learned to improve rice cultivation. Such invention and borrowing produced new pools of social and cultural capital, combinations of transplanted and acquired knowledge, practices, and institutions that constituted important components in the new English-style societies settlers were creating. These new pools of social and cultural capital were also transportable to other and newer places, that of Virginia being reproduced in neighboring Maryland and North Carolina, that of eastern New England in western New England, and that of Barbados in the Leeward Islands, Jamaica, and South Carolina, all of which went through a pattern of adaptation, selection, and enhancement similar to that which had characterized the construction of the earliest spaces of English colonial enterprise in the Americas. In thinly populated societies of the kind that characterized the early generations of English colonizing efforts in every new area of settlement, the human capital of particular individuals with the specialized skills needed in those efforts effectively translated into social capital. On the other hand, during the initial stages of English occupation, transplanted social and cultural capital everywhere went through a winnowing or simplification process. In the simple societies with which settlers began, there was no outlet or need for some of the specialized skills by which some immigrants had sustained themselves in old England. Finding no employment in their trades, weavers, fullers, and dyers from East Anglia, for instance, became farmers in New England, and their cloth-making skills died with them. Similarly, many of the complexities of Old World societies had no function in simple New World societies. In the process of discarding the superfluous, settlers lost much knowledge and many Old World forms of social and cultural capital. As a result, as the earliest colonies—in the Chesapeake, New England, and the West Indies—slowly became more complex and in need of more refined forms of social and cultural capital, their inhabitants often lamented the earlier loss of such forms and articulated the fear that they had lapsed into a state of creolean degeneracy that fell far short of the standards of the metropolis. In this situation, as Smith remarked, “there was not, perhaps, at that time either in Europe or America a

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single person who foresaw or even suspected the rapid progress” the colonies would make over the next half century.¹² II Indeed, some of the very elements that stimulated such fears provided the means for the colonists’ social and cultural delivery. Trade, continuing immigration, governmental interactions with metropolitan agencies of political supervision, and ongoing cultural exchanges in science, religion, and politics made them a part of an expanding transatlantic “information pool,”¹³ reinforced their inherited cultural preferences for things British, and, by providing them with access to metropolitan social and cultural capital, held out the possibility for the replenishment, expansion, and updating of that social and cultural capital in New World places. Improved transportation and communications resulting from better navigation aids, more efficient and safer ships, more numerous sailings, the development of postal services, and closer economic integration operated in the same way.¹4 Also similarly, high rates of growth and development during the first three-quarters of the eighteenth century signaled the colonies’ expanding capacities for acquiring metropolitan social and cultural capital and successfully incorporating their acquisitions into British American cultures. Especially after about 1715, the expansion of Britain’s American colonies in North America was evident in virtually every sector of life. On the continent, still clustered in a series of noncontiguous nuclei close to the Atlantic seaboard in 1710, population over the next half century spilled out in all possible directions from these nuclei until by the 1760s and 1770s there was one long continuum of settlement stretching from Georgia to Maine, with new nuclei building in Nova Scotia and in East and West Florida. Over the same period, the white settler population soared, rising from about 318,600 in 1710 to around 1,326,300 in 1760, an increase of more than 1,100 percent! Demographic growth was particularly impressive among the continental colonies, where the number of whites was doubling every twenty-five to thirty years, jumping from 286,785 in 1710 to 1,275,163 in 1760. Over the same period, the black population, the overwhelming majority of which was slave, grew from 181,511 to 646,305 in all the British colonies and from 44,386 to 317,906 in the continental colonies. Stimulated by the continuing availability of land and the high levels of eco12. Smith, Wealth of Nations, 2:597–98. 13. Jones, “European Background,” 104. 14. See Ian K. Steele, The English Atlantic, 1675–1740: An Exploration of Communication and Community (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986).

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nomic opportunity to meet the demands of both the growing population and an expanding overseas commerce, the increase in the number of whites on the continent was the result of both continuing immigration and a vigorous natural increase that seems to have been a function of a combination of declining mortality, younger marriages, higher fertility, and better nutrition, while the growth of black population was everywhere a testimony to the increasing capital and labor resources of slave purchasers and, in the continental colonies, also of a sturdy natural increase.¹5 Economic growth was also impressive during these years. Every available indicator—numbers of slaves, rising levels of personal wealth, volume of agricultural production, value of exports, value of imports from Britain, quantities shipped in the coastal trade—suggests steady growth before 1740 and extraordinary growth thereafter. During the six decades after 1700, the volume of agricultural production increased at least six times, the value of overseas exports about four times, and the value of imports from Britain nearly seven times. Recent estimates suggest that the gross national product (GNP) multiplied about twenty-five times between 1650 and 1770, increasing at an average annual rate of 2.7 percent for British America as a whole and 3.2 percent for British North America. This increase may have represented a real per capita annual growth rate of 0.6 percent, which was twice that of Britain.¹6 By the time of the American Revolution, this vigorous economic growth had produced a standard of living that may have been “the highest achieved for the great bulk of the [free] population in any country up to that time.”¹7 Accompanying this impressive territorial, demographic, and economic performance was a rapid development and impressive accumulation of human and social and cultural capital. In the economic sphere, this development was manifest in increased specialization of production and a consequent lowering of production costs, improvements in transportation and a resulting decline in distribution costs, emergence of more efficient markets, advances in economic organization, and rising technical capacity. Manifestations of these de15. Jack P. Greene, Pursuits of Happiness: The Social Development of Early Modern British Colonies and the Formation of American Culture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988), 177–81. 16. John J. McCusker and Russell R. Menard, The Economy of British America, 1607–1789 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985), 51–60. 17. Ibid., 55, 59–61; see also Alice Hanson Jones, “Wealth Estimates for the American Middle Colonies, 1774,” Economic Development and Cultural Change 18 (1970): 130; Jones, The Wealth of a Nation to Be: The American Colonies on the Eve of the Revolution (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980), 302–3; and Jones, “Wealth and Growth of the Thirteen Colonies: Some Implications,” Journal of Economic History 44 (1984): 250–52.

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velopments included an increasingly complex occupational structure, a highly skilled and internally differentiated commercial sector, growing specialization in the professions, including the law, ministry, and medicine, increasing expertise among artisans and tradesmen and women, and rising levels of agricultural output, as farmers and slaves learned, in new environments, to adapt old products and experiment with new ones. The increase in and accumulation of social and human capital was also observable in the social and cultural realms. In the social, it could be seen in the emergence of an increasingly complex society with an ever larger range, more dense distribution, and more deeply established agglomeration of social institutions. These included families and kinship groups, neighborhoods and hamlets, port cities and administrative towns, stores and artisanal establishments, local judicial and administrative institutions, churches, and transportation facilities, including roads, bridges, ferries, and a few canals.¹8 In the cultural sphere, it was evident in the increasing availability of knowledge through a broad spectrum of educational, cultural, social, economic, and religious institutions and through a rising volume of books, magazines, and newspapers of colonial, British, and European origin accessible to the colonists; a general expansion of schooling, including more institutions of higher learning; and a rising level of English literacy, which, running well above 70 percent of adult male settlers, was higher than in Britain; the establishment and expansion of both private and public libraries; the emergence of an increasingly vigorous press with the capacity to publish books, pamphlets, newspapers, and other reading material; and the proliferation of voluntary associations such as coffeehouse groups, chambers of commerce, professional societies, fraternal organizations, literary clubs, salons, tea tables, assemblies, and other imitations of the forms of polite society that characterized the metropolis.¹9 III Together, the massive increase in colonial social and human capital represented by these developments fostered the emergence of a European-style civil society throughout Britain’s American colonies. According to Adam Seligman 18. Greene, Pursuits of Happiness, 184–87. 19. See Lawrence A. Cremin, American Education: The Colonial Experience, 1607–1783 (New York: Harper & Row), 545, 551, 553; David Lundberg and Henry F. May, “The Enlightened Reader in America,” American Quarterly 28 (1976): 262–92; Richard D. Brown, Knowledge Is Power: The Diff usion of Information in Early America, 1700–1785 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989); Richard L. Bushman, The Refinement of America: Persons, Houses, Cities (New York: Knopf, 1992); and David S. Shields, Civil Tongues and Polite Letters in Early America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997).

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in his recent exploration The Idea of Civil Society, the concept of civil society as a voluntary union of people “existing independently of the state” had its origins in eighteenth-century England and Scotland and received “its fullest articulation in the Scottish Enlightenment,” Adam Smith being perhaps its principal analyst and exponent. Yet, as Seligman observes, contemporaries looked across the Atlantic for the primary “historical model of this theory.” The new republican polity of the United States, he writes, “provided for the philosophers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (and for many thereafter) the model of civil society, with its voluntary associations, separation of Church and State, federalist (as opposed to Statist) concepts, and protection of individual liberties.”²0 Seligman’s observations implicitly raise the question of how much this model of civil society was the product of the American Revolution and how much it was informed by earlier colonial British American social experience. Some scholars have been so intent upon assimilating the American Revolution to the great European revolutions, upon emphasizing its revolutionary character and radical discontinuity with the American past, that they have by and large neglected to explore the bearing of earlier American social experience upon the events and developments of the American Revolution. The conception of the Revolution and the creation of a national political system as the founding and of the people who presided over those events as the founders have encouraged this neglect. If we are thinking only about the founding of the American national state, such language elicits no objection. There was no American state and, hence, no political entity or political society that could be called America before the middle of 1776, and the American state in which we now live, the American state so much celebrated by contemporary European philosophers and American political analysts, did not come into being until the late 1780s. Yet if we are thinking about civil society in those areas of America that became the United States, such a conception is fraught with serious problems. For those civil societies, as Adam Smith and his American contemporaries were well aware, were not “founded” during the late eighteenth century; they had already constructed themselves through a long process lasting, in all but one case, between a century and a century and three-quarters. When these societies came together to form the American nation between 1775 and 1800, what they experienced was a second founding. 20. Adam B. Seligman, The Idea of Civil Society (New York: Maxwell McMillan, 1992), 3, 5, 61–62. On the origins and early development of the idea of civil society, see also Marvin B. Becker, The Emergence of Civil Society in the Eighteenth Century: A Privileged Moment in the History of England, Scotland, and France (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994).

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This is not merely a semantic or an academic quibble, especially not for a social historian or for any analyst concerned with understanding eighteenthcentury American conceptions of civil society. To conceive of the establishment of the colonies as the first founding is to call attention both to their long histories as political societies at the time of the Revolution and to open up the possibility for understanding the important relationship between those histories and the contemporary understanding of the meaning of civil society in late eighteenth-century America. From the beginnings of English colonization early in the seventeenth century, both the actual process of settlement—of social formation—and contemporary conceptions of that process facilitated the emergence of such ideas and the priorities they represented. Indeed, the idea of what a civil society ought to be was perhaps the most important form of social and cultural capital settlers brought with them from the Old World. Through every stage of the colonizing process and from Barbados north to New England, the standards supplied by that idea operated as a framework for identification. Largely oblivious to its tragic effects upon the indigenous inhabitants they were driving before them, those who presided over this project, settlers and land developers, conceived of it as a massive civilizing project. Deeply aware of the profound transformative effects of what they were doing, they thought of themselves as engaged in a laborious but noble effort to conquer and render productive a wilderness by felling forests; creating new fields, orchards, and pastures; substituting domestic for wild animals; and otherwise bringing the land under their mastery. In the process, they deliberately and happily changed landscapes that to them appeared rude, uncultivated, underutilized or barren, and barbarous into civil, cultivated, productive, and improved civil spaces, spaces that represented the outermost extensions of the English or other European places to which they were politically, economically, culturally, and emotionally attached and on which they relied for their norms and standards of a civil society.²¹ As the first founders of every new society in colonial English America conceived of this process, they crossed the Atlantic, discovered new countries suitable for habitation, secured possession of those countries by treating with or defeating the Indians, cleared the wilderness, and introduced whatever forms of settled agriculture seemed most appropriate to the new sites in which they found themselves. To supply their wants during the earliest phases of this process, they frequently reverted to more primitive forms of economic and social activity, to hunting, like the Indians, or, in many cases, to grazing and raising livestock. But the larger project in which they were engaged was always the es21. See Jack P. Greene, The Intellectual Construction of America: Exceptionalism and Identity from 1492 to 1800 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993).

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tablishment of settled agricultural, commercial, and civil societies of the kind they had left behind in the Old World; and as they individually established their mastery over particular pieces of ground, made them fit for Europeanstyle agriculture, and built houses and estates for themselves and their families or prospective families, they together reorganized the physical landscape into farms and urban communities, inscribed it with property lines, and began the slow process of implanting, refining, and accumulating the social and cultural capital that would form the foundations for the articulation of a civil society. Whether they entered into formal compacts to which, initially, all settlers explicitly consented (as, for instance, was the case with the Plymouth colonists), or whether, far more commonly, they simply adapted the well-known practices and rules of English common law to their new situations, they quickly established civil polities, the principal purposes of which were little more than to protect their settlements against Amerindians or rival Europeans, to govern relations among themselves, and to secure the property they were creating and accumulating through their own industry and activities. From these early beginnings, the “natural progress”²² of agriculture and the development of the commercial networks to make that agriculture profitable both settled “the affairs of society,” as the Scottish immigrant and lawyer James Wilson later observed, “on an easy and secure foundation”²³ and provided settlers with the economic and social wherewithal to cultivate a civil life. The result, as Adam Smith noted, was a “natural progress in the arts”²4 that led ineluctably in the direction of civility and refinement, developments that stood in stark contrast to conditions that obtained among neighboring Amerindians, who, despite the example of the settlers, “still continue[d] in the most rude and uncultivated state of society.”²5 In the experience of colonial British Americans, moreover, this process was not limited to the earliest, or first, foundings. Rather, as many late eighteenthcentury observers pointed out—among them J. Hector St. Jean de Crèvecoeur and Samuel Williams, whose 1794 History of Vermont contains what is certainly the most extensive, systematic, and sophisticated contemporary analysis of what he referred to as the “state of society” in America²6—as settlers marched toward the “interior parts of the country,” they again and again repeated the 22. Smith, Wealth of Nations, 2:565. 23. James Wilson, Lectures on Law, in The Works of James Wilson, ed. Robert Green McCloskey, 2 vols. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1967), 1:231. 24. Smith, Wealth of Nations, 2:565. 25. William White and James Wilson, “The Visitant,” #5, Pennsylvania Chronicle (Philadelphia), Feb. 29, 1768. 26. Samuel Williams, Natural and Civil History of Vermont, 2 vols. (Walpole, N.H., 1784), 2:352.

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experience of the first settlers, first reverting to hunters but slowly, in Crèvecoeur’s words, changing the “hideous barbarous country” of the “great woods” into “fine, well-regulated district[s],” fi lled with intensive agricultural settlements laced with roads, intermixed with country market towns that were tied to sizable overseas trading posts on the coast, and increasingly characterized by “a general decency of manners” and increasingly sophisticated commercial and social infrastructures, including stores, taverns, courthouses, churches, and other institutions.²7 In its various zones—from the primitive frontier, to what Crèvecoeur referred to as middle zones, to the polite and more heavily commercialized east—colonial British North America after the first two or three generations of settlement at almost every moment thus exhibited the full range of stages through which, contemporary social theorists suggested, societies passed in their advance to commercial civilization. Dating from the first foundings and deeply rooted in the colonial British American experience, this understanding of the process of social development as a progress from rudeness to refinement, from lesser to more advanced forms of social organization, from passion and self-indulgence to reason and self-control, was, by the middle decades of the eighteenth century, thoroughly engraved in the collective consciousness of free colonial British Americans. Long before the American Revolution, colonial British American social development had functioned as a blueprint, an elaborate historical demonstration, evident in literally thousands of cases, of the process by which civil society took shape. As settlers and other contemporary analysts conceived of it, the history of the colonies was only incidentally about war and politics or, other than in New England, which was atypical of colonial British American cultural development, about religious successes and failures. Rather, it was the greater story of the social transformation in little more than a century and a half of significant portions of North America and the West Indies, a grand story that could be richly and endlessly illustrated in the successful rise of individuals to competence, substance, and fortune, as in Crèvecoeur’s recounting of the career of Andrew, the Hebridean, “a poor man, advancing from oppression to freedom; from obscurity and contumely to some degree of consequence—not by virtue of any freaks of fortune, but by the gradual operation of sobriety, honesty, and emigration.”²8 Throughout the colonizing process, this story of the transformation of the wilderness into improved, European-style, civil spaces was the 27. J. Hector St. Jean de Crèvecoeur, Letters from an American Farmer (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1957), 42–43. 28. Ibid., 64.

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principal story that informed, connected, and gave meaning to the lives of the millions of free people who took part in it. Moreover, the characteristics associated with the societies that had taken shape as a result of this transformation were in many respects almost a perfect example of contemporary Scottish Enlightenment theories of civil society. The products of necessity and volition, the free segments of the new societies of colonial British America were, preeminently, societies of independent freeholding families composed of “free and independent men”²9 and “sensible” women³0 deeply engaged, as I have argued elsewhere, in their pursuits of individual happiness.³¹ Notwithstanding the fact that many of those men and women found their happiness in the possession of black slaves, in the economic exploitation of social dependents, and in the sweeping and intensive cultural imperialism that drove their social reconstruction of the areas they had occupied, the societies they created were characterized, said one observer after another, by a series of attributes Enlightenment thinkers associated with the idea of civil society. These included a concentration on agriculture; economic prosperity; social equality among the free segments of society; well-regulated families; concentric circles of neighborhoods, associations, institutions, and markets that provided public arenas for social exchange and interaction and fostered social hospitality, industry, activity, and a powerful impulse toward improvement; mild if not always “perfect freedom and equality”³² of religion; mild, cheap, and highly participatory government that was suspicious of the intrusions of foreign power and intent on limiting the scope of authority and keeping it in local hands; a small civil establishment and low taxes; and a deep hostility to privilege and a “warm and uniform attachment to liberty.”³³ Long before they formally became republican in 1776, the British colonies in America, as Adam Smith pointed out in The Wealth of Nations, were republican in their manners and their governments. Effectively left by the metropolis with virtually complete “liberty . . . to manage their own affairs in their own way,” he explained, settlers had developed polities that were not only thoroughly capable of guaranteeing settlers that “equal and impartial administration of justice which renders the rights of the meanest British subjects respectable to the greatest, and which, by securing to every man the fruits of his own industry, gives the greatest and most effectual encouragement to every sort of industry” but also dominated by locally elected assemblies that were far 29. Wilson, Lectures on Law, 1:81. 30. White and Wilson, “The Visitant,” #3, Pennsylvania Chronicle, Feb. 8, 1768. 31. Greene, Pursuits of Happiness. 32. Williams, Natural and Civil History of Vermont, 2:423. 33. Wilson, “Oration Delivered on the Fourth of July 1788,” in Works of Wilson, 2:777.

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more representative, far less corrupt, and far more responsive to their constituents than was the British House of Commons.³4 Such political arrangements, James Wilson later explained, engraved upon the character of colonial British Americans two of the principal “virtues” associated with the idea of civil society: “the love of liberty and the love of law.”³5 “In the state of society which had taken place in America,” Samuel Williams wrote in spelling out the implications of Smith’s and Wilson’s insights, “the foundations of ” its “freedom were laid, long before the nations of Europe had any suspicion of what was taking place in the minds of men.” Not some “artificially contrived” system “of political checks, balances, and arrangements,” then, but the distinctive social conditions Americans had created during their earlier histories constituted the “extensive and permanent cause” of the “system of American Republicanism,” which Williams defined as the belief that government should limit itself to three simple functions: “do justice, protect property, and defend the country.”³6 The “natural, easy, independent situation, and spirit, in which the body of the [free] people were found when the American war came on” and the broad “civil freedom” they enjoyed, Williams explained, were thus the “constant product and effect”³7 of the operation of the societies that the founders, that is, the first founders, and their descendants and later immigrants had constructed. In such conditions, he thought, “the common farmer of America had a more comprehensive view of his rights and privileges, than the speculative philosopher of Europe, ever could have of the subject.” Political writers during the Revolution, Williams asserted in remarks that he specifically applied to Thomas Paine, met with such “amazing success,” not “because they taught the people principles, which they did not before understand; but because they placed the principles which they had learned” from “the state of society in America . . . in a very clear and striking light, on a most critical and important occasion.”³8 In these essentially self-regulating societies, society, in James Wilson’s words, was not “the scaffolding of government,” but government was “the scaffolding of society.”³9 The end of government and law was to “protect and to improve social life”40 by making sure that the lands, goods, chattels, and rights 34. Smith, Wealth of Nations, 2:585, 610. 35. Wilson, Lectures on Law, 1:72. 36. Williams, Natural and Civil History of Vermont, 2:358–59, 426. 37. Ibid., 2:429–31. 38. Ibid., 2:429–30. 39. Wilson, Lectures on Law, 1:86. 40. Ibid., 1:88.

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“collected by the labour and industry of individuals” should remain, inviolably, “their property,”4¹ while the measure of a good government was the extent to which it promoted “the peace, happiness, and prosperity, the increase, and the affections of the people.”4² What better demonstration could there have been of that fundamental principle of civil society: that “the happiness of society” ought to be “the first law of every government”?4³ Long before they could have read the works of the Scottish Enlightenment, then, colonial British Americans had subscribed to the ideas that society— what the Scots meant by the term civil society—was anterior to government; that the functions of law, governments, and constitutions were to promote the ends of civil society, especially the great end of facilitating the pursuit of happiness by the individuals who composed that society; and that that pursuit would be, for most people, conducted far more satisfyingly in the society of the family, neighborhood, or local civic institutions than in the small political arenas that characterized the colonies. IV In the colonial British American case, civil societies, in the European sense, were not the product of but the precondition for the American Revolution. They were the result, not of independent nationhood or some newfound resources or sensibilities generated by the Revolution, but of an ongoing process of social and cultural capital transfer, refinement, and accumulation that had taken place during the century and a half following the fi rst founding of English colonies in the Chesapeake, New England, and the West Indies during the first half of the seventeenth century. From this perspective, what historians call the American Revolution needs to be understood as an effort to perpetuate the benefits of the civil societies that were already thoroughly in place by the last decades of the colonial era. Both the civic autonomy colonial British Americans sought through independence and the institutional structures they created during the last quarter of the eighteenth century were at once a part of that effort and expressions of the social and cultural capital they had already created and were determined to preserve. Of course, during the colonial era, neither settlers nor metropolitans ever fully understood the larger implications of the social accomplishments of American settlers. Certainly, settlers did not think of the societies they and 41. Ibid., 1:233. 42. Williams, Natural and Civil History of Vermont, 2:415. 43. Wilson, Considerations on the Nature and Extent of the Legislative Authority of the British Parliament (1774), in Works of Wilson, 2:723.

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their ancestors had created as a “new model of the social order.”44 On the contrary, they continued, with Adam Smith, to think of the Old World as the “great mother”45 which had supplied and replenished much of the social capital that—in the special conditions that had obtained in America—settlers and their descendants had been able to refine, expand, and accumulate in the process of creating English societies in American places. Only gradually over the quarter century beginning in the mid-1760s, in the course of intense constitutional discussions over the structure of the British Empire, the necessary attributes of republican polities, and the proper “form of government for an extensive empire,”46 did people on either side of the Atlantic come to an appreciation of the extent to which the “historical development” of colonial British America was “paradigmatic of a broader and more general change in sensibility, values, and world views.”47 During the late eighteenth century, at the time of the second founding, colonial American social experience had a profound bearing upon American conceptions of civil society and of the relationship of civil society to government. Experientially and conceptually, the first and second foundings were of a piece; any discontinuities between them were little more than an elaborate working out of some of the political and intellectual implications of the radical civil societies that colonial Americans had constructed between 1607 and 1776. Precisely because of their radical character, these societies could at once make a profoundly conservative revolution and be seen as paradigmatic for the civil societies emerging in the Old World. 44. Seligman, Idea of a Civil Society, 16. 45. Smith, Wealth of Nations, 2:590. 46. Ibid., 2:623. 47. Seligman, Idea of a Civil Society, 91.

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— seventeen —

Pluribus or Unum? White Ethnicity in the Formation of Colonial American Culture

T

he area that in 1776 became the United States was peopled by descendants of a combination of three groups: (1) the original aboriginal population who had long occupied the area when Europeans initiated a sustained encounter between the Old World and the New at the end of the fifteenth century, (2) many Europeans who had poured into colonial English or, after 1707, British North America beginning in the early seventeenth century, and (3) African slaves forcefully brought to the New World to provide labor for the new economic enterprises established in America under the aegis and control of Europeans. Of the two large-scale transatlantic migrations— the one from northwestern Europe and the other from the western coast of Africa—that brought the original immigrants to colonial British America, the one from Africa was by far the more extensive. From 1680 to the abolition of This chapter was written as a lecture for the ninth annual Colonial Williamsburg History Forum: “Americans on Approval: Immigrants Encounter the Land of Opportunity,” Colonial Williamsburg, Inc., Williamsburg, Virginia, November 4, 1995. It was subsequently delivered as a lecture entitled “Pluribus or Unum: Ethnicization in Early America” at the New Zealand Fulbright Commission, Christchurch, August 8, 1996; as a plenary address entitled “The Cultural Landscape: Ethnic Identity on Early America” at the conference “The Lure of Land: Scots-Irish Settlers in Early America,” Historical Society of Western Pennsylvania, Pittsburgh, September 19, 1997; as the Carls-Schwerdfeger Lecture entitled “Pluribus or Unum: Ethnicity and Society in Colonial British America,” Union University, Jackson, Tennessee, October 30, 1997; and as a plenary lecture entitled “ ‘Pluribus or Unum’ ”?: Ethnic Identity in Colonial British America” at an international conference “The Bicentennial of the RussianAmerican Company (1799–1999),” Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow, September 6, 1999. It has been published in English as “Pluribus or Unum? White Ethnicity in the Formation of Colonial American Culture,” History Now: Te Pae Tawhito O Te Wa 3 (May 1997): 1–12; and in Russian as “Pluribus ИЛИ Unum? ЭТНИЧеСКаЯ ИДеНТИЧНОСТЬ В раННеЙ КОЛОННаЛЬНОЙ ЪрИТаНСКОЙ АМерИКе” [Pluribus or Unum: White Ethnicity in the Formation of Colonial American Culture], in АМЕРИКАНСКИЙ ЕЖЕГОДНИК 1999 [American Yearbook 1999] (Moscow: Nauka, 2001), 31–48. It is republished here with permission from the English version.

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the slave trade in 1807, about three million Africans crossed the Atlantic to the British colonies in America, nearly three times the number of Europeans coming to the same destination.¹ Although British traders brought a large majority of these Africans to the British West Indies, the number reaching the continental colonies was substantial, especially after 1680. During the threequarters of a century before the American Revolution, according to the most recent estimates, the number of Europeans entering the continental colonies exceeded the number of Africans by only about 29,000 people. Out of a total volume of newcomers of 585,800, Africans constituted about 278,400, or 47.5 percent, and in the decades of highest immigration between 1730 and 1770 they accounted for more than 50 percent of all newcomers from the eastern side of the Atlantic.² Notwithstanding the numerical importance of Africans and their descendents in the population of colonial British North America, my interest in this chapter is to analyze the ways and the extent to which, not the infinitely more ethnically diverse African, but the European immigrants and their descendants assimilated to the new English societies created in North America during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Roughly 155,000 to 180,000 Europeans settled in the English North American colonies during the seventeenth century. The vast majority, at least 70 percent, were English. Probably the Irish, numbering as many as 20,000, were the largest non-English group. There were also significant numbers of Welsh, 9,000 to 10,000 Dutch who settled New Netherland, a thousand or so Swedes and Finns associated with the colony of New Sweden in the Delaware River valley, 2,000 to 3,000 French Huguenots, and a handful of Scots and of Jews, who came primarily from the Iberian world. Eighteenth-century European immigration was far less English. Only 44,100, or about 15 percent, of the approximately 307,400 European immigrants between 1700 and 1775 were English, though another 56 to 57 percent were from the British Isles and were therefore presumably English speaking. Ulster Scots with about 66,100 represented 21 to 22 percent. Southern Irish with 42,500 were about 14 percent. Scots with 35,300 were about 12 percent. Welsh with 29,000 were about 9 percent. Germans were the single largest cultural group, with about 84,500 people, or about 27 percent of the total. Other continental Europeans, with only about 5,900 immigrants, were just 2 percent.³ 1. See David Richardson, “The Eighteenth-Century British Slave Trade: Estimates of Its Volume and Coastal Distribution in Africa,” Research in Economic History 12 (1989): 151–95; David Eltis, “Free and Coerced Transatlantic Migrations: Some Comparisons,” American Historical Review 88 (1983): 251–80. 2. Aaron Fogelman, “Migrations to the Thirteen British North American Colonies, 1700– 1775: New Estimates,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 22 (1991–92): 698. 3. Ibid.

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How these diverse ethnic groups related to one another has been an enduring question in the historiography of colonial America. Before the 1960s, the predominant interpretation was the melting pot theory. J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur, a Frenchman who came to Canada as a soldier during the Seven Years’ War and settled in Orange County, New York, at the conclusion of the war, provided an early and full formulation of this theory in his Letters from an American Farmer, first published in London in 1782. “What then is the American, this new man?” Crèvecoeur asked rhetorically in a chapter entitled “What Is an American?” An American, he answered, “is either an European or the descendant of an European, hence that strange mixture of blood, which you will find in no other country. I could point out to you a family whose grandfather was an Englishman, whose wife was Dutch, whose son married a French woman, and whose present four sons have now four wives of different nations.” In America, Crèvecoeur reported, “individuals of all nations are melted into a new race of men,” a “promiscuous breed” of “English, Scotch, Irish, French, Dutch, Germans and Swedes.”4 In these passages, Crèvecoeur described a society in which the attractions of assimilation were so overwhelming that newcomers rushed to trade in their Old World cultural inheritances for the new cultural practices and attributes that would enable them to join in the race for individual happiness, the central imperative of the emerging cultures along the eastern shores of colonial British America.5 In a land of abundance where industry and low taxation quickly elevated men of merit to the “rank of independent freeholders,” Crèvecoeur declared in evoking the vision that had long lain at the heart of the appeal of the New World for Europeans,6 immigrants of all kinds first “submit[ted] insensibly” and then became deeply attached to the new climate, form of governance, language, mode of husbandry, and other new customs and circumstances that seemed to be the principal determinants of achievement. At the same time, in the pursuit of individual happiness they rapidly shed their inherited cultural and religious prejudices. In such a cultural environment, Crèvecoeur suggested, the marriage market became increasingly free of inherited ethnic, religious, linguistic, or even class restrictions, and the resulting mixtures led powerfully in the direction of the melting pot and the formation of a new people. “He is an American,” said Crèvecoeur, “who, leaving behind 4. J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur, Letters from an American Farmer (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1957), 37–39. 5. See Jack P. Greene, Pursuits of Happiness: The Social Development of Early Modern British Colonies and the Formation of American Culture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988). 6. Jack P. Greene, The Intellectual Construction of America: Exceptionalism and Identity from 1492 to 1800 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993).

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him all his ancient prejudices and manners, receives new ones from the new mode of life he has embraced, the new government he obeys, and the new rank he holds. He becomes an American [merely] by being received in the broad lap of our great Alma Mater.”7 Many of Crèvecoeur’s contemporaries however were far less sanguine about the effectiveness of the assimilative process he described. In particular, the massive influx of German-speaking peoples into Pennsylvania between 1730 and 1770 raised doubts about the capacity of the colony to assimilate such a large number of alien people and fears that they might overwhelm and transform the host culture itself. Benjamin Franklin was a particularly acute analyst of this problem. “The Importation of Germans in too great Numbers into Pennsylvania,” he wrote his fellow printer James Parker of New York in March 1751, created the disturbing possibility that Pennsylvania would “in a few Years become a German Colony: Instead of their Learning our Language, we must learn their’s, or live as in a foreign Country.”8 “Why should the Palatine Boors be suffered to swarm into our Settlements, and by herding together establish their Language and Manners to the Exclusion of ours?” he asked in his famous essay “Observations concerning the Increase of Mankind, Peopling of Countries, &c” later in the same year. “Why should Pennsylvania, founded by the English, become a Colony of Aliens, who will shortly be so numerous as to Germanize us instead of our Anglifying them, and will never adopt our Language or Customs”?9 Franklin’s telling phrase “herding together” suggested, not a penchant for assimilation, but a high degree of ethnic clannishness characterized by a tendency to form ethnic enclaves and a determination both to reproduce in the New World as much of their cultural heritage as they could and to have as little to do with the larger host society that had taken them in as possible. Franklin spelled out several of the more important manifestations of such behavior. “Few of their children in the Country learn English,” he complained to his English correspondent Peter Collinson, and they import many books from Germany; and of the six printing houses in the Province, two are entirely German, two half German half English, and but two entirely English; They have one German News-paper, and one half German. Advertisements intended to be general are now printed in Dutch and English; 7. Crèvecoeur, Letters from an American Farmer, 37–45. 8. Franklin to James Parker, Mar. 20, 1751, in The Papers of Benjamin Franklin, ed. Leonard W. Labaree et al., 27 vols. to date (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1959–), 4:120. 9. Franklin, “Observations concerning the Increase of Mankind, Peopling of Countries, &c.,” 1751, in Franklin Papers, 4:234.

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the Signs in our Streets have inscriptions in both languages, and in some places only German: They begin of late to make all their Bonds and other legal Writings in their own Language, which . . . are allowed good in our Courts, where the German Business so encreases that there is continual need of Interpreters.¹0

To overcome the Germans’ “natural” fondness “for their own Language and Manners” and to absorb into the host culture such a large mass of alien people who were in large part “strangers . . . to our Laws and manners” and seemed to prefer to live “chiefly by themselves . . . in a separate body” was, in the view of Franklin and his British contemporaries, a challenge of genuinely massive proportions.¹¹ At one time or another during the early 1750s, people of such persuasion advocated the diversion of Germans from Pennsylvania, the disqualification from civil and military office of all men who did not speak English, the requirement that all legal documents be written in English, the suppression of German printing houses that did not print at least half their books in English, the prohibition of the importation of German books, the creation of financial incentives for intermarriage, and, identifying the device that would serve as the principal instrument of socialization and assimilation to American society from the middle of the nineteenth century, free English schools.¹² The only one of these proposals ever implemented in colonial Pennsylvania, the establishment of schools, seemed to offer the best prospects for assimilation. In such schools, Franklin’s confidant the Reverend William Smith, the provost of the new college in Philadelphia, predicted, German children would “form acquaintances and connections, learn the common language, like manners, and the meaning of liberty, a common weal, and a common country.” As “Roman history shows,” Smith argued, “Intermarriage will follow, which will further unite them in a common interest.”¹³ Yet, although Franklin supported the movement to establish English-speaking schools in all the areas where Germans were “thick settled,” he remained fearful that “the Disagreeableness of disonant Manners” might forever prevent the English and the Germans from amalgamating into a single people. “The German Women are generally so disagreeable to an English Eye, that,” he asserted, it would be extremely 10. Franklin to Peter Collinson, May 9, 1753, in Franklin Papers, 4:484–85. 11. Franklin to Peter Collinson, [1753?], in Franklin Papers, 5:158–59; William Smith to the Society for the Relief and Instruction of Poor Germans, Feb. 1754, in Franklin Papers, 5:214–25. 12. See Peter Collinson to Franklin, Aug. 20, 1753, and Franklin to Collinson, [1753?], in Franklin Papers, 5:21, 158–59. 13. Smith to the Society for the Relief and Instruction of Poor Germans, Feb. 1754, in Franklin Papers, 5:214–15.

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difficult “to induce Englishmen to marry them. Nor,” he added, “would German Ideas of Beauty generally agree with our Women; . . . thick and strong, always enter into their Description of a pretty Girl: for the value of a Wife with them consists in the Work she is able to do.”¹4 Franklin’s assessment evoked an image of a cultural process characterized, not by the melting pot, but by a sturdy and largely intractable cultural pluralism. These two contrasting contemporary views of the immigrant experience, Crèvecoeur’s emphasis upon ethnic intermixing and Franklin’s stress upon ethnic separation, may serve as a point of departure for reconsidering the old question expressed in the title of this chapter, Pluribus or Unum? II Such a reconsideration must begin with an understanding of the several new societies that served as hosts for immigrants from Europe during the colonial era. Over the last quarter century, historians have conceptualized these societies less as a group of discrete colonies than as a series of overlapping but distinctive socioeconomic and sociocultural regions, each characterized by a common mode of settlement and economic culture. The four principal regions in order of their settlement were the Chesapeake, consisting of Virginia, Maryland, and northern North Carolina, with its emphasis upon tobacco production, its penchant for dispersed agricultural settlement, and its extensive use of bound labor; New England, composed of Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, and New Hampshire, with its orientation toward subsistence agriculture, fishing, seafaring, external commerce, and forest productions, and its peculiarly—peculiar in terms of all other contemporary British colonies— intense commitment to Puritan religious and social imperatives; the Middle colonies, consisting of New York, New Jersey, Delaware, and Pennsylvania, with their concentration on grain and meat production; and the Lower South, composed of South Carolina, southern North Carolina, and Georgia, with its stress upon slave-produced staples such as rice, indigo, and naval stores. Settled during the first half of the seventeenth century, the Chesapeake colonies and New England were predominantly English, while the Middle colonies, initially Dutch or Swedish and not taken over by the English until the 1660s, and the once Spanish Lower South, also settled by the English after 1660, always had far more varied ethnic populations, including the Dutch, Swedes, and Finns already resident in the Hudson and Delaware valleys, sig14. Franklin to Parker, Mar. 20, 1751, and to Collinson, [1753?] and May 9, 1753, in Franklin Papers, 4:120, 158–59, 484–85.

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nificant numbers of Welsh and Irish settlers, smaller numbers of Scots and French- and German-speaking Protestants, and even fewer Spanish-, Dutch-, or Portuguese-speaking Jews. In terms of the subject that concerns us here, three general points need to be made about the nature of these four regions and the several colonies that composed them. First, each region should be thought of as a new society, that is, one created by a group of founders who took possession of the land, devised ways to manipulate local material resources for their own survival and profit, reordered the physical and social landscape, and worked out the political, legal, and other cultural arrangements appropriate to their situation. As “the first . . . group to come into a previously unpopulated”—or one might better say, depopulated—“territory, as the effective possessor,” these founders thus constituted what the sociologist John Porter has called “charter” groups in the sense that they and their immediate descendants or successors had “the most to say” about the nature of the societies they were creating.¹5 The earliest arrivals thus exercised a disproportionately powerful defining role. Because, even during the second half of the seventeenth century, all of these founding groups were also heavily English and acted under English auspices as agents of English cultures, all of these new societies exhibited cultures that were recognizably English and, in all aspects of their external relations, were intimately tied into a larger Atlantic world of which Old England was, increasingly, the acknowledged political, economic, cultural, and spiritual center. Emphatically and unmistakably, they were not Spanish, Portuguese, French, Dutch, Amerindian, or African, but English or, after 1707, British. The second point is this: however English these new societies might be, the English people who founded and presided over them came—in every case— from a wide diversity of regions within England. Early modern England, like early modern France or Spain, was a heterogeneous social entity. It was composed of people who mostly spoke the same language, albeit in many dialects, and who shared a national polity with a (generally) common legal system, but who lived under very different conditions in distinctive local cultures, some of which even had their own peculiar political and legal institutions. As a result, English was little more than a broad and as yet highly contested and problematic cultural category that encompassed a welter of divergent local cultures. While they were adapting themselves to a new physical space and creating in every region of colonial English North America a new variant of English provincial culture, settlers from the many cultural regions of England also had 15. John Porter, The Vertical Mosaic: An Analysis of Social Class and Power in Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1965), 60.

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to negotiate among themselves—and thereby become acutely aware of—what it meant to be English. No less than later immigrants from other areas of the world, from Africa and the West Indies as well as from Europe, the earliest English immigrants to North America thus found themselves having to undergo in the societies they were establishing a process that historians of modern immigration refer to as ethnicization. The concept of ethnicization recognizes that immigrant groups from the same national culture usually were neither “internally united by preexisting ties” nor were they the bearers of specific Old World customs and institutions common to all segments of that culture. At the time of their arrival in America, such groups were very often fragmented; only gradually did they come to a consensus about the particular social and cultural unities that bound them together as a coherent ethnic group. In other words, “ethnic ties developed only on American soil,” and the principal emblems of those ties were often as foreign to later immigrants of the same national stock as to the host population.¹6 The third general point about the process of cultural formation in the several regions of colonial British North America is that, however difficult it was for these diverse English groups to come together to form coherent English cultures, later immigrants, whether deriving from England, other parts of Britain, continental Europe, or other parts of America, entered a political, legal, social, and cultural landscape that was already well-defined and that left them with only two choices: to assimilate or to ethnicize. The degree to which any given group could develop or retain a sense of its ethnicity was a function of a number of variables, to be discussed later, but the strong tendency among most British and European immigrants during the colonial era was less to ethnicize than to assimilate, or, at least, accommodate. However, if, either by choice or under pressure from the host culture, they ethnicized, they first, as loose national or pre-ethnic groups, underwent the same process of ethnicization experienced by the earliest English settlers. Contrasting themselves with the dominant host cultures of the regions they inhabited, they came to appreciate both what differentiated them from those cultures and what, from the rich panoply of inherited traditions and institutions brought with them from the Old World, bound them together and made them a distinctive and coherent “ethnic” group. The principal exception to the pattern of cultural formation implicit in the three general points here discussed was New York, where the charter cul16. See Jonathan D. Sarna, “From Immigrants to Ethnics: Toward a New Theory of ‘Ethnicization,’ ” Ethnicity 5 (1978): 370–71.

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ture was not English but Dutch. In terms of both ethnicity and religion, the population of New Netherland was from the beginning notoriously mixed. Containing people from many areas adjacent to the Netherlands, including French-speaking Walloons and Rhineland Germans, a large number of New England immigrants on Long Island, and a few Scots and Iberian Jews, it was nevertheless “distinctively Dutch,”¹7 and, to a significant degree, its Dutchness was the product of a process of ethnicization—similar to that occurring among English peoples in English colonies—among the great varieties of Dutch and other peoples who first occupied the colony and who created and presided over the system of social arrangements that sustained and defined it. By introducing “institutions, laws, and customary practices,” altering the landscape, setting “patterns of interactions with native peoples and imported Africans, and selectively” importing other aspects of their home cultures, this charter group, as Joyce Goodfriend has noted, put down deep cultural roots,¹8 and when the English conquered New Netherland in 1664, they encountered a culture that was already firmly in place, a backdrop against which to define their Englishness. They found themselves in the position, not of negotiating another English provincial culture among English people, but of superimposing English cultural practices and forms upon an entrenched Dutch culture. This process of superimposition was accomplished only slowly over the next seven to eight decades through a lengthy series of cultural negotiations and adjustments between competing impulses toward anglicization and what John Murrin has referred to as “batavianization,” or the desire (stimulated by English pressures toward anglicization) among Dutch settlers to cling to Dutch ways. Control of the public sphere helped the English in this contest. They quickly established English as the language of law and public discourse, reorganized political institutions along English lines, introduced English legal practices into the courts, and redirected trade into the Anglophone world. Lacking coercive resources over the private sphere, however, the English made no systematic or sustained effort to eradicate other aspects of Dutch culture. Instead, they pursued an accommodationist policy that permitted “the divergent cultural traditions of the Dutch . . . to exist without harassment.” For this reason, members of the large New York Dutch population found themselves, in Goodfriend’s words, “obliged to make only minimal concessions to the fact of English government.” “Secure in their family and church life,” they had little incentive to anglicize. Indeed, proximity to the English made the Dutch 17. Donna Merwick, Possessing Albany, 1630–1710: The Dutch and English Experiences (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 8. 18. Joyce D. Goodfriend, Before the Melting Pot: Society and Culture in Colonial New York City, 1664–1730 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), 5.

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aware of their “Dutchness,” stimulated them to express their ethnicity, and increased their attachment to their “own customs and values.”¹9 Notwithstanding the steady growth of the British population and the superimposition of English institutions, the “Dutch way of life” in New York thus remained vigorous well into the eighteenth century. With the Dutch Reformed Church providing an institutional base, Dutch communities and families were able to keep their domestic lives to themselves. In country and town, they continued to cluster in ethnic communities that were unusually “impervious to external influences.” They showed a strong tendency to marry endogamously, over 80 percent of Dutch women and 100 percent of Dutch men before 1700 choosing mates from their own ethnic group. If by the 1690s the customary Dutch mutual will made jointly by spouses to guarantee widows oversight of estates during their lifetimes was giving way to the English will written solely by the husband, Dutch husbands wrote wills designed to accomplish the mutual will’s traditional goal. Similarly, although more and more Dutch people were mastering “the rudiments of the English language” and the intricacies of English legal and business practices, Dutch continued to be the language of religion and home.²0 As the British slowly became numerically predominant during the years from about 1710 to 1750 and as public life took on an ever more English cast, however, the Dutch found it more and more difficult “to sustain their ethnic identity in an increasingly English world.”²¹ They continued to build their houses in a Dutch style and to attend the Dutch Reformed Church, but that bastion of Dutchness was steadily losing members. Dutch parents, ambitious for their children’s success, more and more provided them with an English education so that they might “improve their position in society.” By midcentury English “had become the primary language of Dutch young people” and “facility in the Dutch tongue” was largely limited to the elderly. As Randall Balmer has remarked, “Many of those who claimed a Dutch lineage could no longer speak its language.” After 1700 Dutch men and women increasingly abandoned the principle of “ethnic exclusivity in the choice of marriage partners.”²² By the 1750s male will writers had largely abandoned egalitarian Dutch inheritance practices with their focus on the protection of women’s property interests and, in imitation of their English neighbors, were using their control over property “to advance their children’s inheritance and to restrict 19. Ibid., 110, 219. 20. Ibid., 6, 41, 60, 81, 94–97, 186, 208–10. 21. Ibid., 154, 210; Randall H. Balmer, A Perfect Babel of Confusion: Dutch Religion and English Culture in the Middle Colonies (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 153. 22. Goodfriend, Before the Melting Pot, 101, 188–89, 198, 200, 208–10, 213.

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their widows’ control of property.” In effect, the Dutch, in the open economic environment of New York, had assimilated to a common culture that, defined by English law and operating under the broad umbrella of English political institutions, “fostered male control of property within marriage, individual advancement of the young,” a free marriage market, “and the economic selfsufficiency of family households.”²³ The example of the Dutch in New York and elsewhere in the Middle colonies illustrates three complementary developments that would subsequently be replicated in the experiences of most non-English European immigrants to British North America in the eighteenth century: fi rst, the gradual accommodation to a rather small public sphere dominated by English or British people and norms; second, the intense privatization of a very large domestic sphere within which people could construct lives according to individual or group values; and third, the steady assimilation to a core culture that, while always tolerant of various expressions of ethnic identity, was largely defined by the dominant English population. Among the Dutch, the anglicizing process represented by this third development proceeded more rapidly among the wealthy and in urban places. Among the less well-to-do and in rural areas, Dutch ways continued to be powerfully manifest at least through the end of the eighteenth century. New Sweden was the only other colony where the charter culture was not the work of English or British people, and the experience of its Swedish and Finnish settlers and their descendants stands in marked contrast to that of the Dutch. Already under the jurisdiction of the Dutch at the time of the English conquest of New Netherland in 1664 and incorporated into the colonies of Pennsylvania and Delaware in 1680, the Swedes and Finns in the Delaware River valley lacked the critical mass necessary to enable them to preserve much of their ethnicity in the face of the overwhelmingly numerically superior British population surrounding them. By 1750 the Finnish language had completely disappeared, and the Finns’ descendants, as the Swedish naturalist Peter Kalm reported, had all “changed into Englishmen.” More numerous to begin with, the Swedes held on to their language and customs longer. During his visit, Kalm found that many Swedes still understood and in private even spoke Swedish but that English had become their “principal language” and that more and more of them, “ashamed to talk in their own tongue because they fear they may not in such a case be real English,” refused to speak Swedish in public. Along with rapid rates of intermarriage between Swedes and neigh23. David E. Narrett, Inheritance and Family Life in Colonial New York City (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992), 203, 214.

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boring English people and the total anglicization of the Swedish Lutheran Church, which during the first half of the eighteenth century became Anglican, this wholesale abandonment of the Swedish language testified both to the difficulties a small group of people had in maintaining a separate identity in a sea of British people and, perhaps, to the attractive power of the dominant culture.²4 III In contrast to the conquered Dutch and Scandinavian populations of the Hudson and Delaware River valleys, the new European immigrants who came to colonial British North America between 1680 and 1775 came to cultures that were already English, and they knew from the outset that they would have to adapt to the provincial English cultures in which they were to settle or be consigned. They included four different types of voluntary and involuntary immigrants. First were the convicts, several thousand of whom were sentenced by British courts to transportation to the colonies to serve extended terms as bound servants. Second were the socially desperate people whose marginal lives in Britain impelled them to sell their labor for a term of years in return for a transatlantic passage. Third were the refugees from wars and religious discrimination who looked to America as a place to make a new beginning. Fourth were the so-called betterment immigrants, people with resources or skills that in the New World they hoped to apply in ways that would better their economic circumstances. From the 1680s on, colonial promoters, persons to whom the English crown had conveyed title to whole colonies or extensive parts thereof and persons to whom colonial governments had granted large tracts of land, actively endeavored to recruit British and European Protestant immigrants from all three voluntary categories. To this end, they sponsored a multilingual promotional literature depicting the colonies as safe and inviting places, societies in which there was virtually no poverty, where free people lived in plenty with little labor, and the industrious acquired families, independence, and even riches. Holding out the prospects of easily available land and high wages for labor, this proliferating literature stressed the absence of expensive religious establishments; the presence of religious toleration; the relatively simple, cheap, and unobtrusive governments; the freedom from oppressive social hierarchies and 24. Peter Kalm’s Travels in North America, ed. Adolph B. Benson, 2 vols. (New York: Dover, 1937), 2:683, 717.

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legal restrictions characteristic of all parts of the Old World; and the glorious independence and liberty that free property holders enjoyed under an English system of governance. For the same purpose, colonies passed naturalization laws guaranteeing to foreign Protestants all rights of citizenship enjoyed by English colonists, a device that the British Parliament sanctioned with its passage of the Naturalization Act in 1740. In effect, this promotional literature invited all sorts of European Protestants, including those who had failed to make it in the Old World, to turn their resources, skills, enterprise, and industry to the pursuit of happiness in the New World, a pursuit that held out better possibilities for the achievement of respectability and economic competence than could be found anywhere else in the Western world.²5 Always implicitly and often explicitly, this literature also held out for foreigners the promise of assimilation to the exceptional new societies taking shape in colonial British North America. To join in the pursuit of happiness, in other words, of material and social betterment and individual self-realization, was to become a full participant in the creation of those societies. But, as is revealed by recent literature on the experience of various ethnic groups, including Jon Butler on the French Huguenots,²6 Stephanie Wolf, A. G. Roeber, Marianne Wokeck, and Hermann Wellenreuther on the Germans,²7 and Ned Landsman on the Scots,²8 the pace and degree of assimilation, or the extent to which members of a particular ethnic group could either join or resist absorption into a colonial British American culture, varied considerably according to a range of significant variables. I list ten of these variables: 1. Group size: Groups that came in large numbers had a better chance of resisting pressures of assimilation. 25. See Greene, Intellectual Construction of America, 68–78. 26. Jon Butler, The Huguenots in America: A Refugee People in a New World Society (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1983). 27. Stephanie Grauman Wolf, Urban Village: Populations, Community, and Family Structure in Germantown, Pennsylvania, 1683–1800 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976); A. G. Roeber, Palatines, Liberty, and Property: German Lutherans in Colonial British America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993); Marianne Wokeck, “German Immigration to Colonial America: Prototype of a Transatlantic Mass Migration,” and Hermann Wellenreuther, “Image and Counterimage: Tradition and Expectation: The German Immigrants to English Colonial Society in Pennsylvania, 1700–1765,” in Frank Trommler and Joseph McVeigh, eds., America and the Germans: An Assessment of a Three-Hundred-Year History, 2 vols. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985), 1:3–13, and 1:85–105, respectively. 28. Ned C. Landsman, Scotland and Its First American Colony, 1683–1765 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985).

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2. Places and modes of settlement: Groups settling in clusters or in urban ethnic neighborhoods could resist pressures to assimilate more effectively than those who dispersed among the general population. 3. Facility in the English language: Unfamiliarity with English made assimilation more difficult and slower. 4. Equality of sex ratios: Those who came in family groups or without a highly skewed sex ratio of men to women could supply the endogamous marriage partners necessary to preserve the ethnic integrity of the group. 5. Degree of continuing contact with the culture of origin: Ongoing immigration from and maintenance of transatlantic kinship, financial, community, and religious networks increased a group’s capacity to maintain its ethnic heritage. 6. Strength and exclusivity of religious commitment: Self-defined religious groups exhibiting a powerful drive to retain a pure church often had the will to sustain a strong commitment to ethnic cohesiveness. 7. Degree of clannishness: Groups from Old World cultures that exhibited clannish behavior were likely to perpetuate it in the New World. 8. Attitudes of the host population: A host population intolerant of alternative modes of behavior could drive a group either to assimilate or to heighten their ethnic consciousness. 9. The enemy within: The proximity of people of radically different cultures—Amerindians, Africans, or African Americans—tended, especially in times when such groups seemed threatening, to blur or obliterate distinctions among groups of European ancestry. 10. The enemy without: Vulnerability to attack from neighboring Spanish or French colonies operated to advance assimilation. How these variables functioned to hasten or to retard assimilation in colonial British North American societies can be illustrated through a consideration of the experiences of the major ethnic groups. I propose to look briefly at two of these groups, the French Huguenots, who were most assimilative, and the Germans, who were least assimilative. In this exercise, we will focus on such critical measures as language persistence, religious affi liation, inheritance practices, and marriage choices. Numbering fewer than 5,000 and perhaps as few as 3,000, French Huguenots were both the earliest and the least numerous of the non-English European immigrants to colonial British America. “Significantly different from later German, Scottish, and Scotch-Irish immigrants, who frequently resided in isolated rural settlements where they had little contact with different national groups,” the Huguenots, who fled France during the two decades following the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685 and mostly settled in three places, South Carolina, New York, and New England, tended to live in close contact

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with the English, often in urban centers. Although ethnic cohesion persisted longest among Huguenots who lived in small rural enclaves, such as New Rochelle or New Paltz in New York, “assimilation and waning cohesiveness typified the Huguenot experience everywhere in [colonial British] America.” They learned English quickly, and soon showed so powerful a tendency to marry outside their ethnic group that Jon Butler has called it “a rush to exogamy.” In South Carolina, 60 percent of Huguenots married non-Huguenots in the 1720s and 90 percent in the 1760s. Already by the 1690s in New York, 40 percent of Huguenots were marrying exogenously, a figure that had risen to close to 90 percent by the 1750s and 1760s. In Boston the figure was almost 97 percent in the 1740s. At first, the French Protestant churches served as a base for ethnic cohesiveness, but by 1750 “only two weak French Protestant congregations still existed in the colonies,” the others having either become Anglican churches or disbanded after their members had transferred their church membership to the dominant local church, Congregational in Boston and Anglican in South Carolina and New York. Even earlier, economically successful Huguenots, such as the Manigaults in South Carolina, the DeLanceys in New York, or the Faneuils in Massachusetts, had been thoroughly absorbed into the mainstream of colonial political and economic life. No other ethnic group experienced such “rapid social and religious disintegration” during the colonial era. In accord with Crèvecoeur’s theory, French Huguenots virtually melted into the general population.²9 The German experience stands in sharp contrast. Twenty to twenty-five times more numerous than the Huguenots, they came as free people and as servants, primarily in family groups, from many small polities and regions, including the Palatinate, Swabia, Alsace, Westphalia, Hesse, Silesia, Württemberg, Baden, Switzerland, and Austria. Consequently, they represented many ethnic strands, held varieties of religious opinions—Lutherans, German Reformed, a welter of pietistic sects, and even a few Catholics—and spoke many dialects of their common language. Although they settled in significant numbers in South Carolina, North Carolina, Virginia, Maryland, New Jersey, and New York, the heaviest concentrations were in Pennsylvania, where at the end of the colonial era they formed about 40 percent of the population, a critical mass that enabled Pennsylvania Germans, alone among non-English speaking immigrants, to support several newspapers and presses in their own language. With many speakers clustered together in rural communities and small towns, German remained a language of community discourse as well as of family and religious life. With heavy continuing immigration from Ger29. Butler, Huguenots in America, 5, 9, 45, 55, 81, 89, 110, 132, 158, 187.

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many and with significant numbers of Germans retaining claims to property in their Old World communities and maintaining religious ties to Old World churches, they kept in close contact with the culture from which they came.³0 These conditions permitted a high degree of ethnic cohesiveness, at least in Pennsylvania and the other Middle colonies. Germans communicated in their native language. They attended German churches and lived in German-style farm and urban houses. Wherever they could, they followed the German custom of private arbitration instead of resorting to the courts. They persisted in German inheritance practices, dividing property equally among their children or, when they wanted to keep the property intact, employing contractual devices to oblige the inheritor to provide for his, less often her, siblings. Except in Philadelphia and its environs, the first generations seldom married exogamously. Rarely did they loan money to nonfamily members. Yet ethnicization in the sense of forming a unified community proceeded slowly among the Germans, as it did among British people. To achieve a coherent German ethnicity out of such a diverse population was a task that required a long and arduous series of intraethnic cultural negotiations that, almost certainly, never come to fruition until well after the colonial era.³¹ Nevertheless, although many Germans were intent upon preserving their “Germanness” in the domestic sphere, where women maintained the language, religious norms, and distinct ethnic habits, only the most clannish of Germans (e.g., the Moravians) showed much reluctance to come to terms with the English host societies in which they lived, and, as a whole, they assimilated to the main components of English culture relatively quickly. Like their English neighbors, they settled, not in villages, but on dispersed farms, were active participants in the land market, moved frequently, demonstrated a tendency toward civil unruliness, and concentrated their energies upon the domestic sphere of family, farm, community, and faith. They learned enough English to participate in the legal and political systems. Those who lived in urban areas resided in neighborhoods defined, not by ethnicity, but by class, and mingled 30. Don Yoder, “The Pennsylvania Germans: Three Centuries of Identity Crisis,” and Stephanie Grauman Wolf, “Hyphenated America: The Creation of an Eighteenth-Century German-American Culture,” in Trommler and McVeigh, eds., America and the Germans, 1:42– 431, and 1:65–84, respectively; Wellenreuther, “Image and Counterimage,” 1:90; A. G. Roeber, “ ‘The Origin of Whatever Is Not English among Us’: The Dutch-Speaking and the German-Speaking Peoples of Colonial British America,” in Bernard Bailyn and Philip D. Morgan, eds., Strangers within the Realm: Cultural Margins of the First British Empire (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991), 220–83. 31. Daniel Snydacker, “Kinship and Community in Rural Pennsylvania, 1749–1820,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 13 (1982–83): 41–62; Wolf, Urban Village, 132, 296–300.

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freely with English and Scotch-Irish fellow townsmen.³² These patterns of behavior suggest that the German experience involved not the formation of selfcontained ethnic communities but the simultaneous pursuit of ethnic tradition in private life and assimilation to host norms in the public sphere. IV That an ethnic group as numerous as the Germans could be pulled so strongly in the direction of assimilation suggests that the pressures in that direction in colonial British North America were indeed powerful. Among the most important of these pressures were 1. The wide availability of utilizable physical and social space. The comparatively wide possession of landed and other forms of property and the consequent achievement of independence enabled free people from all European ethnic groups to be drawn into participation in the pursuit of material betterment that constituted the central cultural imperative of colonial British North American life. 2. The social and economic attractiveness of the regional host cultures, which had early devised effective ways to settle on and develop particular physical landscapes. Later immigrants recognized that the surest route to economic success was to acculturate to those ways. 3. The strength and appeal of the large domestic sphere in which people had autonomy to arrange their lives according to their own ethnic or other predilections. 4. The significant presence of Amerindians, Africans, and African Americans throughout the colonies, reminding Europeans of all ethnic groups of their common Europeanness, civility, and whiteness. 5. Neighborhood mixing, which brought people from many ethnic groups into close contact, stimulated social mingling, and encouraged exogamy. 6. Religious diversity and intermingling, which fostered the development of an ideology of tolerance and sometimes led to cooperation across ethnic and denominational lines. 7. A free marriage market, in which men and women could choose mates according to their own personal preferences without consideration of ethnicity or religion. 8. The exclusion of Catholics and non-English speakers from public life, 32. Laura L. Becker, “Diversity and Its Significance in an Eighteenth-Century Pennsylvania Town,” in Michael Zuckerman, ed., Friends and Neighbors: Group Life in America’s First Plural Society (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1982), 196–221.

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which encouraged those with public ambitions to learn English, the language of political and legal discourse, and caused Catholics to abandon or conceal their religion. 9. Nationalizing public experience, for example, the intercolonial wars with Catholic Spain and France, which emphasized the common Protestantism of settlers; or the American Revolution, which defined who was and who was not a citizen in gender, racial, and class—not in ethnic—terms. The operation of these pressures can be conceptualized in terms of a generational morphology of the assimilative process, to one degree or another common to all immigrant groups in colonial British North America, one that stresses the gradual decay of ethnic distinctiveness and cohesion. The first generation of immigrants adapted themselves to local political, legal, and socioeconomic cultures and learned enough English to accumulate and transfer property. The next one or two generations, creole or native born, grew up as English speakers and as fully, or partially, socialized members of a colonial British North American regional culture, mingled with other members of that culture who were not from their own ethnic group, participated in events or experiences that were common to all ethnic groups, and sometimes married across ethnic boundaries. Still later generations largely ignored ethnic considerations in marriage and other behavior. The speed at which a given ethnic group moved through this process varied according to its size, cohesiveness, and other variables previously discussed, with the experience of the French Huguenots and Swedes being at one extreme of the continuum, that of the Germans at the other, and that of the Welsh, Scots, Ulster Scots, and Irish falling in between. If the experience of the Shenandoah valley as described by the historical geographer Robert Mitchell was typical, the breakdown of ethnic cohesiveness and assimilation to a common culture was even more rapid in sites of secondary settlement to which later generations moved. In such places, Mitchell’s work suggests, the “creation of a landscape of dispersed rural settlement patterns and individual family farms transcended differences in national origins” as economic and commercial considerations took precedence over religious and ethnic ones, and “increasing spatial mixing of populations” and high rates of population turnover and upward social mobility “mitigated against the persistence of ethnic identities over time.” By partially isolating “German-speaking groups from the remainder of the valley’s population,” linguistic and religious differences “prolong[ed] their period of cultural assimilation. They participated less than English-speaking groups in the early civic, political, and mercantile life of the valley. But the more rapidly they achieved commercial suc-

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cess, the more rapidly they became assimilated,”³³ and by the closing decades of the eighteenth century they were full participants in a free marriage market that showed less and less concern for ethnic considerations. The prevalence of this assimilative process among European immigrants and their descendants throughout colonial British North America gave considerable contemporary social authority to Crèvecoeur’s melting-pot theory at the same time that it helped to dissipate the fear of ethnic competition and clannishness voiced by Franklin in the 1750s. Of course, this assimilative process did not extend across racial lines. Some Amerindians who lived among whites chose or were compelled by personal circumstance to assimilate to white ways and to amalgamate with settlers of European extraction. How many is difficult to tell, but we should not underestimate their numbers. During the colonial period, however, that possibility was available to very, very few Africans or African Americans. Not ethnicity, but race, defined not by biology but by a powerful “social construction of racial types centering on a mythology of color” and the association of blackness with inferiority, was during the colonial period and continues to be, as the literary scholar Alan Wald has remarked, “by far the more central category in American culture.”³4 To the extent that the European immigrant experience in colonial British America can be constructed in the terms laid out in this chapter, the question raised by its title would seem to be what the French call a question mal posé. The process of cultural formation in colonial British North America was not a matter of Unum or Pluribus but of Unum and Pluribus. In the words of the literary theorist Werner Sollors, “The opposition between ‘pluralism’ and ‘assimilation’ is a false one.”³5 Everywhere, colonial British American cultures displayed a loose form of unity that signaled a strong and expanding general agreement on the desirability of an essentially English, Protestant, commercial, and prosperous public culture, a culture oriented toward the facilitation of individual or group pursuits of happiness by independent white males. This general agreement in turn permitted, even in some respects encouraged, high levels of pluralism in the construction of the domestic spaces that were the products of those pursuits. This situation encouraged the persistence of eth33. Robert D. Mitchell, Commercialism and Frontier: Perspectives on the Early Shenandoah Valley (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1977), 239–40. 34. Alan Wald, “Theorizing Cultural Difference: A Critique of the ‘Ethnicity School,’ ” Melus 14 (1987): 28. 35. Werner Sollors, “Introduction,” in Sollors, ed., The Invention of Ethnicity (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), xiv.

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nic consciousness and behaviors that resulted in a parallel ethnicization and provided a foundation for the invention of ethnic traditions in the nineteenth century. But the later emergence of ethnicities of nostalgia should not disguise the fact that during the colonial period every major ethnic group, including most Germans, assimilated politically, legally, socioeconomically, and linguistically to the powerful host cultures in which they settled. In the words of Ned Landsman, this experience “helped to unify settlers from diverse and seemingly unconnected regional backgrounds under a common national banner.”³6 36. Landsman, Scotland and Its First American Colony, 258.

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— eighteen —

The Cultural Dimensions of Political Transfers An Aspect of the European Occupation of the Americas

I

F

ew developments have had a greater influence on the social organization of the globe than the movement of peoples outward from Europe beginning during the early modern era. In the early modern Americas, this development was manifest in the establishment of a large number of settler and trading societies, each of them associated—and occasionally even sponsored by—a European state. We have long known that the charter—or founding— groups in these societies brought more than their bodies with them to the New World, endeavoring to incorporate relevant aspects of the culture they had left behind into the political societies they were creating on the ground. Already in 1901, Edward Eggleston dilated extensively upon this theme in his influential Transit of Civilization from England to America in the Seventeenth Century,¹ and many recent scholars, including James Lockhart,² David Grayson Allen,³ and David Hackett Fischer,4 have followed his example. These and many similar works have concentrated upon identifying and describing the ways in which

This chapter was written to be the keynote address for the “Alan Morris Conference on the History of Florida and the Atlantic World,” Florida State University, Tallahassee, February 24, 2006. It is republished here with permission from “The Cultural Dimensions of Political Transfers: An Aspect of the European Occupation of the Americas,” Early American Studies 6 (Spring 2008): 1–26. 1. Edward Eggleston, The Transit of Civilization from England to America in the Seventeenth Century (New York: D. Appleton, 1901). 2. James Lockhart, Spanish Peru, 1532–1560: A Colonial Society (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1968). 3. David Grayson Allen, In English Ways: The Movement of Societies and the Transferal of English Local Law and Custom to Massachusetts Bay in the Seventeenth Century (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1981). 4. David Hackett Fischer, Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991).

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European immigrants and sojourners transformed various indigenous Americas into cultural enclaves of varying size and extent: the colonial Hispanic, Portuguese, British, French, Dutch, Swedish, Danish, and Russian Americas. There is still an enormous amount that we do not fully understand about this process. The focus of this chapter is upon the relatively understudied subject of the cultural dimensions of political transfers in the early modern Americas— not on the thousands of political transfers from indigenous peoples to Europeans (an important subject that has received considerable attention in recent decades)5 but on the transfers from one European cultural area to another. Beginning in the seventeenth century, such transfers occurred in a number of settled territories: some were permanent; others were not. Thus, the Dutch seized parts of Pernambuco from the Portuguese in 1630, holding them until 1654, and conquered New Sweden in 1655; the English captured Jamaica from the Spanish in the mid-1650s and New Netherland from the Dutch in 1664; the French occupied the western portions of Hispaniola, renaming them St. Domingue, beginning in the mid-1660s; and the Dutch acquired Surinam from the English in the Treaty of Breda in 1667. By the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713, the French ceded St. Christopher and Acadia to the British, and the Seven Years’ War produced a massive transfer of jurisdictions. By the Treaty of Paris of 1763, the British gained Quebec, the upper Mississippi valley, and the four ceded islands of Dominica, Grenada, St. Vincent, and Tobago from the French, while the Spanish obtained Louisiana from the French and ceded Florida to the British. In the wake of the American Revolution and the creation of the United States, the British in 1783 ceded control over the upper Mississippi valley to the United States and returned Florida to the Spanish. During the Napoleonic Wars, the Spanish returned Louisiana to the French, who promptly, in 1803, sold it to the United States, and the British acquired full title to the disputed island of St. Lucia and the Spanish colony of Trinidad. The United States purchased Florida from the Spanish in 1819 and in 1848 gained Texas and California as a result of the Mexican War. These transfers are thoroughly familiar. The interesting problem about them involves the symbiotic issues of cultural retention and cultural reformulation. What happens when a new state gains sovereignty over an already formed political society and the population of European descent does not leave? According to Sir Edward Coke’s ruling in Calvin’s Case in the early seventeenth century, a conquered territory continues 5. On the legal dimensions of this process, see the excellent volume by Stuart Banner, How the Indians Lost Their Land: Law and Power on the Frontier (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2005).

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to function under existing law and political arrangements unless or until the conqueror supplies it with new law or with forms of governance to create new law. This doctrine applied only in English law, but each of the colonizing powers had its own legal theories about the status of political transfers. While such doctrines were always subject to negotiation according to the specific conditions involved in any particular situation, at least four outcomes were theoretically possible—cultural retention, cultural reformulation, cultural override, or cultural annihilation—and these outcomes depended on a number of variables, including the existing population’s size, density, and capacity for resistance, and the incoming population’s size, density, and capacity for cultural aggressiveness. The specific issues I will address here are, first, how much of their existing political, legal, and other cultural arrangements did the old inhabitants manage to retain and under what conditions and, second, how extensively did the conquering power impose its cultural patterns upon the old inhabitants and under what conditions? This enormously complex subject has many interesting dimensions. Why were some established cultures sturdier, more robust, and therefore more resistant to cultural change than others? Why were others more open to reformulation or hybridization? Why were some superimposed cultures more invasive or less invasive than others? What sorts of cultural and political negotiations over issues of cultural change occurred? In seeking answers to these questions, it is important to distinguish between the role of the state, which in most early modern situations had limited resources for sponsoring cultural change, and the role of culture-bearing immigrants, who, in superior numbers, represented a powerful force for cultural change. These issues can all be studied comparatively, and my mission in this very exploratory effort is to try to tease out a framework for examining them. As historians of colonial British America and the early United States broaden their perspective to include non-English or non-American places in the construction of a “national” history, these are, I think, vital issues that need to be confronted early on. In the analysis that follows, the retention or transformation of the legal system was so fundamental to the outcomes of these transfers that it will receive special attention. Despite John Philip Reid’s many exhortations on the subject, it is unaccountably omitted from most modern frontier studies, few of which contain any index entry under law. But settler law, created and enforced by settler institutions, was, next to the settlers themselves, the principal instrument of cultural change, the main foundation for supplying a culture with legitimacy, and one of the key elements in holding it together and giving it a coherent identity. Law is too important to be reserved to legal historians.

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Transferred political territories in the Americas fall into two broad categories, vacated territories and occupied territories, vacated or occupied, that is, by European settlers and their auxiliaries. The first category includes a few established political societies, notably Spanish Jamaica in the 1650s, English Surinam in 1676, and Spanish Florida in 1763, where the old inhabitants essentially evacuated, leaving a cultural vacuum and the succeeding population with a free hand to superimpose a political society of their own choice upon the material remains of the old society. Something similar can be said about the French occupation of the western half of Hispaniola, where the settled population had fallen so precipitously for a century and a half that there remained only a few cattle graziers, who offered little resistance when French settlers began in the 1660s to use that area as a source of food and other supplies for the pirates on nearby Tortuga. By the time the Spanish formally ceded the area to the French in the Treaty of Ryswick in 1698, the colony of St. Domingue was well on its way to becoming the sugar-producing settlement that would engineer so much wealth and misery during the first nine decades of the eighteenth century. Jamaica, Surinam, St. Domingue, and Spanish Florida in 1763 thus all fall into a special category of political transfers. As vacated territories, that is, territories from which the existing population of European descent voluntarily removed itself, or, in the case of St. Domingue, a territory depopulated of Europeans, these particular political transfers never confronted any variant of the culture clash involved in many political transfers, and they will not be considered further in this chapter. Rather, the focus here will be on the second category of political transfers, those that occurred in occupied territories. Of these, there were two general types, the subsequently relinquished and the subsequently retained. While many subsequently relinquished transfers occurred on the wild coast of northern South America and in the Lesser Antilles during the mid- to late seventeenth century, the principal examples in this category are the Dutch in seventeenth-century Pernambuco and the Delaware valley, the English in post–Seven Years’ War Florida and the Ohio and Illinois country, the Spanish in early nineteenth-century Louisiana and nineteenth-century Florida, and the French in early nineteenth-century Louisiana. Some of these transfers were relinquished too soon to have a lasting effect. The Dutch occupation of New Sweden, lasting just nine years before they lost it to the English, was too brief to produce any considerable cultural change, although the Dutch offered religious toleration and, presumably, equal access to Dutch law and justice, as they would to those Jewish and English settlers who stayed after the reconquest of

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Surinam.6 The same can be said about the French reacquisition of Louisiana in 1802. It was too brief to enable the French to undo the cultural changes wrought by the Spanish over the previous three decades. But the Dutch experience in Pernambuco, which they renamed New Holland, the British experience in Florida between 1763 and 1783, and the Spanish experience in Louisiana all form instructive cases that require at least some brief observations. All of these territories remained in the hands of their new possessors for twenty to thirty years, more than enough time for considerable cultural change. In New Holland, a very substantial Portuguese population remained. Indeed, for the colony’s first few years, Portuguese guerrillas largely kept the Dutch confined to the vicinity of the coastal urban centers of Recife and Olinda. But a series of successful campaigns beginning in 1634–35 effectively destroyed Portuguese resistance, and during the seven-year stewardship of Count Johan Maurits of Nassau-Siegen beginning in 1637, the Dutch managed to consolidate and extend their control “over virtually all of northeast Brazil,” and “after the conquest of Maranhão in 1641,” Dutch Brazil “encompassed half of the fourteen original Portuguese captaincies,” and the Portuguese acknowledged these conquests in a ten-year truce with the Dutch West India Company in 1641.7 The Dutch signaled their intention to keep New Holland not just by expending considerable sums and manpower in the conquest but by introducing Dutch culture. Making Recife the capital of the Dutch overseas Atlantic, much as Batavia was the capital of the Dutch Asiatic enterprises, they established what one recent scholar has referred to as a “well-thought-out government structure,” introduced “major elements of Dutch jurisprudence,” including written and customary law concerning inheritance and marriages, civil cases, and commercial disputes, and converted several Catholic religious edifices into Dutch Reformed churches. In acknowledgment of their numerical weakness vis-à-vis the Portuguese, the Dutch extended religious toleration to Roman Catholics and permitted Portuguese magistrates to constitute a majority on courts in those districts in which the majority of the white settler population was Portuguese, and Maurits’s “consistent courtesies to the Portuguese planters greatly rehabilitated the sugar industry after years of war and neglect.” Although New Holland attracted considerable numbers of Dutch merchants who became, along with some former political officials, long-term 6. See Hans Norman, “The New Sweden Colony and the Continued Existence of Swedish and Finnish Ethnicity,” in Carol E. Hoffecker et al., eds., New Sweden in America (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1995), 188–214. 7. See Benjamin Schmidt, Innocence Abroad: The Dutch Imagination and the New World, 1570–1670 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 251–52.

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residents, the Dutch West India Company never succeeded in enticing large numbers of Dutch settlers to the colony. Thus, the revolt of local Portuguese in 1644 inaugurated a decade-long struggle in which the Dutch, no match for the “substantial population of Portuguese settlers, nomadic and semi-urbanized Indians, and imported Africans” who opposed them, first had to retreat from the countryside and then, in 1654, to abandon the colony of New Holland altogether.8 The Dutch experience in New Holland illustrates the difficulty in the early modern era of maintaining control over, much less absorbing, an existing population that retains possession of the land, continues to constitute a numerical majority, is reluctant to accept the cultural authority of the conquerors, and continues to receive support from its old metropolis. It also hints at a correlation between immigrant population size relative to the size of the existing population and cultural reformulation or replacement. When the Spanish acquired Louisiana from the French by the Treaty of Fontainebleau in 1762, they began what would be a nearly thirty-year stewardship of that colony, which ended when they returned it to the French in 1802. The French heritage of the inhabitants represented a new problem for Spanish colonial authorities. Never before had they had to confront the governance of a substantial non-Iberian population of European descent in the Americas, and they dealt with that problem gingerly. Beyond taking over administration of the colony and declaring the Recopilación de leyes de los reynos de las Indias the basic law code and Spanish the official language, they made little effort to “Hispanicize life, customs, manners, or language” in the colony, and the Spanish legal code, like “the coutume de Paris, which [had] served as the basis of the French legal system in Louisiana,” was “similarly grounded in the Roman law.” Moreover, although they did enforce legal changes on such basic matters as granting land and settling and distributing estates, Spanish administrators seem to have taken pains to respect “French laws and practices of long usage” and to permit the use of French in judicial tribunals. Indeed, as one modern scholar has remarked, in “the more isolated regions of Upper Louisiana the inhabitants continued to abide by the coutume de Paris for all practical purposes throughout the entire Spanish domination.” To be sure, the Spanish may have had little choice. Few Spaniards came to Louisiana while it was under Spanish control, principally only a handful of administrators and soldiers and a few merchants and clerics, so that the French remained the majority among the 8. Ibid., 213, 249–52; Wim Klooster, “Other Netherlands beyond the Sea: Dutch America between Metropolitan Control and Divergence, 1660–1795,” in Christine Daniels and Michael V. Kennedy, eds., Negotiated Empires: Centers and Peripheries in the Americas, 1500– 1820 (New York and London: Routledge, 2002), 175–85.

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inhabitants of European descent. Demography, similarities in religion, political institutions, legal traditions, patterns of landholding, and a conciliatory and cautious approach to governance meant that the old inhabitants confronted no pressing demands for cultural reformulation and that European Louisiana remained culturally French.9 For different reasons, a similar story can be told about the British occupation of the Ohio and Illinois country after 1763. When the British acquired the area, not many over a thousand French people lived in fur-trading and agricultural villages in a vast area stretching from Detroit north to Mackinac Island and at strategic sites on the Great Lakes and along the Wabash, Illinois, Wisconsin, and Mississippi Rivers. Although they kept substantial garrisons at former French forts at Detroit and Michilimackinac and eventually sent out military emissaries in an effort to exact an oath of allegiance from the more distant settlements in the Illinois country, the British government in London made no provision for governing them during the first decade after 1763, thus leaving whatever government they supplied to the discretion of military commanders. In this situation, those French who did not flee to the Spanish side of the Mississippi fell back on existing institutions and customs to settle internal disputes. With the Quebec Act of 1774, the British placed this territory under the jurisdiction of Quebec and authorized the appointment of administrative superintendents and the establishment of inferior courts, but the outbreak of the War for American Independence prevented the implementation of these measures. During these years, moreover, the British made no effort to form new colonies of settlement in the region, and although many British fur traders flowed into it beginning in the early 1760s, it attracted few British settlers. When the British ceded this area to the United States in 1783, its French inhabitants were thus in almost precisely the same cultural situation they had been in 1763, speaking French, following French customs, and living under French law.¹0 The British took a completely different tack with formerly Spanish Florida. 9. John Francis Bannon, “The Spaniards in the Mississippi Valley—an Introduction,” in John Francis McDermott, ed., The Spanish in the Mississippi Valley, 1762–1804 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1974), 3, 11–13; C. Richard Arena, “Land Settlement Policies and Practices in Spanish Louisiana,” in McDermott, ed., Spanish in the Mississippi Valley, 51, 53–55; George Dargo, Jefferson’s Louisiana: Politics and the Clash of Legal Traditions (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1975), 158–59. 10. See Clarence Edward Carter, Great Britain and the Illinois Country 1763–1774 (Washington: American Historical Association, 1910), 7–9, 13–26, 64–65, 162–63; Nelson Vance Russell, The British Régime in Michigan and the Old Northwest, 1760–1796 (Northfield, Minn.: Carleton College, 1939), viii–ix, 71–73.

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By the Proclamation of 1763, the London government announced its intention to create four new colonies, one in Quebec, two in Florida, and one in Grenada, one of the four ceded islands, the rest of which followed Grenada’s lead to become full-fledged colonies with their own provincial governments. East Florida included the whole of the peninsula, while West Florida included not only the former Spanish territory in the vicinity of Pensacola but also the former French territories along the Gulf of Mexico west to the mouth of the Mississippi. Except for several hundred French people scattered along the Gulf coast, the Floridas were virtually devoid of populations of Europeans whose taxes might support a new government. To get these two colonies off the ground, London authorities followed the policy adopted earlier with regard to Georgia and Nova Scotia and devoted large sums to cover the costs of a full civil establishment, a considerable military force, and gifts to pacify the relatively large neighboring Indian population. Looking forward to the development in both colonies of a full-scale settler society of the kind represented by the older British colonies in North America and the West Indian and Atlantic islands, British authorities vigorously promoted settlement and provided for a full British-style civil government complete with executive and judicial officers, an English common law legal system with grand and petit juries, and, as soon as population levels justified it, an elected legislature. British governors encountered no local resistance to this new establishment, but neither East nor West Florida was a rousing success. West Florida attracted enough immigrants to warrant the calling of an assembly as early as 1766, but East Florida grew so slowly that its governors were able to put off calling a legislature until 1781— when an influx of loyalists demanded conventional legislative governance. By the time the Floridas were retroceded to Spain in 1783, however, each colony had established the foundation for a viable export economy and had a substantial number of slaves and a few thousand settlers of British and other European descent, many of the latter consisting of loyalist refugees from the revolting colonies to the north, who were in the process of creating a still primitive but demonstrably British-style culture. The British Floridas were casualties of war, not of social and economic failure.¹¹ Florida during the second Spanish period, from 1783 to 1821, is the final example of a relinquished transfer during the era I am considering in this chapter. I will return to it below.

11. See J. Leitch Wright Jr., Florida in the American Revolution (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1975); J. Barton Starr, Tories, Dons, and Rebels: The American Revolution in British West Florida (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1976).

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III Because of their brevity, these several relinquished transfers clearly do not represent the best test cases for the analysis of the cultural dimension of political transfers. An understanding of that problem requires a close look at a second category of transfers, those that were retained. Retained transfers also need to be broken down into two quite different groups, those that occurred in lightly settled and those that occurred in more heavily settled areas, settled that is by populations of European descent and their auxiliaries. This category consists of three examples, each taken from the era before the American Revolution and involving English or British conquests: New Netherland, Acadia, and Quebec, with New Netherland and Quebec falling into the previously heavily settled group and Acadia into the lightly settled. The conquest of New Netherland is the first case in which any European power in the early modern Americas acquired—and retained—a new political territory in which virtually the entire existing European population remained behind. As historians have long appreciated, New Netherland was a polyglot of nationalities, including French, Germans, and English, but a majority of the European settler population was Dutch, and by the mid-1660s the culture of the colonists was “distinctively Dutch.”¹² This population lived under Dutch law with Dutch institutions, Dutch religion, and Dutch material life in a political society in which Dutch was the official language. By introducing “institutions, laws, and customary practices,” altering the landscape, setting “patterns of interactions with native peoples and imported Africans, and selectively” importing other aspects of their home cultures, this Dutch charter group, as Joyce Goodfriend has noted, put down deep cultural roots,¹³ and when the English conquered New Netherland in 1664, they found themselves confronting a challenge English colonizers had not before had to meet. In the earliest English colonies—in the Chesapeake and New England, and on the Atlantic island of Bermuda and the West Indian islands of Barbados and the Lesser Antilles—colonial entrepreneurs and settlers, who were mostly if not overwhelmingly English, came with the intention of establishing provincial societies along English lines, with public and private institutions, landholding patterns, laws, and living arrangements that were all fundamentally English in form and spirit, and they had a relatively free hand to do so. Coming from various parts of England, they usually went through a process of ethniciza12. Donna Merwick, Possessing Albany, 1630–1710: The Dutch and English Experiences (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 8. 13. Joyce D. Goodfriend, Before the Melting Pot: Society and Culture in Colonial New York City, 1664–1730 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), 5.

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tion in which they negotiated exactly what it meant to be English. In later colonies, the proportion of English emigrants was smaller but still sufficient to enable the settler populations to pursue the same goal. By contrast, in New York, for the first time they encountered a foreign population that was both entrenched and numerically superior. The task before them was not the negotiation of another English provincial culture among predominantly English people but the superimposition of English cultural forms and practices upon an existing Dutch culture. It would be several decades before the English enjoyed a numerical advantage in New York. As Goodfriend has shown, this process of superimposition was accomplished only slowly over the next seven to eight decades through a lengthy series of cultural negotiations and adjustments between competing impulses toward anglicization and what John Murrin has referred to as batavianization, or the desire (stimulated by English pressures toward anglicization) among Dutch settlers to cling to Dutch ways. Control of the public sphere helped the English in this contest. They quickly established English as the language of law and public discourse, reorganized political institutions along English lines, introduced English legal practices into the courts, and redirected trade into the Anglophone world. The primary instrument in this process, as Donald J. Hulsebosch has shown in his excellent study of constitutionalism in colonial and early republican New York, was English common law culture,¹4 which, as Donna Merwick has suggested, quickly rendered Dutch notaries irrelevant to the judicial system and marginalized those who could not speak English.¹5 Lacking coercive resources over the private sphere, however, the English made no systematic or sustained effort to eradicate other aspects of Dutch culture. Instead, they pursued an accommodationist policy that permitted “the divergent cultural traditions of the Dutch . . . to exist without harassment.” For this reason, members of the large New York Dutch population found themselves, in Goodfriend’s words, “obliged to make only minimal concessions to the fact of English government.” “Secure in their family and church life,” they had little incentive to anglicize. Indeed, proximity to the English made the Dutch aware of their “Dutchness,” stimulated them to express their ethnicity, and increased their attachment to their “own customs and values.”¹6 Notwithstanding the steady growth of the British population and the superimposition of English 14. Daniel J. Hulsebosch, Constituting Empire: New York in the Transformation of Constitutionalism in the Atlantic World, 1664–1830 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005). 15. Donna Merwick, Death of a Notary: Conquest and Change in Colonial New York (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999). 16. Goodfriend, Before the Melting Pot, 110, 219.

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institutions, the “Dutch way of life” in New York thus remained vigorous well into the eighteenth century.¹7 As the British slowly became numerically predominant during the years from about 1710 to 1750 and as public life took on an ever more English cast, however, the Dutch found it more and more difficult “to sustain their ethnic identity in an increasingly English world.”¹8 They continued to build their houses in a Dutch style and to attend the Dutch Reformed Church, but that bastion of Dutchness was steadily losing members. By mid-century, English “had become the primary language of Dutch young people” and “facility in the Dutch tongue” was largely limited to the elderly.¹9 In effect, the Dutch, in the open economic environment of New York, had assimilated to a common culture that was defined by English law and operated under the broad umbrella of English political institutions.²0 The English might have had a similar experience with Nova Scotia had they made any effort to attract immigrants and had they not eventually in the mid-1750s expelled the descendants of the French population residing in the colony when France ceded it to Britain in 1713. For the first thirty-five years, however, the British government made little effort to attract immigrants to the colony and established only a rudimentary, essentially garrison government to preside over it. Without British settlers and with a local population protected in their religion by the terms of the Treaty of Utrecht and barred by anti-Catholic British laws “from assuming political duties of a legal and regular sort,” the colony had no demographic foundation for the institution of representative government, and although the appointed council, composed entirely of Britons, served as both a judicial and a quasi-legislative body to adjust disputes among English inhabitants and between those inhabitants and the French Acadians and used English common law models in those proceedings, in cases involving only Acadians the council tended to make decisions based on local custom and the civil law to which the French settlers were accustomed, a popular development among the heavily French majority. Indeed, from early on, various districts selected deputies to meet with British governing authorities to discuss mutual problems of governance, and over time these “unique instruments of government” served as a vehicle for transmitting government proclamations to the general populace and assumed responsibil17. Ibid., 6, 41, 60, 81, 94–97, 186, 208–10. 18. Ibid., 154, 210; Randall H. Balmer, A Perfect Babel of Confusion: Dutch Religion and English Culture in the Middle Colonies (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 153. 19. Goodfriend, Before the Melting Pot, 101, 188–89, 198, 200, 208–10, 213. 20. David E. Narrett, Inheritance and Family Life in Colonial New York City (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992), 203, 214.

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ity for preserving order, adjusting disputes, and overseeing public works in the localities, effectively becoming the “local government bodies of the Acadian population and serving as buffers between them and the English and [as] the regular channel of communication.” As John Bartlett Brebner has observed in his classic study of Nova Scotia during these years, this “scheme of devolution” worked well “for all concerned and without painful frictions.” In acceding to such arrangements, British officials in the colony had little choice. The soldiers stationed there were never sufficiently numerous to dragoon the local population into doing much that it did not want to do (for example, Acadians never took an oath of allegiance to Britain), and most of the soldiers intermarried with the local population and thereby amalgamated with it. Instead of the British anglicizing the province, the emerging system of civil relations essentially gallicized—or creolized—them.²¹ In this situation, the Acadians thrived, increasing from just under 2,000 in 1714 to about 10,000 in 1749, “spreading over the land and making it their own, selling their products to English and French buyers and resolutely disassociating themselves from . . . international rivalries.” Only beginning in 1749, when the London government undertook to strengthen the northern defenses of its American empire in a costly and vigorous campaign, did Nova Scotia become genuinely British, with a substantial non-French settler population, a functioning common law legal system, and, beginning in 1758, a representative legislature, the 10,000 Acadians having been expelled in the 1750s in a striking act of cultural annihilation, a fate in the Americas generally reserved for Indians.²² Quebec, captured from the French in 1759–60 and assigned to Britain by the Treaty of Paris in 1763, represented a similar problem on an infinitely larger scale. Roman Catholic and French speaking, with their own deeply rooted institutions and system of law, the old residents of New France constituted, like the Acadians in 1713, an alien people. But they were far more numerous and lived in a political society that was much more complex. About 70,000 strong and, like the Acadians, with little interest in emigrating, they obviously could be neither expelled nor easily assimilated to British ways. In this situation, as administrators in both London and Quebec quickly realized, the only feasible way to govern Quebec was to pursue a policy of conciliation. Required by the terms of the treaty to permit Roman Catholic worship and the use of the French language, authorities were cautious in imposing English political institutions and law. Thus, they decided to govern the colony without 21. John Bartlett Brebner, New England’s Outpost: Acadia before the Conquest of Canada (New York: Columbia University Press, 1927), 135, 141, 147–50, 164–65. 22. Ibid., 164–65, 180, 255, 257.

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parliamentary institutions that, while an essential part of British colonial governance, were unfamiliar to the French. Instead, they followed the Nova Scotia precedent and vested legislative authority in an appointed governor and council. Although they made English common law with the jury system the basis for criminal justice, they bowed to the desires of the old inhabitants and endeavored to use established customs and civil law jurisprudence in civil cases, insofar at least as British judges understood them.²³ The French population seemed to be happy enough with these arrangements, which anticipated a minimum of anglicization. However, the Proclamation of 1763 had sought to attract settlers to Quebec by promising that it would eventually have a “regular government,” which meant a government with an elected legislature, and that settlers could expect to enjoy the benefits of English law. Within two years after the English established a civil government for the colony, a small but vocal group of British immigrants, mostly merchants and traders, used this promise to demand the establishment of an assembly and the use of the common law in the civil courts. The battle over these efforts was intense and lasted until 1774, when the Quebec Act both continued the system of conciliar government that had been in place since 1764 and guaranteed the continued use of Quebec civil law in civil cases. Representative government would wait until after Parliament’s passage of the Constitutional Act in 1791. That act, a response to the demands for regular colonial government by the thousands of loyalists who had fled to Canada after the American Revolution, separated Quebec into two provinces, with Upper Canada (now Quebec) being principally French and Catholic and Lower Canada (now Ontario), the home of most loyalist settlers, being British and Protestant. This measure, which authorized the establishment of representative government in both provinces, enabled the British inhabitants, as Reginald Coupland once remarked, to “develop a province of their own . . . on British lines” with a thoroughly common law legal culture, while permitting the still overwhelmingly French society of Quebec to continue living under French-Canadian civil law.²4 These three retained transfers produced markedly different results, and they can be arranged along a spectrum from less to more capacity for resistance to cultural change. In New Netherland, a combination of government 23. See Reginald Coupland, The Quebec Act: A Study of Statesmanship (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1925). Hilda M. Neatby, The Administration of Justice under the Quebec Act (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1937), provides an excellent account of the confusion of law in Quebec, which was at least partially a function of the fact that British judges were interpreting French Canadian law. 24. Coupland, Quebec Act, 191.

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determination and British immigration led to the rapid substitution of British modes of governance and law for Dutch, the slow marginalization of the Dutch inhabitants and their language, the eventual assimilation of the Dutch to an increasingly anglicized society, and the retreat of Dutch culture into the private sphere. In most other early modern British colonies, the anglicization process, mostly driven by settler desires to implement forms of governance and law that would protect their bodies and their property, was considerably faster, and the presence of a substantial Dutch population in New York certainly slowed but did not arrest this process. Near the other side of the spectrum was Quebec. With a large settled population, it had to make rather few cultural adjustments, retaining the French language and French law in civil proceedings and a Roman Catholic religious order. Indeed, in the first quarter century of British rule, the anglicization process went little further than the use of the common law in criminal cases. When large numbers of British peoples flowed into the colony after the American Revolution, metropolitan authorities split off a large section of it to form a new colony with a British majority, thus avoiding the necessity of any fundamental cultural change among the old inhabitants. Nor was any basic cultural adjustment required following the introduction of representative governance in the early 1790s. The new assembly was dominated by French people. For its first thirty-five years until British settlement began in earnest in 1749, Nova Scotia stands even beyond Quebec in the spectrum of cultural retention. With few British settlers to pursue the goal of creating British societies, the neglect of the metropolitan government meant that it would remain a fundamentally French colony. Acadian French culture was never subjected to the process of anglicization. When British settlement began in earnest, the British provincial government simply expelled most of the Acadians. Evidently, in colonies conquered by the British the demographic and cultural density of the old population and the level of British immigration were the critical variables in determining whether a political transfer meant significant cultural change. IV Wherever English or British settlers came to dominate the public life of a colony, however, they, operating under broad constraints set down by a weak, distant, and often negligent metropolitan government with little capacity for coercion, became the central agents for turning indigenous Americas into British ones. This is to make the important point, by no means confined to the British, that most of the agency in the construction of the new polities that made up early modern empires rested in the hands of the settlers themselves. They settled and reconstructed the new spaces, creating the economic

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and household structures that enabled them to live in those spaces, and their agents—in the form of representatives and magistrates—largely fashioned the systems of laws and governance that enabled them to regulate social and economic interactions and to govern the acquisition and circulation of property in land, slaves, and material goods. Of course, they were not entirely free agents in this process. In particular, they were restricted by their metropolitan legal and cultural inheritance. In the British colonies, this meant that they were reproducing variants of the common law cultures they had left behind, cultures that, varying from one political entity to another according to local custom, gave them enormous flexibility in adapting the law to local conditions while at the same time marking them as resolutely, even militantly, British. A similar and equally powerful process was at work in other European Americas. To the extent that they had any qualms about what they were doing to local indigenous peoples and to Africans, settlers justified their behavior in terms of the story they constructed to explain the larger meaning of their lives. According to that story, which was the same throughout the English and many other parts of the newly colonized worlds of the Americas, they were engaged in a massive civilizing process: bringing previously improperly exploited territories into a cultivated state. They were constructing outposts of European civility and thereby beginning the work of bringing civilization to a vast new world. This self-justifying story provided the rationale for the wholesale expansion of settlement throughout the colonial era, as settlers rushed to establish new political units to bring law and governance wherever they went. By the era of the American Revolution in British America, this settler juggernaut was an already powerful engine, and the new territories acquired by the fledgling United States served as a new field for its operation. Even under the Articles of Confederation, the national government played a more prominent role in this process than the British government had. In rulings such as the Land Ordinance of 1785 and the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, as well as in many later measures, it set the rules for land acquisition, for erecting new territories, and for the conversion of those territories into states, while its military forces played an essential role in clearing the land of Indians. After 1783 the settlers were no longer nominally British but American. Indeed, coming from different areas in the old colonies, they negotiated what it would mean to be American in the areas in which they were settling, thereby replicating the experience of early colonial settlers who similarly had come from different areas of England and had had to negotiate their Englishness on American shores. No less than their ancestors, however, these American settlers were propelled by the same impulses to acquire land, achieve economic and social success, and transform their new settlements into civil spaces, and to protect their lives and property through a system of justice rooted in the Anglophone tradition that

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had been at the heart of colonial expansion. These culture-bearing agents carried with them the institutional and legal inheritance they had known in the original states. Thus, if the Northwest Ordinance stipulated that the structure of governance should be republican and the structure of law “based on English common law, as modified by colonial practice,”²5 such stipulations were in perfect accord with the intentions of the settlers. Consensual governance through representative institutions and jury-based common law jurisprudence had long been defining features of the anglicizing, now Americanizing, impulse. In the legal realm, the continuities were striking. “From the established settlements of Massachusetts, New York, and Virginia, to the frontiers of Indiana and Michigan territories,” Mary Tachau has observed, “English law and legal forms . . . defined American jurisprudence.” So far from exhibiting any animosity toward “the English legal system,” Kentucky courts, she found, carefully observed “the proprieties that had become enshrined in centuries of English jurisprudence,” and the “procedures, practices, and principles” observed by the courts were “as consistent with the English judicial tradition as that first generation of Americans knew how to make them.”²6 The common law, Malcolm Rohrbough notes in his study of the trans-Appalachian frontier, “was fully accepted and, indeed, never debated.” “Due process, dependence on English precedent, and the force of tradition gave” courts in the new western states “a legal structure much like that of the East.”²7 By virtue of the inclusion of the Ohio and Illinois country in the Quebec colony by the Quebec Act in 1774, the several hundred French people scattered through it, mostly in the village settlements of Detroit, Vincennes, Cahokia, and Kaskaskia, had been promised a French civil law jurisprudence, but the British government took no steps to implement this promise, and the Treaty of Paris transferring the area to the United States ignored this question altogether. Declining to present their land claims to territorial and state courts, the French inhabitants showed no enthusiasm for the common law system theoretically imposed following the Northwest Ordinance. But their numbers were few, and any hope of securing recognition of their entitlement to live under their old laws disappeared as they were engulfed by settlers committed to the establishment of republican government and common law jurisprudence.²8 The best study of the process involves not any of the states in the Old 25. Malcolm J. Rohrbough, The Trans-Appalachian Frontier: People, Societies, and Institutions, 1775–1850 (Belmont, Calif.: Wadsworth, 1990), 50. 26. Mary K. Bonsteel Tachau, Federal Courts in the Early Republic: Kentucky, 1789–1816 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978), 78, 83, 94. 27. Rohrbough, Trans-Appalachian Frontier, 40–41. 28. Ibid., 60–61.

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Northwest but Mississippi, where William B. Hamilton has made a superb examination of the functioning of law in the territory and early state. According to Hamilton, the incoming tide of Americans venerated the “common law as the birthright of Americans,” and the “English common law and English equity” rapidly became the “accepted base of the law in the territory.” To be sure, judges greatly simplified procedure and adapted it to suit conditions in the territory, but “dominance of the common law was strong.” Courts sometimes had resort to Spanish civil codes in cases that had been in litigation before Spain ceded the territory to the United States in 1798, but those cases were settled, not by notaries in the Spanish style, but by juries and judges in the Anglo-American tradition. Like their counterparts in the Old Northwest, the small French and Spanish populations in the territory had to adapt themselves to an aggressive common law culture that had little room for alternative legal systems.²9 Across the Mississippi in Upper Louisiana, which came under American jurisdiction following the Louisiana Purchase, there was a substantially higher population of French people than could be found in the Ohio and Illinois country in 1783, several thousand as opposed to several hundred, and in the more settled places the French population had been living under a settled civil law system for upward of a century. Yet, the outcome of this clash of cultures was very much the same. Excellent studies of the confl ict of legal traditions in Missouri and Arkansas, the two states that developed in Upper Louisiana— Missouri by Stuart Banner, and Arkansas by Morris S. Arnold—have shown that Jefferson’s ambition to make the common law the legal foundation in Louisiana was quickly realized in those states. “The Americans who poured into Missouri in the early nineteenth century,” Banner writes, “brought with them notions of property, how land was to be owned, and sovereignty, how law was to be found, [that were] quite different from those dominant in the area” under the French and Spanish. Whereas the old inhabitants believed that productive land should be held in common and thought that “law bubbled up from the unarticulated norms of everyday life,” the new immigrants were committed to the ideas that land should be “allocated in private plots” and that law “flowed downward, in the form of rules and precedents embodied in [authoritative] texts” and limited the discretion of the officials who enforced it. For the first few years after the transfer of these territories to the United States, Banner finds, “local civil disputes were often resolved through a hybrid form of jus29. William Baskerville Hamilton, Anglo-American Law on the Frontier: Thomas Rodney and His Territorial Cases (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1953), vii, 118, 121–22, 132, 136.

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tice, in which American judges resorted to local substantive rules developed under Spanish colonial authority and established by the testimony of French Creoles, in proceedings whose form was copied by England,” and “in land cases this mixed legal system lasted much longer.” “With this one exception, however,” Banner finds, “older legal traditions died out within a decade after the Louisiana Purchase,” and in 1816 the territorial legislature declared that thenceforth English common law would be in force. Arkansas underwent a similar transformation. With an incoming population ignorant of civil law and determined “to extirpate” it “entirely from their legal system,” Arnold writes, the legal community made sure that Arkansas “would completely and deliberately separate itself from its eighteenth-century cultural and legal traditions.” In explaining these transformations, Banner and Arnold both emphasize the importance of the growing demographic superiority of the Anglo settlers. As Arnold notes, the small size of the old population “made it more vulnerable to American immigration and to the legal assumptions that accompanied it.” Both writers emphasize the voluntary assimilation of the old population through intermarriage and the gradual acceptance of the benefits of a legal system that privatized ownership of land. And they both stress the extent to which the legal transformation was, in Banner’s phrase, “primarily culturally driven.” The specific cultural influence these writers stress is the “ideas of the people who shaped the legal system,” that is, of the legal community. But surely the common law cultural heritage of the broader settler population constituted an overwhelmingly important precondition for this change.³0 Even though they had larger numbers of old settlers and in some cases much better developed civil legal systems than could be found in Upper Louisiana in 1804,³¹ those states carved out of territories acquired either from Spain, in the case of Florida, or from Mexico, in the cases of Texas, California, and New Mexico, repeated the experience of Missouri and Arkansas. With regard to the territories acquired from Mexico, the case is pretty clear. As David Weber has remarked, “Anglo Americans repudiated the Spanish past all across the borderlands, judging Spain’s legacy an unmitigated failure and replacing its vestiges with their own institutions and cultures,” even rejecting 30. Stuart Banner, Legal Systems in Conflict: Property and Sovereignty in Missouri, 1750–1860 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2000), 3, 6, 98–99, 128, 150; Morris S. Arnold, Unequal Laws unto a Savage Race: European Legal Traditions in Arkansas, 1686–1836 (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1985), 197, 203. 31. See Charles R. Cutter, The Legal Culture of Northern New Spain, 1700–1810 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1995). Cutter covers only New Mexico, but his findings presumably apply to Texas and, perhaps to a lesser extent, to California as well.

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“the widely respected Spanish civil law.”³² From the moment of its successful independence movement in 1836, the Texas republic introduced not only Anglo-American forms of governance but also a common law legal culture. As the authors of one of the earliest digests of Texas state law noted in 1859, Texas courts “followed and practiced” the “common law of England as now practiced and understood” insofar as it was not “inconsistent” with state law.³³ In California, a growing American and British population had, well before the American conquest, been uncomfortable with the character of Mexican Californian law. In particular, according to David J. Langum, they had little confidence in alcalde courts, decried “the absence of a well-defined substantive law and the highly particularistic manner in which justice was meted out to individual litigants,” and “bleated loudly about living in a land without law.” Sharing a common culture and with “strongly internalized understandings of the common law that they had brought with them to California,” they invariably invoked those understandings in all their dealings with one another. So thoroughly were they “acculturated to the common law,” Langum concludes, that they were altogether unable “to understand the procedures, purposes, and cultural assumptions behind the Mexican legal system.” No wonder that when California came under American control, the surging majority of AngloCalifornians “drew on local law only to the extent absolutely necessary,” primarily in adjudicating land disputes with roots in the Mexican period, and “did their best to order their present circumstances in a manner harmonious with the remembered law of the eastern and midwestern states from which they had come.” No wonder that the 1850 California constitution adopted the English common law as the rule of decision for California courts.³4 Even in New Mexico, which contained more people with a Spanish heritage and a much older and more deeply rooted culture, the existing legal culture could not survive the transfer to the United States. The first territorial 32. David J. Weber, The Spanish Frontier in North America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), 341. 33. William S. Oldham and George W. White, A Digest of the General Statute Laws of the State of Texas (Austin, 1859), 296–97. But see also Jean A. Stunta, Hers, His, and Theirs: Community Property Law in Spain and Early Texas (Lubbock: Texas Tech University Press, 2005), which shows that Spanish property law survived in Texas well after the area was taken over by Anglos. 34. David J. Langum, Law and Community on the Mexican California Frontier: AngloAmerican Expatriates and the Clash of Legal Traditions, 1821–1846 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1987), 140, 146, 186, 267, 269; Gordon Morris Bakken, The Development of Law in Frontier California: Civil Law and Society, 1850–1890 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1985), 87.

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legislature adopted the common law. Although subsequent legislatures modified common law forms to fit the arid conditions they found in New Mexico and validated the water regulations that had been followed by the Spanish for more than two centuries, “most lawmaking,” as one recent scholar has found, “depended upon Eastern precedent or the English common law.”³5 Unfortunately, no modern scholar has taken up the subject of the relationship of law to political transfer in Florida. Certainly, when the Spanish resumed control of the province after 1783, they reestablished Spanish civil law, notwithstanding the continuing presence of many residents, particularly in West Florida, who had come from common law societies with traditions of consensual government. Especially in the 1790s and in the following decade, moreover, the promise of land on easy terms lured still more people with similar cultural preferences. How as an alien group they adapted to living in a Spanish colony with Spanish law, however, does not seem to have been a subject of intensive study.³6 Presumably, they adjusted, albeit probably with misgivings and complaints. After the United States assumed control in 1821 and collapsed West and East Florida into a single territory, Congress instructed the territorial government to follow the provisions of the Northwest Ordinance, which required the adoption of the common law as well as the establishment of republican representative government. In the absence of a detailed modern study, there is no reason to suppose that Florida either differed much from other territories obtained from Spain or Mexico or retained much of Spanish civil law culture, except perhaps for the settlement of land claims.³7 Lower Louisiana represents the only exception to this trend. Indeed, its closest parallel is not with any of the other territories that came under the jurisdiction of the United States but with Quebec after Britain acquired it. Both societies were French and Roman Catholic. Both had relatively long histories and complex settled societies. Both had their own French modes of governance and social relations. Both were founded upon civil law jurisprudence, and French was the predominant language of authority in Louisiana even after it came under Spanish governance in 1763. Significantly, both Lower Louisiana 35. Gordon Morris Bakken, The Development of Law on the Rocky Mountain Frontier: Civil Law and Society, 1850–1912 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1983), 14, 16, 22–24, 32, 34, 130. 36. An important exception is Andrew McMichael, Atlantic Loyalties: Americans in Spanish West Florida, 1785–1810 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2008), 35–53, 102–26, which includes an acute analysis of the tensions between Spanish authorities and American settlers over the legal status of slaves. 37. See Charlton W. Tebeau, History of Florida (Coral Gables: University of Miami Press, 1971), 121.

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and Quebec had come under the jurisdiction of an alien power that spoke a different language and had radically different systems of governance, landholding, and jurisprudence. Finally, although the French inhabitants of Louisiana were in a less commanding position demographically than those in Quebec, they did constitute a clear majority of the settled population of Europeans and people of mixed descent in 1804, and their numbers gave them far more capacity to resist cultural imposition than their thinly scattered compatriots enjoyed in Upper Louisiana or the Ohio and Illinois country. The one crucial difference between Quebec and Lower Louisiana was in the evident determination of the new presiding power “to transplant its institutions and culture into the territory.” Jefferson was a strong advocate for total assimilation, and although there was no possibility of imposing this policy by force, the territory’s new and growing American population, eager to live under the familiar common law, promised to give the government powerful, perhaps even decisive support, and, in stark contrast to the situation with the British government in Quebec four decades earlier, the rapidity with which the government moved in this direction called forth deep fears of “cultural annihilation.” Already in the fall of 1804, the new territorial council inaugurated “the legal reconstruction of Lower Louisiana” by introducing virtually all of “the institutional innovations . . . characteristic of the common law system. By introducing the familiar officials, courts of law, and adversary proceedings of the common law,” the council signaled its intention to ready the territory for the “ultimate reception of the common law itself.” From the beginning, the new system exhibited many practical problems, largely arising out of the “difficulties attending an effort to administer a judicial system when the authorities lacked certain knowledge of local customs while the inhabitants were confused by the new legal formalities.” But these conditions were symptomatic of a much deeper clash of legal traditions that, as George Dargo showed in his pioneering and still extremely valuable study of nearly thirty years ago, “encompassed the interests, the value system, the very identity of a diverse people who now, for the first time in their history, had to unite in defense of the common elements of their heritage.”³8 In this situation another American innovation worked strongly in their favor. In contrast to Quebec, which waited three decades for the establishment of legislative government, Congress stipulated that Lower Louisiana, like other populous territories, should have an elected legislature. The first election was held in the fall of 1805, and the old inhabitants, augmented by an influx of refugees fleeing from the revolution in St. Domingue, enjoyed an overwhelm38. Dargo, Jefferson’s Louisiana, 10, 19, 50, 106, 111, 140.

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ing majority in the new Louisiana House of Representatives. Having never opposed “the introduction of the common law jury trial in criminal cases,” they consented to a law that “permanently terminated the existence of Spanish criminal law in” Lower Louisiana, and they focused their efforts upon preserving as much of the civil law tradition as they could. In 1808 the legislature enacted a civil law digest that “established a kind of civil law system in Louisiana.” Subsequently, the state constitution of 1812 protected this achievement by barring “legislative reception of an alien system of law by general reference.” As Dargo said, the “enactment of a digest of civil law composed mostly of French, Spanish, and Roman sources—though interlarded with some local as well as a smattering of English materials—shows how deeply attached the old inhabitants were to their legal past, and how much they desired to maintain continuity with it.” As Dargo points out, the digest represented nothing less than “the political compromise on the basis of which the settled population of Lower Louisiana finally accepted American rule.”³9 Yet, it is easy to overestimate the extent of this victory. It did not “establish a thoroughgoing civil law system.” The state’s criminal law was based on the common law tradition, and, Dargo reports, “procedural law, while unique, adopted many of the basic components of the American system: some of the common law forms of action, the adversary process itself, and the controlling importance of the judiciary in determining the meaning of the written law.” Equally important, the territorial government had acted to implant an “American-style court system” before an effective opposition could be mobilized. With some rancor, the old inhabitants accepted these “institutional changes,” and the digest of civil law “left the major American legal innovations intact,” with a superior court, jury trials, and parish judges instead of the old civil commandants. Despite their distaste for these features of the new legal system, “the local population adjusted to the new order with surprising speed.”40 Yet, in preventing a general introduction of the common law, the old inhabitants of Louisiana demonstrated that under certain conditions in a political transfer, a settled population could resist wholesale cultural amalgamation. It had met the common law onslaught head on and had won some limited concessions. No other political transfer to the United States could claim as much. Only Quebec had managed, in the midst of a political transfer, to retain more of its cultural integrity.

39. Ibid., 17, 50, 121, 132, 169, 173. 40. Ibid., 135, 171.

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V Looking generally at this complex panoply of examples, we can make a few observations about the cultural dimensions of political transfers in the early modern Americas. Only the French Acadians suffered total cultural annihilation. In an overwhelming number of these cases, as well as in the West Indian examples of St. Christopher in 1713 and the ceded islands after 1764, extensive immigration by nationals and agents of the new possessing power rather quickly overwhelmed whatever was left of the old culture, shifting cultural power to the incoming population and inaugurating fundamental cultural transformations in the structures of governance, legal foundations, social and economic organization, and religious orientation. In all of these cases, the old cultures were largely swept away, leaving only a few buildings, roads, fields, irrigation systems, and other improvements, perhaps a few legal remnants in property law, or, where assimilation of the old population did not occur through intermarriage and shifting settlement patterns, a few ethnic enclaves. The actual role of the overseeing government in these transfers was not insignificant. It often set the rules for settlement and, especially in the nineteenth century, supplied some military force to protect the incoming population. But, as should be evident from the foregoing analysis, the incoming settler populations were the principal agents in the transformation of the spaces acquired as a result of these political transfers from one kind of national cultural space to another. Culture-bearing creatures, settlers brought their own regional cultures with them to a new space and then, acting within the confines of the institutions they created and peopled, negotiated among themselves a cultural system that was familiar and would enable them both to claim attachment to the cultures they had left behind and to create a new version of those cultures adapted to their new physical spaces. What they produced was principally the product of their desires, however those desires may have been frustrated, usually only temporarily, by a variety of conditions. In most cases, then, the history of political transfers was a history of cultural imperialism that ran roughshod over and frequently all but annihilated the existing culture. The very ubiquity of this kind of cultural imperialism, resulting in wholesale cultural override, dramatically calls attention to those few cases in which it did not occur. The relinquished transfers did not attract sufficient immigration to enable the new controlling power to hold on to them or, in the case of Dutch Brazil, to overcome the resistance of the more numerous old population. But within the category of retained transfers, we find only the three examples of Quebec, Lower Louisiana, and New York, in each of which the old culture exhibited considerable resistance to cultural change and substantial capacity

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for cultural retention. Most successful in this regard was Quebec. Governmental timidity, perhaps in part the result of new impulses toward toleration, pluralism, and humanitarianism in imperial administration, a low immigration rate of British nationals, and the French Canadian determination to retain the old way of life seem to have been the central variables there. In Lower Louisiana, the sustained resistance of the old inhabitants and their clout in the new political institutions that came with territorial government combined with the weakness of the central government to enable them, even in the face of growing immigration from the presiding power, to retain some elements of their civil law culture—not as much perhaps as modern Louisiana patriots like to claim, but still enough to make Louisiana an exception, indeed the only exception, in a sea of common law cultures in the rest of the United States. If Quebec managed a high degree of cultural retention, Lower Louisiana underwent a process of significant cultural reformulation. In New York, the old Dutch population was less successful in resisting the imposition of an anglicized culture because, unlike the old inhabitants of Lower Louisiana, they lacked a public voice in the early decades following the conquest and so were unable to negotiate the institutionalization of much of their old culture, which consigned them to more rapid assimilation than occurred in Lower Louisiana. The ultimate result was simply another case of cultural override. The history of European expansion, as Stuart Banner observed about the expansion of the United States, is “one of serial colonization, in which the people overwhelmed by the incoming” population “included earlier colonizers from continental Europe as well as Indians.”4¹ By ending this chapter with the three cases with the highest degree of cultural retention, I fear that I have betrayed my modern sensibilities. People like me prefer to think about cultural survivals not cultural loss. But it has required a long exposure to humanitarian values and a painful education in the pitfalls of cultural arrogance to bring the modern world to an appreciation of the virtues of pluralism. This chapter is a reminder that European cultural imperialism has operated not only against indigenous people or the enslaved but also against other Europeans. It suggests that we should focus, not upon those few cases in which old settlers managed to retain some of their old ways, but upon the vastly greater number of cases in which old settlers suffered loss of control not just over their territory and instruments of governance but, more importantly, over the cultures they had constructed in those spaces. The victims of cultural override, they managed, at best, to retain in their private lives some of their old ways, if also, in all probability, only in a greatly modified form as a result of the normal 41. Banner, Legal Systems in Conflict, 3.

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processes of the cultural negotiation that seems to occur among all peoples who live together in the same geographical space. Negotiating power is almost never equal. As early modern Americanists lovingly construct histories of the many worlds we have lost, they need to keep in mind the disproportionate role of power in the creation of the Americas.

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— nineteen —

Early Modern Southeastern North America and the Broader Atlantic and American Worlds

H

istorians of neither the indigenous inhabitants of the mainland of southeastern North America nor the colonies Europeans established there after 1560 have ever been comfortable working within the framework of the history of the South. The very idea of the South as a distinctive entity characterized by slavery, large numbers of people of African descent, large plantations producing staple crops for export, low investment in education and other social amenities, and deep religiosity makes sense only in the American national context that took shape during the fifty years following the American Revolution and the subsequent creation of a new federal state that by the 1820s had, however tenuously, drawn all the inhabitants of southeastern North America into a national union. Only as a consequence of their experiences within that union did the people of these discrete political societies come to understand, first, that they had a common interest in relation to other segments of the union and, over time, that they had a common identity and composed a distinctive region. To be sure, the political societies that evolved out of these early colonies all subsequently became parts of the South and, to one degree or another, shared in the defining of its attributes. Indeed, as the South became a self-conscious entity in the years after the Missouri Compromise, residents of those old societies, especially Virginians and South Carolinians, often acted as leaders in the construction of a southern regional consciousness. If historians of the South have been content to search the pasts of the colonies for the rudiments of the later South, and if some students of the southern colonies have been complicitous in such projects, most colonialists have found the anachronism and decontextualization inherent in such undertakings discomforting and have

This chapter was written for a special issue of the Journal of Southern History. It is republished here with permission from “Early Southeastern North America and the Broader Atlantic and American Worlds,” Journal of Southern History 73 (Aug. 2007): 1–14.

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suspected that they would lead to distorted interpretations. For more than a century, the urge to avoid such disfigurement has driven historians of the early modern Southeast to seek frameworks that did not treat their areas of study as anterooms to the histories of the United States and its subset the South. The historians involved in this endeavor have been remarkably successful. They have represented the early modern southeastern colonies as outposts or extensions of the European empires to which they were attached and, further, as products of early modern European expansion, populated by European and African immigrants and culturally fused with indigenous peoples. Historians have used the perspectives of empire and of expansion to highlight the significance and changing character of European attachments, the concept of diaspora to focus attention on the extent and depth of the African connection, and the idea of encounter to investigate the impact of both upon the indigenous populations who inhabited the Southeast in considerable numbers before and after the arrival of Europeans and Africans. Two additional and complementary perspectives, the Atlantic and the pan-hemispheric, offer still other routes by which historians of the early modern Southeast may escape the pitfalls of anachronism and set their area of study in an even broader contemporary context.¹ Modern historical investigation over the past century has revealed that the early modern Southeast was, by any measure, a place of extraordinary diversity. Its indigenous inhabitants were descendants of urban-dwelling and mound-building Mississippian peoples who had reached their zenith in the thirteenth century. At the time of their encounter with Europeans in the sixteenth century, they spoke a variety of languages and were divided into several large chiefdoms and confederacies and several hundred smaller nations. Many of these people were sedentary and agricultural, a few were sedentary and subsisted on marine resources, and others supplemented their part-time agriculture with hunting and gathering or were nonagricultural and seasonally nomadic. Despite severe demographic decline, a result of war, enslavement, and their susceptibility to European diseases, they continued for two centuries to be numerically predominant in the region as a whole. As late as 1760 they 1. See Jack P. Greene, “Beyond Power: Paradigm Subversion and Reformulation and the Re-Creation of the Early Modern Atlantic World,” in Greene, Interpreting Early America: Historiographical Essays (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1996), 17–42; David Armitage, “Three Concepts of Atlantic History,” in Armitage and Michael J. Braddick, eds., The British Atlantic World, 1500–1800 (New York: Palgrave, 2002), 11–30; and Jack P. Greene, “Comparing Early Modern American Worlds: Some Reflections on the Promise of a Hemispheric Perspective,” History Compass 1 (2003), http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/ doi/full/10.1111/1478–0542.026 (see chap. 1 in this volume).

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were twice as numerous as whites in the vast areas south and west of the nodes of European settlement on the Atlantic coast. With a long history of creating new collectivities, moreover, they showed themselves to be incredibly adaptive, repeatedly seceding and combining to form new groups, some of which constituted powerful nations and others of which lived on the margins of colonial societies and entered into webs of economic, social, and political exchange with European settlers. By 1776 the indigenous population had stabilized, and it held sway over much of the vast area between the Carolinas and the Mississippi River valley.² The Europeans who came to the area were similarly diverse, representing three different national states with divergent legal cultures and styles of colonization. The Spanish established the fi rst permanent European colony in 1565 on the northern fringes of Spain’s American dominions, naming it Florida and conceiving of it principally as a strategic outpost on the return route of silver fleets. Attracting few Spanish settlers, it consisted of a presidio in St. Augustine and a hinterland of more than 26,000 evangelized Indians organized into self-governing mission provinces that in the middle of the seventeenth century extended from north Florida into Georgia and from the Atlantic to the Gulf of Mexico. Florida’s support system, providing royal subsidies to the Indians in return for their agricultural products and labor, was unique in early European colonial relations in southeastern North America. By the early eighteenth century, proxy wars and slave raiding generated by the English to the north had destroyed this extensive mission system and reduced Florida to a citadel at St. Augustine; two posts on the Gulf, at Pensacola and San Marcos; and a few hundred refugee Indians and fugitive slaves. The small export economy that had developed in the seventeenth century around deerskins, ranch products, naval stores, and provisions for the port of Havana had become a casualty of war and Indian fl ight. In an unrelated colonizing venture during the second decade of the eighteenth century, the Spanish, pushing the frontier of New Spain north, established a presidio and a mission and began to settle in San Antonio, Texas.³ When the English came to southern North America, they brought an entirely different pattern of colonization. With settlement as their principal ob2. Amy Turner Bushnell, “The First Southerners: Indians of the Early South,” in John B. Boles, ed., A Companion to the American South (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2002), 3–23, provides an excellent essay on the literature on this subject. 3. See Amy Turner Bushnell, Situado and Sabana: Spain’s Support System for the Presidio and Mission Provinces of Florida (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1994); Bushnell, “First Southerners,” 11; and David J. Weber, The Spanish Frontier in North America (New Haven: Yale University Press 1992), 191–95.

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jective, the English colonies—Virginia and Maryland in the Chesapeake in the early seventeenth century, the two Carolinas in the latter half of the seventeenth century, Georgia in the early eighteenth century, and, briefly, East and West Florida between 1763 and 1783—promoted large-scale British immigration, privatized landholding, created consensual polities, imposed legal and religious practices, and used unfree labor, European, Indian, and African, to produce staple crops (tobacco in the Chesapeake and northern Carolina; naval stores, rice, and indigo in the Carolinas, Georgia, and the Floridas) for export. Although the English developed a brisk trade with the Indians in deerskins and, until the late 1720s, in Indian slaves and used Indian allies as proxies in military contests with the Spanish, the English showed little interest in evangelizing Indians and, in contrast to the Spanish in Florida, segregated themselves from indigenous populations. Driven by land hunger, the aggressive settler population in the English colonies expanded rapidly. By the 1760s and 1770s it had driven the Indians out of and occupied most of the area up to the Appalachian Mountains and was spilling across those mountains into the eastern reaches of the Mississippi River valley.4 The last to make permanent settlements on the southern North American mainland, the French established the colony of Louisiana in 1699, beginning with posts along the Gulf at Biloxi and Mobile and, in 1718, at New Orleans. Although the colony attracted far more metropolitan immigrants than Spanish Florida had and rather early developed the rudiments of a plantation economy using slave labor to produce indigo and other staples for export, the area occupied by white immigrants remained relatively small, with a core of fairly dense settlement radiating out from New Orleans and several scattered grainproducing settlements, often associated with trading posts, extending north up the Mississippi and its tributaries. Outside the areas of commercial agriculture, relations with Indians fell somewhere between those of the Spanish and those of the English and involved a significant degree of mutual interaction.5 If the differences among these areas of national colonial occupation were striking, there were also significant variations within them, especially in the case of the more densely settled (with Europeans and Africans) sphere of British colonization. Notwithstanding the commonalities deriving from their English origins and continuing connections with the metropole, the Chesapeake colonies, including the northern portions of North Carolina, differed radi4. See Jack P. Greene, Pursuits of Happiness: The Social Development of Early Modern British Colonies and the Formation of American Culture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988), 81–100, 141–51, 170–206. 5. See Daniel H. Usner Jr., “Borderlands,” in Daniel Vickers, ed., A Companion to Colonial America (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2003), 408–24.

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cally from those to the south. Students of these colonies have always shared an awareness of these variations, but the distinctions have been made ever more explicit over the last forty years as a result of a significant expansion and deepening of the historical literature. Founded during the first half of the seventeenth century, the Chesapeake colonies of Virginia and Maryland produced their principal staple, tobacco, in a mixed agricultural economy. They employed massive amounts of unfree labor, but before the closing decades of the seventeenth century, the workers were mostly indentured servants of British origin. Enslaved Africans only became the predominant form of labor during the early decades of the eighteenth century and never constituted more than 40 percent of the total of a rapidly expanding population through the middle decades of the eighteenth century. As a mode of economic organization, plantations with thirty or more slaves accounted for less than about a fifth of the land under tobacco culture, the typical establishments being much smaller family farms of a few hundred acres worked by family members and fewer than ten slaves. By the early decades of the eighteenth century very few indigenes remained within or lived adjacent to the principal areas of settler expansion. The Chesapeake colonies were thus essentially yeoman cultures, the vast majority of property-owning settlers being small freeholders, whose holdings were surrounded by a few plantations, often no more than two or three per county. In these cultures not only the large planters but also the yeomanry had prominent roles in a civic life that was fundamentally consensual, especially in the localities. By the time of the American Revolution, many prominent white Chesapeake residents were beginning to recognize the problems a slave economy had created for Virginia and, buying into the new antislavery rhetoric emanating from Europe, were sympathetic to proposals for eliminating slavery. Along with a growing emphasis on wheat and grain production, this ambivalence about slavery made some Marylanders and Virginians think of their states as central states that more closely resembled Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and New York than they did the eastern states of New England or the southern states of the two Carolinas and Georgia.6 The southern portions of North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia, 6. See Greene, Pursuits of Happiness, 7–18, 81–100; James Horn, Adapting to a New World: English Society in the Seventeenth-Century Chesapeake (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994); Philip D. Morgan, Slave Counterpoint: Black Culture in the EighteenthCentury Chesapeake and Lowcountry (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998); and Jack P. Greene, “The Constitution of 1787 and the Question of Southern Distinctiveness,” in Robert J. Haws, ed., The South’s Role in the Creation of the Bill of Rights (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1991), 9–31, 147–49.

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all settled after 1670, presented a striking contrast. For their first century, they centered around a low-country cultural core radiating from Charleston, the South Carolina capital, never penetrating more than fifty miles from the Atlantic, and stretching north into the Cape Fear region of North Carolina and, after the removal of a ban on slavery in the mid-eighteenth century, south into coastal Georgia and, after 1763, the new British colonies of East and West Florida. Significantly influenced by the successful example of Barbados, from which many early immigrants came, this culture early came to rely on the institutions of the large plantation and slave labor for its economic base. Although this area always engaged in enough mixed agriculture to feed itself, used the heavy forests to produce naval stores, and carried on a brisk trade in deerskins and Indian slaves with the numerous indigenes who inhabited the region, it rapidly came to concentrate on the production of rice and, in the 1740s, indigo. Following a model worked out in the sugar culture of Barbados, low-country planters produced rice on large plantations with high concentrations of imported African slaves. Already by the first decade of the eighteenth century, blacks constituted a majority of the population in the core parishes, and by the 1730s blacks outnumbered whites by more than two to one, a ratio that in some low-country parishes reached as high as nine to one, because white planter families typically lived not on their plantations but in the growing urban port of Charleston, by far the largest colonial city on the southern North American mainland. In contrast to the Chesapeake and the West Indies, where slaves produced staples in gangs, the low-country labor system of rice production typically used the task system, assigning slaves specific jobs and permitting considerable scope for their own economic projects once they had completed those tasks.7 Of course, these diverse societies—consisting of many scattered indigenous nations, colonies attached to three separate empires, and large distinctive settler cultures within the more heavily settled British territories that were further divided into five or, briefly after 1763, seven separate polities, each with its own discrete pattern of civic life and identity—had some contact with one another. Each of the colonies had extensive interactions with indigenous peoples, principally through trade, slave raiding, or war. Indigenous nations and Spanish Florida provided refuges for runaway slaves from the British colonies, and a small clandestine trade flowed between Spanish Florida and the lower south7. See Greene, Pursuits of Happiness, 141–51; Morgan, Slave Counterpoint; S. Max Edelson, Plantation Enterprise in Colonial South Carolina (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2006); and Bradford J. Wood, This Remote Part of the World: Regional Formation in Lower Cape Fear, North Carolina, 1725–1775 (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2004).

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ern British colonies. However, these many political societies were all also discrete entities. The indigenous nations were scattered, only loosely connected or completely disconnected from one another, and sometimes at war among themselves; and the colonies all were much more closely tied to the European metropole to which they were politically, economically, and culturally attached than to the colonies of other national empires within the region. To the extent that individual colonies had intensive interactions with other colonies, it was with those within the empires to which they belonged, the British colonies with the British West Indian or other continental colonies, French Louisiana with the French settlements in the Illinois country, Canada, or the French Caribbean islands, and Spanish Florida with Cuba and New Spain, to both of which it had administrative attachments. Clearly, if these colonial spaces existed within the physical setting of the southern North American mainland, they also operated in and were constituent parts of the larger national imperial contexts to which they were connected by powerful ties of governance, law, trade, and cultural heritage. Through a great number of monographs, many different historians contributed to the construction of this understanding of early modern southeastern North America largely without benefit of an explicitly Atlantic or panhemispheric perspective. To be sure, the imperial and expansion-of-Europe frameworks within which they set most of their work were always implicitly and often explicitly transatlantic, involving the comparison of colonial cultures with metropolitan cultures and the explication of the continuing ties between metropolises and colonies in all areas of colonial life. Stimulated by the civil rights movement and the new historical consciousness relating to black America that it produced, other historians used the concept of diaspora to study the slave trade, the African roots of American cultures, the widespread distribution of African slaves throughout the American world, and the diversity of the slave experience in America, and thereby also focused attention on the transatlantic exchanges that characterized the new American worlds created after 1492.8 Still others, using the concept of encounter, examined the effects of the intrusion of Europeans and Africans upon the old worlds of the Americas and the vast cultural changes provoked by this ongoing encounter.9 Indeed, it can be said that this body of work laid the groundwork for the development of broader conceptions of the Atlantic basin and the Western Hemisphere as in8. See Philip D. Morgan, “African Americans,” in Vickers, ed., Companion to Colonial America, 138–71; and David Eltis, The Rise of African Slavery in the Americas (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000). 9. See the excellent article by James H. Merrell, “Indian History during the English Colonial Era,” in Vickers, ed., Companion to Colonial America, 118–37.

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terconnected spaces in which similar social processes were at work. The result has been the identification of a useful area of study that can be called Atlantic or Western Hemispheric history. How the rapid emergence of Atlantic history as an area of study may change the way historians think about early modern southeastern North America is as yet unclear. So far, Atlantic history has mostly been, in J. H. Elliott’s words, a “history conceived in terms of connections,” producing much new detail about many aspects of the complex and changing relationships that bridged and surrounded the Atlantic but little about the new worlds that developed within the four Atlantic continents.¹0 For the study of those worlds, however, the greatest promise of an Atlantic framework is that it may encourage more historians to look across imperial and national boundaries and explore transnational continuities and similarities. Such scholars may thereby create broader contexts of comparison that will at once stimulate an appreciation of the general contours of the early modern New World experience, clarify understanding of the manifold specific variations within that experience, and enable historians to fit the particular areas they study into that general context. With reference to the early modern Americas, scholars from a variety of disciplines have been moving in this direction for more than a quarter century. Although he totally neglected developments on the southern continent, D. W. Meinig, working in the field of historical geography, in the first volume of The Shaping of America: A Geographical Perspective on 500 Years of History, published in 1986, employed the concept Atlantic America as a framework for his transnational discussion of European intrusions into North America before 1800.¹¹ In the same year, Peter Hulme, a literary analyst deeply influenced by postcolonial perspectives, used the concept of an extended Caribbean to call attention to commonalities in European understandings of the encounter with indigenous peoples and the subsequent colonial process in a broad area stretching from English Virginia south to Portuguese Salvador.¹² Perhaps more useful for students of early modern southeastern North America is the concept of a plantation complex that has emerged principally out of the work of the many historians who over the past four decades interested themselves in the African slave trade and the many inscriptions of African slavery upon American social landscapes. 10. J. H. Elliott, “Atlantic History: A Circumnavigation,” in Armitage and Braddick, eds., British Atlantic World, 236–37; quotation on 237. 11. D. W. Meinig, The Shaping of America: A Geographical Perspective on 500 Years of History, vol. 1: Atlantic America, 1492–1800 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986). 12. Peter Hulme, Colonial Encounters: Europe and the Native Caribbean, 1492–1797 (London: Methuen, 1986), 3–4.

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Like the idea of an extended Caribbean, the concept of a plantation complex calls attention to the ubiquity of a form of settlement that stretched across national and imperial boundaries and encompassed a substantial area of the Americas. Distinguishing plantation colonies from settlement colonies, in which the majority of the populations were of European origin, Philip D. Curtin defined the primary attributes of the former in a succinct volume published in 1990. These attributes included location in a tropical or semitropical and fertile space, the overwhelming predominance of unfree labor, a majority slave population that was non-self-sustaining and had to be replenished by continuing imports, organization of agricultural production around large-scale capitalist plantations, and a powerful focus on the production of staples for foreign export. Curtin finds the purest examples of this complex in the sugar colonies. Although Spaniards brought sugar culture from the Mediterranean and eastern Atlantic islands to Hispaniola and to New Spain during the first half of the sixteenth century, Brazil was the American place in which, during the last half of the sixteenth century, Europeans first worked out all the characteristics of the plantation complex, which spread to Barbados and other eastern Caribbean islands during the last half of the seventeenth century and from thence to the Greater Antilles, where during the century after 1690 Jamaica and St. Domingue became its fullest expressions before the early nineteenth century. At the same time, this plantation culture spread in modified form onto both the South American and North American mainlands. If it centered in the Caribbean, Brazil and the North American Southeast functioned as parallel continental sites for its extension into the rest of the Americas. Indeed, it proved to be highly adaptable for the production of agricultural staples other than sugar, for forest industries, and even for ranching, and it subsequently spread into the mining areas of Peru and New Granada, where the supply of Indian labor was diminishing, and, following the discovery of gold in the 1690s and diamonds a few decades later, into Minas Gerais in Brazil.¹³ So extensive was the importation of Africans to meet the labor demands of this expanding plantation complex that Africans could be found in significant numbers well beyond the apparent boundaries of that complex, sometimes even functioning on large, plantation-style units of production in nontropical areas, as in the case of iron production in the British middle colonies and agricultural production in New Jersey, New York, the Connecticut River valley, and the Narragansett area of Rhode Island.¹4 Insofar as the employment of 13. Philip D. Curtin, The Rise and Fall of the Plantation Complex: Essays in Atlantic History (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990). 14. See Ira Berlin, Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1998), chap. 2.

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African slaves on large units of production was the central feature of the plantation complex, there seem to have been few limits on its utility in the early modern Americas. Following Philip D. Morgan, however, it may be useful to make a distinction between slave colonies, where slaves provided a high proportion of the labor force and constituted a substantial segment of the population, and slave-owning colonies, where slaves supplied only a fraction of the labor and were a distinct minority of the population, albeit in both types of colonies slavery was protected and regulated by law. This distinction is similar to the one Curtin made between settlement colonies and plantation colonies.¹5 Yet these distinctions cannot be applied too strictly. Except possibly for those small island colonies the British established in the West Indies after the Seven Years’ War, the slave societies of the plantation colonies were never without at least a few small, independent producers working with smaller numbers of slaves on the peripheries of the sugar plantations and were never strictly monocultural in the sense that they produced only the principal export staple. All the older island colonies in the Lesser Antilles, both British and French, produced much of their own foodstuffs, and if, as in the case of Barbados, they had a significant white population before the adoption of slavery, the population continued to be up to a fifth white. In the Greater Antilles of Jamaica and St. Domingue, the number of whites never rose much above 10 percent, but much slave labor went into the production of minor staples such as coffee, indigo, cotton, and ginger, into growing foodstuffs, and into cattle raising. On the mainlands of North and South America, even in the low country of southern North America and in Salvador in Brazil, where the populations were heavily African, substantial numbers of small producers raised foodstuffs and livestock and produced naval stores and logwood in a varied economy that concentrated on but was not limited to the production of the main export staple. The plantation economies of the Chesapeake and Louisiana—where the proportion of blacks was far lower and the number of independent yeomen farmers much larger—practiced even higher levels of mixed agriculture in a social landscape dominated by smaller economic units. In the study of these variations, a broad pan-hemispheric framework may be just as useful as an Atlantic perspective. By locating early modern southeastern North America within the broader framework of the pan-hemispheric plantation complex, historians can better understand where the area fits within the broad colonial process that trans15. Philip D. Morgan, “British Encounters with Africans and African-Americans, circa 1600–1780,” in Bernard Bailyn and Philip D. Morgan, eds., Strangers within the Realm: Cultural Margins of the First British Empire (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991), 157–219.

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formed the Americas after 1492. They can see it not only as a promiscuous conglomeration of distinctive offshoots of European empires but also, at least in the British and French areas of settlement, as an extension of the plantation complex and as one or more of the many possible variations within that complex. From this wide perspective, these areas seem to be less peculiar—less in need of explanation—in the early modern colonizing process than the settlement colonies to the north: the middle colonies and New England in colonial British America, and New France in colonial French America. But the inclusion of the Chesapeake colonies within this plantation complex also underlines the fact that planters can coexist with a numerically dominant and empowered slave-owning settler population of smaller farmers within the plantation complex, an insight that will not surprise historians of colonial British America but that has often been overlooked by students of the various cores of the plantation complex. This emphasis upon the combination of plantations and farms involving mixed agriculture, the production of staples, and slave labor may be particularly important for historians interested in pursuing the questions of how and when the diverse societies and populations in early modern southeastern North America eventually came together to form a coherent cultural region. Ultimately, of course, answers to these questions will require systematic and intensive analysis by historians of the emerging South in the national era. In light of the vast amount we have learned over the past generation about all the entities of southeastern North America as they had developed by the closing decades of the eighteenth century, however, I suggest that this exercise begin by acknowledging that the most dynamic and expanding population on the southern mainland of North America was the British. Within the British sphere the low-country model seems already by the 1770s to have been close to reaching its natural limits. If Barbados had served as a cultural hearth for the extension of the plantation complex to the low country, the cultural hearth that took shape in the low country and revolved around rice production on large plantation units with large numbers of slaves was unsuitable for lands far beyond the physical boundaries of the low country and was therefore incapable of replication throughout much of the area of future expansion. By contrast, the cultural hearth that developed in the seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century Chesapeake tidewater turned out to be eminently transportable and adaptable. Beginning in the 1730s, tidewater immigrants carried Chesapeake culture, with its focus on a mixture of tobacco, corn, and grain production using slave labor distributed among a few large plantations and a much larger number of small producers, west into the Piedmont and across the Blue Ridge Mountains. There they joined an even larger stream of

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immigrants pushing south from Pennsylvania, at once absorbing those immigrants into the broad outlines of Chesapeake culture and adapting that culture to the interests and inclinations of the newcomers. Together, these two streams of immigrants negotiated a new cultural hearth, the attributes of which a subsequent generation carried west across the Appalachians into Kentucky and south into the backcountries of the Carolinas and Georgia.¹6 With the emergence of cotton culture in the 1790s, this cultural hearth underwent a further transformation before it swept across the South as fast as the Indians could be removed and Spanish control over Florida, Louisiana, and Texas eliminated. Wherever the aggressive bearers and modifiers of this culture went, they took with them its central ingredients—an insistence upon a consensual and participatory political system, a system of law rooted in British common law, and, most important of all, a pattern of land occupation devoted to the production of staples with slave labor on a few plantations and a much larger number of smaller units—and imposed them upon the physical and political landscapes. As Michael P. Johnson and David C. Rankin have shown in a study based on an intensive examination of the first four United States censuses throughout the Southeast, this pattern of land occupation predominated throughout those states that came to constitute the South.¹7 Although the bearers of this culture ran roughshod over the indigenous and non-British cultures they encountered, even to a remarkable extent in French Louisiana, where they met the heaviest resistance, they never created a homogeneous regional southern culture.¹8 The flexibility of this cultural system ensured that it could be adapted to a wide variety of distinctive areas, distinctions that derived from variations in physical settings, cultural inheritances, and population mixtures; and the emerging South turned out to be at least as heterogeneous as any other area of the new United States within whose jurisdiction it slowly took shape in the decades after 1820, if, perhaps, not nearly so heterogeneous as it had been during the three previous centuries. 16. See Robert D. Mitchell, “American Origins and Regional Institutions: The Seventeenth-Century Chesapeake,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 73 (Sept. 1983): 404–20. 17. Michael P. Johnson and David C. Rankin, “Southern Slaveholders, 1790–1820: A Census,” paper presented at the Southern Historical Association annual meeting, New Orleans, 1990. 18. See Jack P. Greene, “The Cultural Dimensions of Political Transfers: An Aspect of the European Occupation of the Americas,” Early American Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal 6 (Spring 2008): 1–26 (see chap. 18 in this volume).

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Index

Abercromby, James: and metropolitan conceptions of empire, 271; on need to reform British imperial governance, 96–97 Abingdon, Lord, on colonial claims to British liberty, 240 Absolutism, ideology of: in early modern Europe, 37; in early modern England, 43–44, 46; and early modern European governance, 255; expropriation of, by revolutionary French regimes, 55–57; —, by British King-in-Parliament, 99 Acadia: ceded to Britain, 402; as retained transfer under Britain and limited extension of English culture to, 409, 411–12, 414. See also Nova Scotia Acadians: cultural annihilation of, in Nova Scotia, 423; expulsion from Nova Scotia, 210, 411, 412 Adams, Abigail, 346 Adams, John, 279; on behavior of Maryland and New York delegates, 346–47; on congressional delegates’ jealousy of New England, 346; on differences among American colonies and congressional delegates, 283, 345, 348; on popular response to South Carolina constitution, 352; on settler purchase of Indian lands, 279; on slowness in forming a national government, 351; on superiority of New England delegates, 347; on Virginia and North Carolina constitutions, 352 Adaptability, as attribute of social and cultural capital, 368 Adaptation, cultural: in the Americas,

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19–32; of British social and cultural capital to colonial societies, 364–72; of English consensual governance and English legalities in American colonies, 105–6, 109–10, 136, 143–48, 289; of English identity to American colonies, 342–43; of English libertarian inheritance to slave societies, 294–322; of metropolitan culture to American colonies, 267–77 Addison, Joseph, 320–21 Adolphus, Gustavus, 260 Adventurers, private or state-authorized, in the early construction of empire, 86, 117–18 Africa: British representative government in eastern African colonies of, 224; contributions of factories in, to British commerce, 115; forced migrations from, 381–82; and trade with Britain, 116 African Americans: and assimilation process in colonial British America, 399; as comparative models in the shaping of settler identity, 29 African slavery and American colonization, 11 African slave trade, 20, 113; application of humanitarian standards to, 225 Alba, Duke of, and Netherlands Revolt, 40 Algeria, 66, 67 Allen, David Grayson, on transplantation of English culture to New World, 401 Alleyne, John Gay: defends Barbados response to Stamp Act crisis, 317–21; on relationship between slavery and defense of provincial rights, 317–19, 321

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440

Index

Alterity, language of, as applied by metropolitan Britons to colonists and colonies and overseas Britons, 30–31, 51, 272–74, 282, 291, 297–99, 323–39 A. M., anon., on colonial claims to British liberty, 234–35 America, cultural transformation of, 19–32 American, negotiation of meaning of, in new territories, 415–16 American Civil War, 359 American Plantation Duties Act of 1764 as reform measure, 223 American question: and colonial claims to British identity, 342; debate over, 213–25; and debate over constitutional status of colonial assemblies, 227–49; and the othering of American settlers, 337–39; and West Indian response to debate over, 316–22 American Revolution, 55, 373, 376, 379, 382, 426; causes and nature of, 48–54; contrasted to French Revolution, 74; as a decentralizing revolution, 53–54; effects on British Empire of, 100, 211–12; effects on colonial identities, 29–30; as settler revolt, 51; similarity to previous early modern revolutions, 46–51; weakness of transformative power of, 78 American Studies and study of identity, 15 American War for Independence, 12–13, 209; causes of, 213–24; and effect on debate over constitutional status of colonial assemblies, 227–49 Amerindians. See Indigenous Americans Ancient Constitution, 44–45 Anderson, Adam: on British colonial administration, 221–22; on British commercial development, 263; on commerce with American colonies, 264 Anderson, Benedict: on relationship of creoles and metropolitans, 267; on creole conceptions of cultural status, 269 Anglicization of colonies, 30–31 Anglocentrism of colonial British America scholarship, 21–22 Annalistes: methods, 7; objectives, 4, 21–22, 68–69 Antigua, 142; assembly of, 105; and confl icts

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over settler claims to English rights and legalities, 297 Antislavery: and an early attack on Jamaican slavery, 300–302; and negative assessment of creole despotism in American colonies, 273–74 Arkansas and incorporation of English legal system in new state polity, 416–18 Armitage, David, on character of British Empire, 210 Arnold, Morris S., on the incorporation of English legal system in Arkansas, 416 Articles of Confederation, 72–73, 351, 355; and United States expansion, 415 Assemblies, colonial. See Parliamentary institutions, colonial Assimilation: as cultural objective in colonial public sphere, 399–400; of Dutch in New Netherland, 409–11; morphology of process of, 398; pressures for, 397–98; in settlement of colonial British America, 383–400; variables in process of, 393–94 Atlantic history: as analytic framework, 3–18; as approach to study of colonial southeastern America, 427, 432–33 Atlantic History and Culture Program at Johns Hopkins University, 18, 20 Atlantic island colonies, effects of repeal of Declaratory Act of 1766 upon, 247. See also Bahamas; Bermuda Atlantic perspective: on early modern history, 3–4; on southeastern North America, 426–37 Australia, 102, 213, 282; and British representative governance, 224; responsible government in, 249 Authority: in the British Empire and the United States, 53–54, 71, 143–202, 227–49; in colonial Hispanic America, 58; of colonial legal regimes, 278–92; consensual character of, 284, 288; consolidation of, in French national state after 1789, 55–57; construction of, in early modern states and empires, 83–88, 101–12; creation of, in early America, 283, 294–99; debate over, in reference to Jamaica, 140–207; dispersal of, in early modern states, 36; distribution

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Index of, in the United States, 350–59; division of, in British Empire, 133, 140, 242–44; in the Dutch Republic, 41–42; in English/ British state, 45–48; negotiated character of, in British Empire, 218; in Old Regime France, 54–55 Backcountries, cultural formation of, in southeastern North America, 437 Bacon’s Rebellion, 127 Bahamas, 103, 116; assembly in, 108, 128, 249; exodus of loyalists to, 212; metropolitan bureaucrats in, 125 Bailyn, Bernard, 33 Balmer, Randall, on Dutch assimilation in New York, 390 Banner, Stuart: on the incorporation of English legal system in Missouri, 417–18; on United States expansion and colonialism, 424 Barbados, 123, 124, 142, 374, 409; assembly of, 105, 249; character of early settlers in, questioned, 326; and confl icts over settler claims to English rights and legalities, 297; corporate identity of, 26, 27, 30; as cultural hearth for British West Indian colonies and lower south, 436; English identity in, 294; government of, 121; and influence on lower southern colonies, 431, 435; labor system of, 431; metropolitan bureaucrats in, 125; military force in, 115; as part of plantation complex, 434; perpetual revenue in, 127; ratio of black to white population in, 435; settlers in, 24; slave system of, 327 Barbados Assembly, claims English rights and legalities, 298; and response to Stamp Act crisis, 317–21 Barbadoes Packett, anon., and colonial claims to English rights and legalities, 303 Barnard, Samuel, on Jamaica’s claim to English system of law and liberty, 295 Baugh, Daniel, on British Empire as commercial empire, 95 Bayly, C. A.: on British Empire, 91, 100, 130; and changing philosophy of British Empire, 277

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Beckford, Richard, 178; opposes removal of Jamaica capital, 165 Beckford, William, M.P.: condemns Knowles in British House of Commons, 188, 192–93; on security of Jamaica land titles, 161 Bell, Philip, Barbados governor, 106 Bengal, 115, 120, 210 Berkeley, Sir William, Virginia governor, 106 Bermuda, 103, 115, 409; assembly of, 105, 119, 249; metropolitan bureaucrats in, 125; settlers of, 24 Bernard, Francis, on need to reform British imperial governance, 96 Bernard, Sir John, M.P., on economic importance of empire, 216–17 Betterment immigrants, to colonial British America, 392 Beverley, Robert, on English social origins of early Virginians, 335–36 Bilder, Mary Sue, 179 Blackstone, Sir William: on consensual character of English legalities, 283–84; on English system of law and liberty, 258; on legal needs and functions of polities, 186– 87; on social basis for enfranchisement in Britain, 234, 338; views of Parliamentary omnipotence, disputed, 242 Blathwayt, William, and colonial administration, 122, 129–30 Blenman, Jonathan: denies that Barbados is conquered polity, 298; on metropolitan othering of colonies, 333 Bloch, Marc, 68 Board of Trade: abolition of, 137–38; and administration of colonies, 129–35, 218–20; attention to Jamaican problems, 142–207; authority of, denied by Jamaica Assembly, 200–205; on making Jamaica example for rest of colonies, 205; provides limited support for Knowles, 172–73; relations with Edward Trelawny, 147–51; reports negatively on Jamaica acts, 157–58 Bodin, Jean, 38 Bolivia, 17 Bollan, William, on need to reform British imperial governance, 96

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Index

Bolton, Herbert E., 4, 13 Bombay, 210 Borderlands: in pre–United States history, 5; of northern New Spain, 15 Bourbon reforms, in Hispanic American empire, 59, 98 Bourke, Nicholas, champions colonial claims to English rights and legalities, 303–6 Bradford, William, 7 Brazil: colonization of, 10, 17; Dutch era, 423; as part of plantation complex, 434. See New Holland; Pernambuco Brebner, John Bartlett, on Acadia under British governance, 412 Brewer, Holly, 279 Brightman, Thomas, and English national identity, 259 British American colonies, success of, 89–90 British behavioral standards and traditions, as normative model for colonial provincial identities, 28–29 British Empire: awareness of economic importance of, as source of metropolitan efforts to tighten imperial controls, 216– 18; colonial conception of as composite polity, 227–28; and imperial governance, 48–49, 53, 71, 206, 227–49; contrasted with Roman Empire, 233; diversity of, after 1763, 210–11; emergence of, as global power, 208–13; moral costs of, 213, 224–25; as negotiated empire, 140, 207; new authoritarianism in administration of, 225; and role of metropolitan social and cultural capital in development of, 364– 72; success of, and bureaucracy in, 113–39; territorial expansion of, 210–11 British patriotism, of colonies, 28–29 Brooks, James, 279 Brown, John: on English system of law and liberty, 257; on relationship between commerce, liberty, and refinement, 264; on superior humanity of British, 263 Buckner, Philip, on subordination of liberty in nineteenth-century British Empire, 277

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Bureaucracy, British imperial and colonial, 113–39; criteria for personnel in, 124, 136; expansion of offices after 1750, 124–27; as an instrument of imperial control, 126 Bureaucracy, in English/British national state, 45 Burgoyne, General John, 240 Burke, Edmund, M.P.: on American creoles, 273; on the Board of Trade, 137–38; on British libertarian traditions and success of empire, 270; on colonial claims to liberty, 275–76; on development of British colonies, 92; on folly of using force to maintain empire, 95–96; on liberty as the foundation of Protestantism, 276; on nature of British colonization, 94–95; on new colonial system, 98–99 Burke, Thomas: on need to retain state sovereignty in national union, 354–55; on state fears of congressional authority, 353–54 Burke, William: on ad hoc character of English colonization, 102, 122; on British libertarian traditions and success of empire, 270; on colonial bureaucracy, 134; on European expansion and transformation of the Americas, 364–66 Burnard, Trevor, 17 Bushman, Richard Lyman, 280; on law as instrument of colonial property owners, 287–88 Butler, Jon, on French Huguenot immigration to colonial British America, 393, 395 California: acquired by conquest by United States, 402; and incorporation of English legal system in new state polity, 418–19 Calvin’s Case, 402–3 Campbell, John: on British colonial administration, 221; on British libertarian traditions and success of empire, 270, 276; on commerce with American colonies, 264–65; on development of American colonies, 266; on empire and national identity, 266–67; and origins of English commerce, 262; on relationship between commerce and social equality and indus-

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Index try, 264; on relationship between trade and empire, 120 Canada, 69, 102, 115, 282; and British representative governance, 224; conquest of, 209; responsible government in, 249 Cape Breton, metropolitan bureaucrats in, 12–26 Cape Fear region of North Carolina, 431 Cape of Good Hope, 365 Care, Henry, on English system of law and liberty, 256, 257 Caribs, black, in St. Vincent, 115 Carib War in St. Vincent, 314 Carolina: assembly of, 107; slave system of, 327. See also North Carolina; South Carolina Cartwright, John, on British objections to acknowledging legitimacy of colonial claims to liberty, 235–36 Casa de Contratación, 121 Caswell, Richard, 354 Catalonia, separatist revolt in, 39, 43 Catholic exclusion in Ireland, as moral cost of empire, 277 Catholicism, 10. See also Evangelization Catholics, on application of humanitarian standards to Irish Protestant discrimination against, 225 Ceded Islands. See Dominica; Grenada; St. Vincent; Tobago Center for New World Comparative Studies, John Carter Brown Library, 18n28 Central America as settler colonies, 9, 15 Character, distinctive provincial, of each colony, 28–29. See also Identity Charisma, metropolitan, in colonies, 115, 39 Charles I, 45 Charles II, 45–46, 137; and colonial administration, 121; proclamation as acknowledgment of Jamaica’s rights as Englishmen, 161–62, 169, 202 Charter groups, role of, in creating new societies, 387–88, 401 Chase, Samuel, on counting slaves for taxes under Articles of Confederation, 350 Chesapeake: character of, as planter-

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443

yeoman societies, 429–30; as coherent region of colonial British America, 386; labor system of, 431; as part of plantation complex, 435–37; and ratio of black to white populations, 435; as region of central states, 430; settlers in, 23; transportability of culture heart formed in, 436–47. See also Maryland; Virginia Child, Sir Josiah: on character of early colonial settlers, 326, 335; on colonies and commerce, 116 Chile, as settler colony, 9, 15 Chivalric model and American colonization, 9 Cholmondeley, Earl, M.P., on economic importance of empire, 216 Civic participation: in Britain, 47–48; in the British colonies and United States, 52; exclusive character of in the Netherlands, 41–42; in Hispanic America after independence, 61–62; social basis for, in Jamaica, 167–68 Civil law. See Law Civil society: concept of, 372–73; as established in colonial British America, 373–79; as precondition for American Revolution, 377–79 Clannishness, degree of, as variable in process of assimilation in colonial British America, 394 Clarke, Edward, on Knowles’s oppression, 184–87 Clive, Robert, and British corruption and rapine in India, 272–73 Coercive Acts, 338 Coke, Sir Edward, 35, 168, 275, 284, 297, 305, 402; and English jurisprudential tradition, 44–45, 46, 254–55 College of New Jersey, 349 College of Philadelphia, 385 Colley, Linda: on British cult of commerce, 263; on English system of law and liberty, 258, 285; on Protestantism and British identity, 260–61 Collinson, Peter, 384 Colman, George, Jr., on American creole slave owners, 272

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444

Index

Colonial British America, as explanatory concept, 21–32 Colonialism: continuation of, after creation of national states, 32, 65–69; effects of 22–23; moral costs of British, 313–15; as a positive legacy for United States, 339; in United States expansion, 424 Colonial outcomes, determinants, of, 10–12 Colonies: and British national identity, 264–77; metropolitan conceptions of, 270–71; and presence of colonies of rival powers as variable in process of assimilation in colonial British America, 394 Colonising, anon., on metropolitan authority over colonies, 231–32 Colonization, transatlantic, 83–100; ad hoc nature and process of English, 102–3, 122; as civilizing project, 265–66, 282, 286; comparisons with Greek and Roman, 93–94; competing concepts of, in British Empire, 90; consolidation of, and Lords of Trade, 127–28; and constitutional status, 96–100; contemporary conceptions of, in colonial British America, 374–77; legal instruments of, 104–5; limited government investment in, 117; as measure of European progress, 368; and social and cultural capital, 364–80 Colonization synthesis, as analytic perspective, 281 Commerce: as adhesive element in British Empire, 139; and British national identity, 253–54, 262–65, 285 Comparative colonial history, 6–18, 23 Comparative models and the formation of provincial identities, 29 Comunero revolt in New Grenada, 1781, 59 Conciliation of former colonies and failure of ministerial efforts to end American War, 241 Connecticut, 85, 124, 386; assembly of, 105; contributions to Seven Years’ War, 214 Connecticut River valley, as extension of plantation complex, 434 Conquered status of colonies and debate over inherited rights and legalities of settlers, 298

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Consejo de Indias, 121 Consensual character of English legalities, 283–84 Consensual governance: as basis for colonial resistance to metropolitan authority, 223– 24; and British colonial development in the Americas, 377–78; and construction of imperial authority, 101–12; 114, 118–19; debate over extent of, in colonies, 226–49; as English political tradition, 45–48, 71–72; expectations of, in British colonies, 90; as fundamental principle of British governance, 171, 202; as inappropriate for some territories, 210–11; in Spanish imperial management, 58; and United States expansion, 416–25 Considerations Upon the Question, anon., on colonial claims for liberty, 230–31 Constitutional Convention of 1787, 75 Constitutionalism: as basis for independence, 60; as basis for resistance to centralization in early modern Europe, 38–40; in the English and Glorious Revolutions, 44–48; in the Fronde, 42; in Netherlands Revolt, 41–42; as protest against Bourbon reforms in Hispanic America, 59 Constitutional Right of the Legislature of Great Britain, anon., on British Parliament’s right to tax colonies, 229–31 Constitutional settlement of 1787–88, 72–73; role of states in, 73 Constitution of Cadiz, 1812, 59–60; abolished, 1814 Constitution of Jamaica, attacks on and defenses of, 142–207 Constitution of United States, 359 Constitutions: American state, peculiarities of, as expression of colonial governing frameworks, 352; rapid formation, 351–52 Consultation as active ingredient in construction of authority within empires, 87–88, 103 Contact with culture of origin, degree of, as variable in process of assimilation in colonial British America, 394 Continental Congresses, 344; disagreements

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Index in, over distribution of authority between national and state governments, 348 Continental perspective on colonial studies, 4–5, 13 Continuities: between colonial and national expansion, 415–25; between colonial and national political and social regimes, 51–54, 64–79, 278–97, 340–44; between eastern cultural hearths and western states, 416– 21; between English and colonial social and cultural capital, 364–72; between the first and second foundings of American polities, 380; between Old and New World political forms, 85, 87–88, 101–7, 109–10; between provincial colonial and state identities, 30–32, 267–70, 342–59; in state political boundaries, local governing arrangements, judicial systems, and legal systems from colonial to national era, 352–53 Contract as source of colonial constitutions, 169 Convicts as immigrants to colonial British America, 392 Conway, Henry Seymour, on folly of using force to maintain empire, 95 Cook, James, voyages, 212–13 Coriolanus, anon., on reconciliation with colonies, 240–41 Cortes, Spanish, and Constitution of Cadiz, 1812, 59–60 Cotton culture, emergence of, in southeastern North America, 437 Councilors, colonial, as bureaucrats, 136 Coupland, Reginald, on legal culture of Lower Canada, 413 Courts, British colonial, modest powers of, 288 Coutume de Paris, a basis of French Louisiana law, 406 Creolean degeneracy in new societies, 369–70 Creole cultures in American colonies, and deviations from metropolitan culture, 267–68 Creolization, of English culture in America, 28–29, 32 Crèvecoeur, J. Hector St. Jean de: and melt-

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ing pot theory of assimilation, 383–84, 386, 399; on the state of society and the process of social development in late colonial British America, 375–79 Cromwell, Oliver, 45; and Western Design, 115 Cromwell, Thomas, 43 Crown, British, subordination of, to law: as arbiter and uniting element in British Empire, 243–44; as fundamental principle of British governance, 171 Crown colony governance as an alternative to consensual governance in British Empire, 229, 248 Cultural annihilation in French Acadia, 423 Cultural inheritance, national: as adhesive force of empire, 114, 139; as claimed by colonists, 87–88, 132–33 Cultural dimensions of political transfers in America, 401–25; outcomes and variables of, 402–3 Cultural imperialism in retained political transfers, 423–25 Cultural resources, metropolitan, as adhesive element in early modern empires, 86, 114, 139 Cultural retention, patterns of, in Louisiana, New York, and Quebec, 423–25 Culture hearths: colonial, as engines for geographical expansion, 32; transportability of, as formed in Barbados, the Chesapeake, the valley of Virginia, and the Carolina low country, 436–37 Cumberland, Richard, on American creoles, 273 Cunningham, Hugh, on religion and identity in eighteenth-century Britain, 260 Curtin, Philip D.: and distinction between settlement colonies and plantation colonies, 435; and idea of plantation complex, 432 Custis, Daniel Parke, and efforts to deprive Antiguan settlers of English rights and legalities, 297 Custom, provincial: as basis for Jamaica Assembly authority, 155; as source of colonial constitutions, 170, 202

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446

Index

Custom establishment in colonial British America, 123, 135 Dalrymple, Alexander, on colonial bureaucracy, 134 Dane, Nathan, on distribution of authority between national and state governments, 358 Daniel, Samuel, on English system of law and liberty, 255–56 Daniels, Christine, 279 Dantas, Mariana, 17 Dargo, George: on colonial claims to English rights and laws, 118, 269; on emerging legal system in Louisiana, 421–22 Davenant, Charles, on colonial governance, 98; on colonies and commerce, 116 Dawes, James, excluded from Jamaica Assembly, 177–78, 181 Dawes, Manasseh, on colonial claims to British liberty, 238 Dayton, Cornelia Hughes, 279, 282; on regularization of colonial legalities, 290 Deane, Silas: on hope for constructing an American national identity, 345; on deep attachment of states to colonial rights and political forms, 353 Declaratory Act of 1721 (in reference to Ireland), repeal of, 146 Declaratory Act of 1766, asserts metropolitan full sovereignty over colonies, 229; repeal of, in 1778 and effects on governance of Ireland and non-revolting colonies, 212, 240, 242, 246–48 Declaration of Independence, 348 Defense needs, as adhesive force of empire, 114; during Seven Years’ War as source of metropolitan concern, 214–15 Defining character, of English legalities, 284–85; in early America, 291–92 Defoe, Daniel: on American colonies as places of cruel labor regimes and social and moral redemption, 330–32; on English system of law and liberty, 258 DeLancey family of New York, 395 Delap, Francis, Jamaica provost marshal:

Greene, final pages 446

imprisonment by Knowles of, 179–80, 188–90, 191–92; cause dropped, 194, 195 Delaware, 124, 386; as conquered colony, 24 Dempster, George, on liberty and British imperial development, 93, 110, 114, 270; on British corruption and rapine in India, 272–73 Development: economic and cultural, of colonies, 11–12; as element in formation of corporate identity, 27–28; sources of, 370 Diaspora, as approach to study of colonial southeastern America, 427 Dickinson, John: condemns Barbados Assembly’s response to Stamp Act crisis, 317–18; on future of American union, 351; on retention of authority in states, 350–51 Disease, effects of European, upon Amerindians, 11, 19 Distance as hindrance to establishment of metropolitan authority in empires, 86, 138 Diverse sources of English legalities, 284 Dominica, 124; assembly of, 108; ceded to Britain, 402; extension of consensual government and rule of law to, 211; metropolitan bureaucrats in, 126 Dominion of New England, 90, 107, 127–28 Douglass, William: on colonial polities, 108; on need to reform British imperial governance, 96 Duane, James, on moving too fast to independence, 346 Due process of law, as fundamental principle of British governance, 172 Dunk, George, Earl of Halifax, colonial administration of, 130, 147, 174, 194–95, 218–20 Dutch: conquests in Brazil and New Sweden, 402; experience in settling New York and gradual accommodation to English conquerors, 388–91; as percentage of white immigrants to British colonial America, 382 Dutch Reformed Church as institutional base for retaining Dutchness in New York, 390, 411 Dutch West India Company and New Holland, 405–6

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Index Dynamic character of English legalities, 284 Early America as analytic framework, 20–21 East Florida, 124, 370; assembly of, 108; as British colony, 408, 429; as conquered colony, 24; extension of consensual government and rule of law to, 211; metropolitan bureaucrats in, 126–27; retroceded to Spain, 113, 211 East India Company, 47, 116, 120, 212; bureaucracy of, 136; corruption and application of humanitarian standards to, 225 Economic development. See Development Economic growth of colonies, 116 Economic orientation of early modern colonization, 86 Economic potential as variable in American colonization, 9–10 Edict of Nantes, 394 Edling, Max M.: on constitutional settlement of 1787–88 and early national governance, 73–75 Eggleston, Edward, on transplantation of English culture to New World, 401 Eliot, Sir John, 305 Elizabeth I, 259 Elliott, J. H.: on Atlantic history, 6, 433; on comparative colonial history, 15; on early modern constitutionalism, 38–40; on early modern state formation, 35–36; on French Revolution and creation of unitary state, 56–57 Ellis, Henry, on need to reform British imperial governance, 96 Empire, and British national identity, 264–77; as approach to study of colonial southeastern America, 427; moral costs of, 266, 272–73, 276–77 Empire, early modern: consensual component required in construction of, 101–12; as extension of European composite state, 70; metropolitan efforts to reconstruct authority, 89–90, 96–100; orientation of, 139; redefinition of, 83–100; role of private agents in construction of, 88–89

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Encounters with indigenous peoples: as approach to study of colonial southeastern America, 427; and identity formation, 265–66 English: conquests of Jamaica and New Netherland, 402; regional diversity of, and meaning of Englishness in America, 387–88; percentage of white immigrants to British colonial America, 382 English Civil War, 106. See English Revolution English language, knowledge of, as variable in process of assimilation in colonial British America, 394 English Revolution, nature and causes, 42–48 Englishman, pseud., on reconciliation of Britain and America and extension of liberty, 245 Enhancibility, as attribute of social and cultural capital, 368–69 Enquiry Whether the Absolute Independence of America is not to be preferr’d, anon., denounces claims for Parliamentary imperial omnipotence, 245–46 Enslaved peoples, in British Empire, civil exclusion of, 115 Equality, social, and relationship to commerce, 264 Erikson, Erik, 25 Erskine, John, and colonial claims to British liberty, 234–35, 240 Essay Concerning Slavery, anon., on problems of Jamaica slave system, 306–8 Estates General, Dutch, and Netherlands Revolt, 40–42 Estates General, France, and role in French Revolution, 55 Estwick, Samuel, and defense of English identity of West Indian settlers, 308–16 Ethnicity in colonial British America: African, 381–82; European, 381–400 Ethnicization: as concept for explaining negotiation of meaning of ethnic designations in new societies, 387–88; among Dutch in New Netherland, 409–10; in the settlement of colonial British America, 384–400

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448

Index

Ethnohistory, 8; as approach to study of colonial southeastern America, 427–28 European expansion: as approach to study of colonial southeastern America, 427; and establishment of new cultures in the Americas, 401–2; as a focus of study, 19–32 European settlement, diversity of, in southeastern North America, 428–29 Evacuated territories, as category of political transfers, 404 Evangelization, as variable in American colonization, 9–10 Expansion, colonial, territorial, 370–71; demographic, 370–71; economic, 371; in human and social and cultural capital, 371–72; and social and cultural infrastructure, 372; and social and economic differentiation, 372 Extended Caribbean, as analytic concept for study of southeastern North America, 433 Family and household governance in colonial British America, 280–81 Faneuil family of Massachusetts, 395 Fauquier, Francis, Virginia governor, 136 Febvre, Lucien, 68 Federalist Papers, 74 Fernando VII, and restoration of absolutism in Spanish monarchy, 60 Fielding, Henry, on English system of law and liberty, 256, 257, 258 Finns as percentage of white immigrants to British colonial America, 382 Fiscal resources, limited availability of, to imperial powers, 85–86 Fisch, Jorge: and claims to metropolitan laws in overseas colonies, 268; on law and settler colonization, 131 Fisher, David Hackett, and transplantation of English culture to New World, 401 Fissiparous character of Spanish American Wars for Independence, 60–62 Florida, 15, 209, 437; Anglicization of, through division into two colonies, 407; ceded to Britain, 402, 404; and incorporation of English legal system in new state polity, 416, 420; purchased by

Greene, final pages 448

United States, 402, 404; relations with British colonies under Spanish, 431–32; as relinquished transfer retroceded to Spain, 402; as Spanish colony, 428. See also East Florida; West Florida Foote, Samuel, on British moral corrosiveness in India, 273 Fortescue, Sir John, 44, 50, 275, 284; and English jurisprudential tradition, 254–55, 257; and English national identity, 285; on English prosperity, 262 Foster, Stephen, on radical voluntarism of Puritan churches, 287 Founding, idea of: applied to people who presided over American Revolution, 373; applied to people who presided over founding and development of colonial America, 373–76 Fox, Charles James, acknowledges parliamentary status of Irish and colonial legislatures, 248 Fox, Henry, M.P.: on colonial governance, 100; condemns Knowles in British House of Commons, 188 Foxe, John, and English national identity, 259 Foyle, Oxenbridge, on vicious colonial labor systems, 326 France, 35; British fear of imperial resurgence of, 208; imperial challenge of, as source of metropolitan efforts to tighten imperial controls, 217–18; and intervention in American War, 209; nature of Old Regime in, 54–55 Franklin, Benjamin: on British othering of colonies, 271–72, 337; on counting slaves for taxes under Articles of Confederation, 349; on dissimilarities among American colonies, 343–44; on ethnic separation in colonial British America, 384–86, 399 Frearon, Thomas: on fears of approval of removal bill, 196–97; on Knowles’s oppression, 184–85. See also “Veridicus” French Huguenots: as percentage of white immigrants to British colonial America, 382; and rapid assimilation to English culture, 394–95 French Revolution, 209; causal relationship

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Index to Spanish American Wars for Independence, 59–60; nature and causes of, 54–57 Fronde, nature and causes of the, 42, 43 Fuller, Rose, Jamaica chief justice and M.P., 178, 195–97; condemns Knowles in British House of Commons, 192–93; and controversy over legitimacy of Jamaica courts, 174–75; on Delap affair, 184, 189; and fear of loss of Jamaicans’ English rights and land titles, 158, 161; on Jamaicans’ desire to end political contention, 194; opposes removal of Jamaica capital, 165; organizes rally against removal, 165–66; on metropolitan disapproval of Knowles, 183 Fundamental law as source of colonial constitutions, 168–69 Gale, William, 195; on Delapping Jamaicans out of liberty, 196 Galloway, Joseph, on differences among colonies, 344 Garrigus, John, 17 Gashry, Francis, London agent for Edward Trelawny, 148–49, 151–52, 153 Gaspar, David Barry, 279 Georgia, 91, 116, 123, 124, 217, 370, 386, 430, 437; assembly in, 108, 128, 133; as British colony, 429; as constitutional model for British Florida colonies, 408; as government-supported colony, 137–38; government of, as new model of colonial polity, 218 Germans: and assimilative process, 395–99, 400; complaints of “herding together” and lack of assimilation by, 384–86; as percentage of white immigrants to British colonial America, 382 Glen, James, South Carolina governor, 136 Glorious Revolution, 42, 50, 90, 91, 99, 108, 109, 124, 147, 228; nature and effects of, 46–48; in New England and New York, 128; and representative colonial governance, 128 Godwyn, Morgan, on colonial slave regimes, 327–28 Gooch, Sir William, Virginia governor, 136

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Goodfriend, Joyce, on Dutch assimilation in New York, 389–90, 409–10 Gordon, Thomas, on English system of law and liberty, 257 Gorham, Nathaniel: on possible breakup of American union into smaller confederacies, 356–57; on weakness of Articles of Confederation, 358–59 Governance, British imperial, efforts to reform, as source of colonial confl ict, 140–207, 211; and examination of Jamaican problems, 142–44; new authoritarianism of, 225; principles of, explored, 171–72; relation between efforts to enhance authority of, and revolt of thirteen colonies, 213–24 Governance, colonial, legal foundations of, explored in Jamaica, 168–71 Governors, royal colonial, and metropolitan efforts to control, 128–29; successful appointees to be, 136; limits of authority of, 181–82 Great Awakening as invention of historians, 75 Great Britain: the Admiralty, 131, 135; and the colonial administration of the Board of Trade, 129–35; the Council of Plantations, 122–23; the Customs Commissioners, 123, 135; the Lords of Trade, 122–24; the Privy Council, 121, 122, 130, 131, 135; the Treasury, 131, 135; the War Department, 131, 135 Greenfield, Leah: on English corporate identity, 341; on English religion and identity, 259; on English system of law and liberty, 256, 285 Greengrass, Mark, 34 Grenada: assembly of, 108; ceded to Britain, 402; extension of consensual government and rule of law to, 211; metropolitan bureaucrats in, 126 Grenville (George) administration and efforts to tighten controls over colonies, 228, 234 “Grievances,” anon. manuscript attack on Knowles, 180–82; burned by Jamaica Assembly, 182

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450

Index

Groans of Jamaica, anon., objects to metropolitan othering of American colonists, 298–99 Grotius, Hugo, works used in antislavery critique, 300 Group size as variable in process of assimilation in colonial British America, 393 Guadeloupe, 209 Haitian Revolution. See St. Domingue Hakluyt, Richard: on colonization and Protestantism, 259; on English commercial development, 262 Haldane, George, governor of Jamaica, administration and death of, 198 Hale, Sir Matthew, 284 Hamilton, Alexander, on British othering of Americans, 338 Hamilton, Lord Archibald, and efforts to deprive Jamaica settlers of English rights and legalities, 297 Hamilton, William B., on the incorporation of English legal system in Mississippi, 417 Hardwicke, Lord Chancellor, and legal foundations of slavery, 312 Harrison, Benjamin, on need for an exit strategy from American union, 349 Hartog, Hendrik, on public basis of authority in British American colonies, 288 Helgerson, Richard, and formation of English national identity, 260, 285, 341 Hemispheric history: as analytic framework, 6–18; as approach to study of colonial southeastern America, 427, 432–33, 434–37 Henley, Robert, metropolitan attorney general, on establishing courts in Jamaica, 195–96 Henrickson, David, on nature of early national American union, 72–73, 78 Henry, Patrick, and the fi rst stirrings of an American identity, 344–45 Hermes, Katherine, 279, on influences of Indian law upon settler law, 289 Hewes, Joseph, on depth of attachments to state government, 351

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Higginson, Stephen, on possible dissolution of American union, 356 Hill, Christopher, on leadership of Protestant Europe, 260 Hispaniola, 115, 434; French occupation of, 402, 404 Historical Account of the Sessions of Assembly, anon., defends Knowles, 192–93 Hobbes, Thomas, 97 Holderness, Earl of, 164, 165, 190, 194–95 Holland and Netherlands Revolt, 41 Holy Roman Empire, 34 Hooper, William, on need to retain colonial polity forms, 352 Hopkins, Stephen: and colonial claims to liberty, 275; upon distinctions in state identities and strength of national union, 353 Host population, attitudes of, as variable in process of assimilation in colonial British America, 394 Hotman, François, 38 House of Commons resolutions intervening in Jamaica’s internal affairs, 193–94, 204 Hudson Bay Company, 120 Hudson’s Bay, 108 Hulme, Peter, 66; and concept of an extended Caribbean, 433 Hulsebosch, Daniel J., on English common law culture in New York, 410 Humanitarian standards as applied to British Empire, 224–25 Humanity: as trait of British character, 262; of West Indian slave holders questioned, 301–2 Hume, Benjamin, 160 Hume, David, 313; on law as index to national character, 285; on primitive social state of Amerindians, 368 Hurst, J. Willard, on United States legal history, 279 Hutcheson, Francis, 313 Iberian American colonies, similarities and differences among, 9–10 Identity, American, rooted in British iden-

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Index tity and mediated by provincial identity of states, 338–59 Identity, corporate: colonial yearning for metropolitan acknowledgment of English, 334–39; development of, 30–32; of England, 103; failure of American settlers to develop a counter identity before 1776, 338–39; formation and development of, in colonial British America, 12, 25–32; as issue in debate over the American question, 342; of Jamaica, 141–207; and law in British American colonies, 278–92; questioned by metropolitan Britons, 323– 39; and strength of provincial identities, in early American republic, 72; variations in, among provinces, 342–43 Identity, English, 258–77, 293–94; claimed, adapted, and defended by overseas Britons, 267–76, 341–44; conditions rendering claims to, problematic, 342; mediated through provincial identities before 1776, 338–39, 342–43; questioned by metropolitan Britons, 342; West Indian claims to, defended in response to Somerset Case, 309–16 Identity, national or imperial, definition of, 254 Identity, State, in United States; derived from entrenched provincial identities, 343–44; as more powerful than American national identity in early United States, 340–59 Illinois country. See Mississippi valley, upper Immigration to colonial British America, 381–82; recruitment of, 392–94; types of, 392 Improvements as element in formation of colonial identity, 28 India, 115, 209, 227; authoritarian governance of, 211, 248; British corruption and rapine in, 272–73; imperial oversight of, 212; and moral costs of empire, 277; as precedent for governance of non-settler colonies, 225; trade, 116, 117, 212 Indiana, 416

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Indian superintendencies in North America, 125–26 Indigenous Americans: and assimilation process in colonial British America, 399; as comparative models in the shaping of settler identity, 29; diversity in southeastern North America, 427–28; effects upon, of European diseases, 11; population density of, as variable in American colonization, 9–10; primitive social state of, 365–68; and Proclamation of 1763, 211; removal of, in North America, 437 Indigenous peoples, in British Empire: and British expropriation of native lands, 115; civil exclusion of, 115; English reaction to, 265–66, 267 Indian relations during Seven Years’ War as source of metropolitan concern, 214–15 Inheritance, British, as source of colonial constitutions, 169, 203 Inkle, Thomas, and Yarico story and evils of colonial slave systems, 328 Innes, William, and othering of American colonists, 323 Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Present Dispute, anon., on colonial claims to British liberty, 235 Insecurity of West Indian slave colonies, 142 International practice as source of colonial constitutions, 170–71 Instructions to governors, authority of: affi rmed by Privy Council, 163; denied by Jamaica Assembly, 144–45, 148, 154–60; constitutional reach of, debated, 128–29, 219; insisted upon by Board of Trade, 147, 149–50, 153–56 Intermarriage among ethnic groups as indication of assimilation, 390–92 Intra-imperial relations among southeastern North American colonial polities, 432–33 Ireland, 227; achieves legislative independence, 246–47; bureaucracy in, 129; effects of American War for Independence upon, and union with Britain in 1800, 212; governance of, as precedent for Quebec, 210; and moral costs of empire, 277

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452

Index

Irish, southern, as percentage of white immigrants to British colonial America, 382 Irish constitution suitability for colonies, 202 Irish Parliament, 109, 128, 129 Jackson, Richard, M.P., on folly of using force to maintain empire, 95 Jacobite Uprising of 1745, 258 Jamaica, 17, 88, 115, 116, 117, 121, 124; Assembly of, 128; and confl icts over settler claims to English rights and legalities, 297; as conquered colony, 24; and constitutional crisis of 1750s, 141–207; constitution of, 142; controversy over the removal of the capital, 163–99; corporate identity of, 25, 27–30; crown colony government in, 249; disorganized militia of, 143; English capture of, 402; English identity in, 204; as functional settler republic, 206–7; incendiary politics of, 143; land engrossment in, 143; metropolitan bounty to, 142; metropolitan bureaucrats in, 125–27; Parliamentary bill on state of, 161; as part of plantation complex, 434; political precociousness of, 142; and provision of tripartite constitution to, 106–7; ratio of black to white populations in, 435; as retained and anglicized political transfer, 404; satirized by Edward Ward, 329–30; slave law in, 279; and Stamp Act crisis, 317; status within empire, 141–42; strategic situation of, 142; and strength of Jamaica London lobby, 143; white population of, 143 Jamaica Assembly, 128; and appointment of revenue officers, 148; authority of, over legislation and finance, 143–44; condemned in British House of Commons for resolutions, 193–94; condemns Knowles for breach of privileges, 160–61; denies authority of Board of Trade, 200–205; denies authority of royal instructions, 144–45, 154–55; foundations of authority of, 172–73; ignores proposal to revise laws, 156; models itself on Brit-

Greene, final pages 452

ish House of Commons, 203–4; questions constitutionality of suspending clauses, 202; refuses to include suspending clauses in legislation, 150, 154, 159, 202; on relationship between slavery and defense of provincial rights, 320–21; scope of claims to authority, 154–55, 158–60; sides with North Americans in debate over American question, 320–21; success in resisting metropolitan reforms, 199; thanks Crown for supply of African slaves, 299; tries to change judicial tenure, 157–58 Jamaica Association as device for political conciliation, 151–53, 158, 176–77 Jamaica Council: controlled by Knowles’s supporters, 191; models itself on British House of Lords, 203–4; proposal to expand size of, 152–53; supports Assembly in denial of Board of Trade authority, 201 Jamaica Revenue Act of 1728 as source of colonial constitutions, 169–70, 202 James I, 259 James II, 45–46, 98; and colonial administration, 122, 127; and governance of New York, 107 Janiewski, Dolores, on colonialism in United States, 68 Jay, John, 346, 350 Jews as percentage of white immigrants to British colonial America, 382 Johnson, Michael P., on patterns of land occupation in early republican South, 437 Johnson, Dr. Samuel, on colonial liberty in British Empire, 232 Johnstone, George, M.P., on colonial claims to British liberty, 238 Jones, Sir William, 305 Judicial decisions, metropolitan, as source of colonial constitutions, 169 Judicial tenure, Jamaica Assembly’s efforts to change, 157–58 Jurisprudence, jury-based, and United States expansion, 416–25 Jurisprudential tradition, English: and construction of colonial governance, 103; and defense of colonial rights, 207; developed and employed by English lawyers, 44–45;

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Index and English national identity, 254–55; invention of, in early modern Europe, 38 Justinian Code, 170 Kalm, Peter, on assimilation of Swedes, 391 Kammen, Michael, on colonial parliamentary institutions, 105–6 Katz, Stanley, on early American law, 291–92 Kennedy, Archibald, on need to reform imperial governance, 96 Kentucky, legal system of, 416 Kenya, 66 Kingship, divine right, Stuart emphasis upon, 43 Kingston, merchants’ petition to remove Jamaica capital to, 163–64 Knight, Franklin, 58 Knight, James, on slavery and internal security in West Indies, 302–3 Knollenberg, Bernhard, on metropolitan efforts to reform imperial administration, 219–20 Knowles, Charles, Admiral and Jamaica governor, 190, 191, 199; behavior condemned by Board of Trade, 155–56; burned in effigy, 197; condemned in House of Commons, 188, 192–93; disputes Assembly’s theories about Jamaica constitution, 176; embraces petition to remove Jamaica capital, 163–89; harassed by Spanish Town residents, 165–66; and Jamaica Association, 151–53; maneuvers to pass removal bill, 175–79; on need for constitutional reform in Jamaica, 152–53; proposes expansion of Council, 152–53; report, on state of Jamaica, 155; resigns Jamaica governorship, 187–89; on Trelawny’s popularity and preponderance of Assembly authority in Jamaica, 150–51 Knox, William, on British colonial administration, 223 Koebner, Richard, on liberty and the British Empire, 276 Koenigsberger, H. G.: on American Revolution, 50–51; on British Empire, 90–91; on early modern state formation, 35–36 Kolp, John G., 279

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453

Konig, David Thomas, 279; on functions of law in colonial British America, 287; on jurisprudence of ordinary people, 288; on law-mindedness and rights-mindedness of colonial British Americans, 286; on selectivity and adaptability of settler law, 289–90; on supremacy of settler law in early America, 281 Labor demands and American settlement, 19–20 Labor systems, unfree: in Chesapeake and Lower South colonies, 430–31; in plantation complex, 434–35; in West Indies, 300–302, 306, 415 Land engrossment in Jamaica, 143 Land Ordinance of 1785, 415 Landsman, Ned, on Scottish immigration to colonial British America, 393, 400 Langum, David J., on incorporation of English legal system in California, 419 Late Occurrences in North America, anon., on colonial claims to British liberty, 233 Law, English common: and colonial British American identity, 278–92; and colonial estate building, 287; and constitutionalizing of new settler societies, 287; and creation of a unified legal system in France, 56; and English national identity, 254–59, 303–5, 341; functions of, in new colonial societies, 286–88; incompatibility with West Indian slave systems, 300–301, 308–9; indeterminancy and flexibility, 284; as instrument of British colonization, 24, 70; as principal engine of cultural change in European expansion, 403; as settler instruments in colonies, 286–89; and study of corporate identity, 26–27; as variable in American colonization, 10–12; varieties of, in early America, 280–81. See also Jurisprudential traditions Law, rule of: claimed and adapted by overseas Britons, 268–269, 285–86; as part of English cultural inheritance, 114, 118–19; and metropolitan oversight, 131 Law revisal: enacted by Virginia, 156; refused by Jamaica Assembly, 156

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454

Index

Lee, Arthur: on English social origins of early Virginians, 335–36; on state resistance to increasing national authority, 356 Lee, Richard Henry, on fi rmness of American union, 345 Leeward Islands, 116, 123, 124; metropolitan bureaucrats in, 125–27; perpetual revenue in, 127; settlers of, 24. See also Antigua; Lesser Antilles; Montserrat; Nevis; St. Christopher Legal inheritance from Europe in early America, 280 Legality: characteristics of English, 283–85; as inclusive analytic concept, 280–81; as inheritance and possession of British settlers, 286–87; settler selectivity, adaptation, and innovations in, 289–90 Legal systems, retentions of, as key measure of cultural contiuity, 403 Lesser Antilles, 409; relinquished political transfers in, 404 Letter from a Merchant in Jamaica, anon., attacks Jamaican slavery, 300–302 Lewis, William: on fears of success of removal bill, 197; on Jamaicans’ desire to end political contention, 194; on Jamaica’s loss of political talent, 196 Liberty: and British imperial development, 93, 101; claimed and adapted by overseas Britons, 107–8, 160–207, 223–24, 268–69, 295–97; and colonial economic and civil development, 93, 101–2, 134; confl icts over colonial claims to, 228–49, 297; and construction of a British identity in the West Indies, 293–322; and English national identity, 254–59; and ideology of Netherlands Revolt, 41–42; and incongruity with slavery, 294–330. See also Jamaica; Jamaica Assembly Ligon, Richard, and story of Inkle and Yarico, 328 Literature, discursive, and study of corporate identity, 26–27 Littleton, Edward (colonist): and colonial resentment at metropolitan othering, 295–98; on slavery and internal security in West Indies, 302

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Littleton, Sir Edward (jurist), 305 Lloyd, Richard, solicitor general of Britain, and Jamaica capital removal bill, 183, 187–88 Local government, bureaucracy in, 137 Localist perspective on United States history, 75–79 Localities and Localism. See Provinces Lockhart, James: on Spanish colonial history, 6–8; on transplantation of Spanish culture to New World, 401 Long, Edward, and defense of English identity of West Indian settlers, 308–16 Lords of Trade: and colonial administration, 122–24; role of, in defining terms of constitutional debate, 131–32 Louis XVI, 55, 56 Louisiana, 209, 437; and capacity for cultural retention, 420–24; ceded to Spain, 402, 404; as French colony, 429; and incorporation of English legal system in new state polity, 420–24; purchased by United States, 402; and ratio of black to white populations, 435; as relinquished transfer with low levels of cultural reformulation under Spanish, 406–7; retroceded to France, 402, 404–5 Louisiana House of Representatives, 422 Lower Canada, 413 Lower Louisiana. See Louisiana Lower South: character of settlement, 430– 31; as coherent region of colonial British America, 386 Lowther, Robert, and efforts to deprive Barbadian settlers of English rights and legalities, 297 Loyalist, American: exodus and effects on expansion of British Empire, 212; migration to Upper and Lower Canada, 413 Lyttelton, William Henry, Jamaica governor: administration of, 199–207; appointed, 198; challenges Jamaica Assembly’s claims to parliamentary privilege, 304; on Jamaica’s constitutional claims and practice, 202–5 Lynch, Thomas, on counting slaves for taxes under Articles of Confederation, 349

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Index MacLachlan, Colin M., on Spanish colonial administration, 91 Madison, James: on possible dissolution of American union, 355; on preservation of union, 356 Madras, 210 Magnae Brittanniae Notitia, anon., on British trade, 262 Maine, 370 Man, Yunlong, on ad hoc nature of provincial political institutions, 103–4, 106, 109 Mancke, Elizabeth, 17 Manigault family of South Carolina, 395 Mann, Bruce H.: on early American law, 279; on regularization of colonial legalities, 290–91 Manning, Edward, speaker of Jamaica Assembly, 178, 186; deceased, 197 Mansfield, Lord, and Somerset Case, 309, 313 Many Legalities of Early America, 279–92 Marshall, Peter, on British Empire, 216, 224–25 Martin, Samuel, Sr., and defense of English identity of West Indian settlers, 308–16 Martinique, 209 Maryland, 124, 137, 386; assembly of, 105, 119; as British colony, 429; charter, 104; contributions to Seven Years’ War, 214; servant use of courts in, 279; as setting for Defoe novels, 330–32; slave system of, 327 Massachusetts, 17, 86, 107, 108, 117, 288, 386, 395, 416; assembly of, 105; contributions to Seven Years’ War, 214; metropolitan bureaucrats in, 126 Massachusetts Bay Company, 118 Maurits, Johan, of Nassau-Siegen, and New Holland, 405 Mazarin, Cardinal, and the Fronde, 42 McCulloh, Henry, on reform of British imperial governance, 96 Meinig, D. W., and Atlantic history, 433 Melting pot theory of assimilation, 383–84, 386, 399 Mercer University, 25 Merchant agency, in the construction of empire, 119–20

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455

Meredith, Sir William, on colonial claims to British liberty, 239 Merwick, Donna, on effects of introduction of English common law in New York, 410 Metropolitan law adapted by settlers, 281 Mettam, Roger: on the Fronde, 42; on Old Regime France, 55 Mexican Revolution of 1910, 62 Mexican War, 402 Mexico, 85, 87, 209, 366. See also New Spain Michigan, as new polity, 416 Middle colonies as coherent region of colonial British America, 386 Middleton, Conyers, on British civil refinement, 264 Migration of Europeans to America, 11 Militia, disorganized state of Jamaican, 143 Miller, John: on early modern state formation, 35–38; on early modern English state formation and resistance, 43, 45–46 Milton, John: on English system of law and liberty, 256; on religion and identity, 259 Mimetic impulses as adhesive component of empire, 114–15 Minas Gerais as extension of plantation complex, 434 Mineral wealth as variable in American colonization, 9–10 Minorca: authoritarian governance of, 210; governance of, as precedent for Quebec, 210 Mississippi and incorporation of English legal system in new state polity, 416 Mississippi valley, upper, 421; and absences of cultural change under British, 407; ceded to Britain, 402, 404; ceded to the United States, 407; and the incorporation of English legal system in new state polities, 416 Missouri and incorporation of English legal system in new state polity, 417–18 Missouri Compromise, 426 Mitchell, John, on need to reform British imperial governance, 96 Mitchell, Robert, on assimilation process in Shenandoah valley, 398–99

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456

Index

Mixed government, English theory of, applied to colonies, 106–7 Mixed populations arising from colonization, 9–11 Models of empire, 84–86 Montesquieu, 244; on English system of law and liberty, 258; on law as index to national character, 285; on liberty and British American development, 93, 110–11; Persian Letters cited, 307; on republican dimensions of English constitution, 206 Montserrat, 142; assembly of, 105 Moore, Henry: administration of, and conciliation of Spanish Town interests, 190–98; appointed lieutenant governor of Jamaica, 188 Morgan, Philip D., and distinction between slave societies and societies with slaves, 435 Morón, Guillermo, 14 Morrill, John, on development of English state, 43 Morrison, Kenneth, defends Barbados response to Stamp Act crisis, 318–19 Morse, John, Jamaica judge, 174–75 Muldoon, James, 279 Multicultural perspective on colonial studies, 4–6, 20–21 Multiracial society in Hispanic America, 58–59 Murray, William, attorney general of Britain: opinion of, sought on removal bill, 183; report of, 187–88 Murrin, John, 53 Naples, separatist revolt in, 43 Napoleonic wars, 402 Narragansett area of Rhode Island as extension of plantation complex, 434 Narragansett Indians, 279 Narrett, David E., and Dutch assimilation to English law, 390–91 Nation: concept of, and the French Revolution, 55–57; limited reach of, in Mexican War for Independence, 61 National Assembly, role in French Revolution, 55–56

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National state paradigm as analytic perspective, 281; defects in, for study of expansion and transfers, 403 National states, character of early modern, 82, 85 Nation building distinguished from state formation, 39 Nation state, French Revolution and changes in concept of, 56–57 Nation state perspective on colonial history, 12–13, 18, 32, 64–65 “Native of Barbados,” pseud., critiques Barbados response to Stamp Act crisis, 319–21 “Native of the Island,” pseud., defends Knowles, 177 Naturalization Act of 1740, 393 Natural law as source of colonial constitutions, 171 Natural rights theory, employed in attacks on Jamaica slave system, 300, 307 Naval might and English national identity, 285 Navigation Acts, 90, 107, 122; colonial evasion and compliance with, 123–24 Nedham, William, on Knowles, 189 Negotiation: and creation of authority in overseas colonies, 111–12; as operating principle of British Empire, 133–34; and process of colonial and imperial formation, 31–32 Netherlands, the, 35, 255, 264 Netherlands Revolt, nature and causes of, 40–43 Nevis, 142; assembly of, 105 New Brunswick: creation of, 212; effects of repeal of Declaratory Act of 1766 upon, 247 Newcastle, Duke of, 164, 165, 177, 178, 180 New England, 15; as coherent region of colonial British America, 386, 430; settlers in, 23 Newfoundland, 108, 115, 123; authoritarian governance of, 210; metropolitan bureaucrats in, 126 New Granada: Comunero revolt in 1781, 59; as extension of plantation complex, 434; as settler colony, 9, 15

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Index New Hampshire, 386; assembly of, 107 New Haven, 108, 291; assembly of, 105; legal regime of, 280 New Holland: Dutch occupation and experience, 405–6; religious toleration of Catholics in, 405 New Jersey, 108, 386, 430; assembly of, 107; as conquered colony, 24; as extension of plantation complex, 434 New Mexico, 279; and incorporation of English legal system in new state polity, 418–20 New Netherland, 389; English capture of, 402; as retained transfer under Britain, 409–11, 413–14 New Philology studies, 8 New societies, colonies as, 11, 85, 387 New South Wales as convict colony, 213 New Spain, 17, 434; as exceptional New World colony, 9, 15; riots in 1765 against Bourbon reforms, 59 New Sweden, 382, 391; Dutch capture of, 402; as relinquished transfer, 404 New York, 384, 386, 388, 395, 416, 430; assembly of, 107; and capacity for cultural retention, 413–14, 423–24; as conquered colony, 24; contributions to Seven Years’ War, 214; as extension of plantation complex, 434; metropolitan bureaucrats in, 127 New Zealand, 102, 282; and British representative governance, 224; responsible government in, 249 North (Frederick, Lord) administration, 229 North Carolina, 386, 437; as British colony, 429 North Carolina constitution, 352 Northwest Ordinance, 415–16, 420 Nova Scotia, 17, 91, 370; assembly in, 108, 128, 133; authoritarian governance of, before 1758, 210; British acquisition of, 115; as conquered colony, 24; as constitutional model for two Florida colonies, 408, 412, 413; effects of repeal of Declaratory Act of 1766 upon, 247; established as a royal colony, 217; exodus of loyalists to, 212; government of, as new model of colonial

Greene, final pages 457

457 polity, 218; as government-supported colony, 137–38; metropolitan bureaucrats in, 126

Occupied territories, as category of political transfers, 404 Off utt, William, Jr., 280; on colonial courts, 288; on regularization of colonial legalities, 290 Ohio River valley, French activities in, 217–18. See also Mississippi valley, upper Oldmixon, John: on English social origins of American settlers, 332–33; on histories of colonies, 110; on relationship between commerce and Englishness, 262 Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, 279 Ontario. See Upper Canada Orange County, N.Y., 383 Orange County, N.C., 280, 288, 291 Osterhammel, Jürgen, on colonialism, 67–68 Otherness. See Alterity Otis, James: on colonial claims to liberty, 274–75; on European gains from colonization, 274 Paine, Thomas, and civil society in American colonies, 378 Palmer, R. R., 33 Paris, Ferdinand, London agent for Spanish Town interests: on Delap affair, 184; on metropolitan discontent with Knowles, 183; warns Jamaica against ministerial nominated agent, 194–95 Parker, Geoff rey, and Dutch Revolt, 41 Parker, James, 384 Parliament, British, intrusion into colonial administration recommended, 146 Parliamentary institutions, colonial: and appointment of colonial officers, 136; bicameralism of, 106; debate over constitutional status of, 108–9, 227–49; expanding authority of, 109; and Glorious Revolution, 128; mimesis of, and divergence from British House of Commons, 109–10, 128; metropolitan attempts to curtail

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458

Index

Parliamentary institutions, colonial (cont.) authority of, 107–8, 128, 132; transfer to and development in British colonies and Ireland, 101–12; uncertain constitutional status of, 108, 132–33 Parsons, Samuel Holden, 347 Partibility as attribute of social and cultural capital, 368 Patriotism, British, of American settlers, 341–44 Patronage, absence of gubernatorial, in Jamaica, 145 Pelham, Henry, 144, 145, 147, 205 Pennsylvania, 124, 291, 384, 385, 386, 395–96, 430; assembly of, 107; contributions to Seven Years’ War, 214 Pennsylvania state constitution of 1776, as replication of Pennsylvania’s colonial constitution, 352 Pernambuco: Dutch capture of, 402; as a relinquished transfer, 404–5; renamed New Holland, 405 Peru, 85, 87, 209, 366, 384, 385, 386, 395–96, 430; as exceptional New World colony, 9, 15; as extension of plantation complex, 434; riots in 1765 against Bourbon reforms in, 59 Petitions for and against removal of Jamaica capital, 166–67 Phelips, Sir Robert, 305 Philip II, 57; and Netherlands Revolt, 40–41 Physical spaces as element in formation of corporate identity, 27; as variable in American colonization, 9–10 Pinnock, Philip, opposition to Moore and suspension from Council and judgeship, 191–92 Pinnock, Thomas, on political character of free Jamaicans, 190 Pitt, William: condemns Knowles in British House of Commons, 188, 192–93; resigns as fi rst minister, 193 Placemen, exclusion of, from Jamaica Assembly attempted, 155 Plane, Ann Marie, 279 Plantation complex: as analytic construct for studying southeastern North Ameri-

Greene, final pages 458

can history, 433–37; characteristics of, 434–35; mixed agriculture and yeomen proprietors in, 435–37 Plantation Office. See Great Britain Pluralism as cultural object and relation to private sphere, 399–400 Pluralistic character of English legalities, 284 Plymouth, 108; assembly of, 105 Pocock, J. G. A., 33 Pole, J. R., 21 Political Balance, anon., and colonial administration, 228 Political culture as variable in American colonization, 10–11 Pope, Alexander, 313 Population, white, of Jamaica, 143 Porter, John, on role of charter groups in new societies, 387 Portugal, 34; separatist revolt in 39, 43 Postcolonial studies, 22–23; definitional problems for settler colonialism, 22–23; and the study of national history, 65–69 Postlethwayt, Malachy: on economic importance of empire, 217; on English social origins of American settlers, 333; on need to reform British imperial governance, 96 Power: disparities of, in colonial British America, 23–25; role of, in political and cultural negotiations, 401–25 Pownall, John, secretary to Board of Trade, transmits House of Commons Jamaica resolutions to colonies, 193–94 Pownall, Thomas: on British colonial and commercial expansion 92, 120; on British Empire, 89; on liberty and British imperial development, 93, 110; and metropolitan conceptions of colonies, 271; on need to reform British imperial governance, 96 Poyning’s Law, as applied, to colonies, 128; to Ireland, 129 Pratt, Charles, Baron Camden, on commercial emphasis of British Empire, 95 Prerogative, royal: extent of, at issue in seventeenth-century England, 255; Stuart emphasis upon, 43–46; West Indian resis-

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Index tance to metropolitan exertions of, 303–6. See also Jamaica; Jamaica Assembly Price, Charles, Sr., speaker of Jamaica Assembly, 158; attempted discredit of, 177; and Delap affair, 179; leads opposition to Knowles, 185; opposes removal of Jamaica capital, 165; reelected speaker, 191; voted out as speaker, 178 Price, Richard: on British Empire as free, 226, 236–38; on liberty and British imperial development, 111; on problems in India, 237–38 Prince Edward Island. See St. John Principles of Law and Government, anon., on constitutional organization of British Empire, 244–45 Privilege controversy in Jamaica, 206 Privy Council, British: disallows Jamaica acts and affi rms authority of instructions, 163, 199–200; disallows removal law and establishes counties and new ports in Jamaica, 197–98; refers petitions about removal of Jamaica capital to Board of Trade, 173–74 Property, sanctity of, as fundamental principle of British governance, 172 Prosperity and English national identity, 253–54, 262, 285 Protestantism and English national identity, 253, 255, 259–61, 285. See also Evangelization Provinces, American: British colonies as, 97, 230–31; colonial and national, as central arenas of public life, 32 Provinces, early modern European: authority and privileges of, 36; elimination of, during French Revolution, 56; and lococentrisim in Spanish American Wars for Independence, 60–62 Provinciality and cultural formation in colonial British America, 19–32 Pulteney, William, on colonial claims to British liberty, 238–39 Purchase, settler, of indigenous lands, 283; by application, 283 Putnam, Robert, and concept of social capital, 363–64

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459

Quebec, 124, 211; absence of assembly in, 108, 128; and capacity for cultural retention, 420–24; ceded to Britain, 402; as conquered colony, 24; conquest of, 208, 210, 220; consensual government granted to in 1791, 224; effects of repeal of Declaratory Act of 1766 upon, 247–48; exodus of loyalists to, 212; given jurisdiction over upper Mississippi valley settlements, 407; metropolitan bureaucrats in, 126–27; as a retained transfer under Britain, 409, 412–13, 414 Quebec Act, 407, 413 Quito, riots in 1765 against Bourbon reforms, 59 Race as central category in American culture, 399 Racial diversity, presence of, as variable in process of assimilation in colonial British America, 394 Racism and defense of West Indian slavery, 313 Radding, Cynthia, 17 Radicalism of colonial British American societies, 53; of French Revolutiom, 55–58, 62–63 Ralegh, Sir Walter, on colonization and the extension of Protestantism, 259 Rankin, David C., on patterns of land occupation in early republican South, 437 Raynal, Abbé, Guillaume Thomas François, on European expansion and transformation of the Americas, 364–66 Reason of State as priority over local rights in Jamaica, 147 Recopilación de leyes de los reynos de las Indias, 121; introduced by Spain in Louisiana, 406 Reference group theory and the study of identity formation, 29 Reformation, Protestant and Catholic, 9 Reformulation, cultural, in America, 19–32. See also Adaptation Refugees from war and discrimination as immigrants to colonial British America, 392

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460

Index

Regions, socioeconomic and sociocultural, of colonial British America, and distribution of ethnic groups, 386–87 Reid, John Philip, on importance of legal systems in British America and United States 403 Religion. See Evangelization Religious commitment, strength and exclusivity of, as variable in process of assimilation in colonial British America, 394 Relinquished territory, as category of political transfers, 404 Renovation, obsession with, in early modern revolutions, 39–40 Representative government. See Parliamentary institutions Republican form: of British colonial governments, 141; of Jamaican polity, 206–7 Republicanism, United States, as reaffi rmation of colonial experience, 51–52 Resistance, political: of British North American colonies, 71–72; character of, in early modern revolutions, 33–63; of English colonies to Crown’s centralizing efforts, 90, 128–29, 132–33, 144–45, 154–56, 159, 199, 202, 219–29, 320–21; metropolitan response to colonial, 228–49 Resource endowments in the Americas and colonial development, 366–67 Respondents Case. See “Veridicus” Restoration of Stuart Monarchy, 45 Retained territory, as category of political transfers, 404 Retention, cultural, among migrants to America, 21 Revenue, perpetual colonial: advocated for British troops in Jamaica, 146–47; and Lords of Trade, 127 Revolutions, comparative and early modern, 33–61 Rhode Island, 124, 386; assembly of, 105 Rhodesia, 66 Rice as principal crop of lower south, 431 Rights, English: claimed for Jamaicans as inheritance, 158–59, 161–62; claimed for all colonies, 295–97; used by colonies to

Greene, final pages 460

defend against exertions of prerogative, 303–6 Rio de la Plata as settler colony, 9, 15 Rivers, Marcellus, on vicious colonial labor systems, 326 Robertson, Reverend Robert, on colonial slave regimes and metropolitan complicity in them, 329 Rodriguez, Jaime, on Spanish American Wars for Independence, 58–60 Roeber, A. G., 280; on German immigration to colonial British America, 393 Rohrbough, Malcolm, on the incorporation of English legal system in new state polities, 416 “Roscommon,” pseud., on metropolitan othering of colonies, 333 Ross, Robert, on diverse sources of settler legalities, 189 Royal African Company, 120 Royalization of private colonies as metropolitan objective, 107, 124 Rush, Benjamin: on ease of states in transitioning to republican governments, 351; on hope for constructing an American national identity, 345 Rutledge, Edward, expresses suspicions of New England delegates, 350 Sàam, Moses Ben, on evils of colonial slave systems, 328–29 St. Christopher, 142; assembly of, 105; British acquisition of, 115; ceded to Britain, 402; cultural override in, 423 St. Domingue, 17, 209; causes and effects of revolution in, 57–58; French colonization of, 402, 404; as part of plantation complex, 434; and ratio of black to white populations, 435; refugees from, 421 St. John, 124; assembly of, 109; effects of repeal of Declaratory Act of 1766 upon, 247; exodus of loyalists to, 212; extension of consensual government and rule of law to, 211; metropolitan bureaucrats in, 126 St. Kitt. See St. Christopher St. Lucia: ceded to Britain, 402; crown colony government in, 248

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Index St. Vincent, 124, 314; assembly of, 108; ceded to Britain, 402; extension of consensual government and rule of law to, 211 Salvador, Brazil: as part of extended Caribbean, 433; and ratio of black to white populations, 435 Saratoga, British defeat at, 240 Sarna, Jonathan D., on process of ethnic formation in America, 388 Savelle, Max, on comparative colonial history, 4, 14 Schwartz, Stuart, on Portuguese colonial history, 6, 9–10 Schwoerer, Lois, 46 Scientific and intellectual achievement and English national identity, 253, 261–62, 285 Scotland, separatist revolt in, 59 Scots, as percentage of white immigrants to British colonial America, 382 Scott, James Brown, 75 Scottish Enlightenment, 373; and conjectural history, 263 Seligman, Adam: on nature of civil society, 372–73; on new United States as contemporary model of civil society, 372–73 “Sempronius,” anon., and discussion of slavery in Barbados, 302 Senegambia: as British colony, 113; metropolitan bureaucrats in, 126 Serle, Adam, on colonial liberty in British Empire, 232 Servants as immigrants to colonial British America, 392 Settlement, places and modes, as variable in process of assimilation in colonial British America, 394 Settler, utility of, as social category, 282 Settler agency, 282–83; in American colonization, 11–12, 31; in British American colonization, 70–71; constraints upon, 283; in the construction of empire, 87–88, 102–3, 118–19; sources of, 23–25; in United States expansion, 76–78 Settler law, in colonial British America, 280; accessibility of, 290; character of, 291–92; differential operation of, in relation to social categories, 280; commonali-

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461

ties among provincial systems of, 291; diverse sources of, 289–90; superiority of, in early America, 281, 287–88; variations in and localization of, 288–89 Settler republics, British colonies as, 283 Settlers: as central agents in cultural transformation in colonial British America and the United States, 414–22; character of, questioned by metropolitan Britons, 323–39; as culture-bearing agents, 415–16, 423–25, 436–37; law-minded and rightsmindedness of, 286; and reproduction and adaptation of metropolitan legal and cultural inheritance, 414–22 Settler societies, definition and character of, 66–69 Seven Years’ War, 30, 71, 75, 92, 108, 115, 116, 124, 126, 234, 264, 271, 336, 337, 364, 383, 402, 404, 435; colonial behavior during, as source of metropolitan concern, 214–15; and metropolitan efforts to tighten colonial control, 214–24, 228; outcome of and problems posed by, 209–13 Sewell, William H., on nature and causes of French Revolution, 54–57 Sex ratios, equality of, as variable in process of assimilation in colonial British America, 394 Sharpe, John: and defense of Jamaica legislation, 162–63; opposes removal of Jamaica capital, 168 Shenandoah valley as site of secondary settlement, 398–99 Sheridan, Charles Francis: on British imperial organization and its effects on America and Ireland, 241–44; denies Blackstone’s contentions about omnipotency of Parliament, 242 Sheridan, Richard Brinsley, 241 Shipley, Jonathan, Bishop of St. Asaph, and virtues of colonial liberty, 234 Sicilly, separatist revolt in, 41 Simplification in new societies and disuse of social and cultural capital, 369–70 Slavery, colonial: as basis for othering of American colonists, 323, 327–29, 334; as central to plantation complex, 434–34;

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462

Index

Slavery, colonial (cont.) and colonial insecurity in West Indies, 302–3, 306–8; and the construction of a British identity in the West Indies, 293–322; defended by West Indians in wake of Somerset Case, 308–16; importance of, for West Indian economy, 299; legal foundations of, examined, 310–11; metropolitan complicity in, 311–15; and the moral corrosiveness of empire, 276; reservations about, as taboo subject in colonies, 302 Slavery studies, 8 Slave trade to Africa. See African slave trade Smith, Adam, 238; on British Empire, 83–84, 86, 89, 100; on British Empire as free, 226; on character of American slave holders, 333–36; on comparative advantage of Europeans over Amerindians, 366–68; contrasts European activities in Africa and Asia with those in America, 266; on creolean degeneracy in new societies, 269–70; on emergence of civil societies in colonial British America, 372–73; on England’s early commercial development, 262; on European expansion and transformation of the Americas, 365–68, 380; and implicit republicanism of colonial polities, 206; on latent republican character of colonial governance, 377–78; on liberty and British imperial development, 93, 101–2, 110–11; on primitive social state of Amerindians, 365–66; on progress of Europeans settlements in America and measures thereof, 365–66; on rapid growth of new societies, 119, 134 Smith, James, opposes granting Congress power over state domestic affairs, 354 Smith, Captain John, 7 Smith, Sir Thomas, on colonies as civilizing projects, 265 Smith, Reverend William, 385 Snyder, Terry L., 279 Social and cultural capital: attributes of, 368–69; and colonization and state building in early modern British Empire, 364– 80; components of, that gave Europeans

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a comparative advantage, 367–68; modes of enhancing, 368–69; redefined and extended as analytic concept, 363–64 Social openness and English identity, 253, 261, 285 Sollors, Werner, on dichotomy between pluralism and assimilation, 399 Somerset Case, and defense of English identity of West Indian settlers, 308–16 South, U.S.: diversity of, 437; history of, 426, and relationship to colonial southeast, 426–26 South Africa, 66, 102, 282; and British representative governance, 224; conquest from Dutch, 213; responsible government in, 249 South Carolina, 142, 386, 395, 430, 437; as British colony, 429; corporate identity of, 25, 27–30; metropolitan bureaucrats in, 125–27 South Carolina state constitution, 352 Southeastern North America: and Atlantic world, 426–37; diversity of European settlements in, 428–29; diversity of indigenous population in, 427–27; as part of plantation complex, 434–36; and ratio of black to white populations, 435; variations among colonies within, 429–31 Sovereignty: and the British metropolitan and imperial constitutions, 228–33; debate over location in American national union, 354–55; as issue in American Revolution, 50–51; popular, in the United States, 53 Spain, 35 Spanish American Wars for Independence, 58–62; fissiparous character of, 60–62 Spanish monarchy, nature and causes of separatist revolts in, 39 Spanish patriotism among Creole populations of Hispanic America, 58–59 Spanish Town: celebrates disallowance of removal bill, 197–98; efforts to remove the Jamaica capital from, 163–207 Stamp Act of 1765: colonial resistance to, 223–24, 227, 228, 234; crisis over, 338; as reform measure, 223; repeal of, 229

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Index Stanhope, Lovel, appointed Jamaica’s London agent, 194–95 State building, and social and cultural capital in early modern British American colonization, 364–80 State formation: colonization as a form of, 70–71; in early modern England, 43–48; early modern resistance to, and creation of revolutionary traditions, 33–63; and the study of United States national history, 65, 69–79 States: early modern, nature of, 34–40; resistance of, to centralizing tendencies, 37–38; tensions in, 36 Steele, Ian K., on British colonial administration, 122, 131 Steele, Richard, and story of Inkle and Yariko, 328 Stone, Lawrence: on British naval and military power, 91–92; on effects of Glorious Revolution, 46–47 Stuart monarchy and pursuit of absolutism, 43–46, 57 Sturtz, Linda L., 279 Sugar, as feature of plantation complex, 434 Sullivan, John, 347 Surinam, acquired by Dutch from English, 402, 404 Suspending clauses: Board of Trade condemns Knowles for not including, in removal law, 181; as an instrument of metropolitan control, 219; Jamaica Assembly refuses to include, in legislation, 150, 154, 156, 158–59 Sweden, 35 Swedes: as percentage of white immigrants to British colonial America, 382; rapid assimilation of, in middle colonies, 391–92 Swedish Lutheran Church, 392 Tachau, Mary, on English legal system and new state legal regimes, 416 Tacky’s rebellion, and demand for more British troops in Jamaica, 198–99 Tasmania as convict colony, 213 Texas, 437; acquired by conquest by United States, 402; and incorporation of English

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legal regime, 416–17; as Spanish colony, 428 t’Hart, Marjolein C.: on early modern state formation, 37; on Netherlands Revolt, 42 Theories of colonization, settler constructions of, 24–25 Thirty Years’ War, 260 Thomas, Nicholas, 66 Thomson, Charles, on possible dissolution of American union and shape of new confederacies, 357–58 Thomson, James, on empire and British national identity, 266 Three Letters to a Member of Parliament., anon., on colonial claims to British liberty, 235–36 Thurlow, John, 170 Tilly, Charles, on early modern state formation, 34 Tobacco, as principal crop of Chesapeake colonies, 430 Tobago, 124; assembly of, 108; captured by France, 113, 211; ceded to Britain, 402; extension of consensual government and rule of law to, 211 Tomlins, Christopher L.: on early American law, 279, 280, 281; on regularization of colonial legalities, 290–91; on settler innovations in English legalities, 290 Tortuga, 404 Townshend Acts, crisis over, 229 Townshend, Charles, and metropolitan conceptions of colonies, 271 Trade. See Commerce Trade restrictions on colonial commerce: evasion of, during Seven Years’ War, as source of metropolitan concern, 214–15; as metropolitan objective, 90, 107, 120, 122–23 Trading companies, state-authorized, in the construction of empire, 86–87, 110 Traditions, early modern revolutionary, 33–61 Transferability as attribute of social and cultural capital, 368 Transfers, political, of territories: categories of, 404; cultural dimensions of, 401–25;

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Index

Transfers, political, of territories (cont.) possible cultural outcomes of, 402–3; variables determining cultural outcomes of, 403 Transformation, cultural, of the Americas by European expansion and colonizing process, 281–82, 364–70 Transplantation: of British social and cultural capital to colonies, 364–72; of eastern culture hearths to new American states, 76, 414–21; of English consensual government to American colonies, 101–7, 109–10, 140–41, 267–70, 278–97, 341–43; of English culture to American colonies, 31, 267–69, 341–44; of European cultures to New World, 70, 401–2; of Old to New World political forms, 85, 87–88 Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle, 217 Treaty of Breda, 402 Treaty of Paris (1763), 210, 402, 412 Treaty of Ryswick, 404 Treaty of Utrecht, 402, 411 Trelawny, William, Jamaica governor, 136, 153, 154, 158, 176, 205; on defects and reforms needed in Jamaican constitution, 143–47; and the Jamaican Association, 151–53; and problems with West Indian slave systems, 306–8; on relations with Jamaica Assembly, 141–51 Trenchard, John, on English system of law and liberty, 257 Trinidad, Crown colony government in, 284 Tropical History Program, University of Wisconsin. 18n Tryon, Thomas, on colonial slave regimes, 327–28 Tudor, Mary, 259 Tudor monarchy and development of English national state, 43 Tufts, Cotton, 347 Tupac Amaru revolt, 1780–83, against the Bourbon reforms, 59 Unesco, multivolume histories, 14 Ulster Scots, as percentage of white immigrants to British colonial America, 382 Upper Canada: creation of, 212; effects of

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repeal of Declaratory Act of 1766 upon governance of, 247–48. See also Quebec van Gelderen, Martin, on Netherlands Revolt, 28–21 van Wesenbeeke, Mattheus, 38 Van Young, Eric, on Mexican War for Independence, 60–61 Varnum, James, on possible dissolution of American union, 355 Venezuela as settler colony, 9, 15 “Veridicus,” pseud.: and case against removal of Jamaica capital, 167–74; on slavery and internal security in Jamaica, 302 Vermont as prospective new state, 357 Vice admiralty courts, in colonial British America, 123 Virginia, 15, 88, 115, 124, 137, 288, 386, 416; assembly of, 105, 106, 119, 128; as British colony, 429; character of early settlers of, questioned, 326; and charter forfeiture, 117; contributions to Seven Years’ War, 214; corporate identity of, 25, 27–30; franchise rights in, 279; metropolitan bureaucrats in, 125–26; as part of extended Caribbean, 433; perpetual revenue in, 127; as setting for Moll Flanders and Colonel Jacque, 330–32; slave system of, 327; women’s legal agency in, 279 Virginia Company of London, 104, 121 Virginia Constitution, 352 Virgin Islands, 116, 124 Wald, Alan, on race as central category in American culture, 399 Wallace, Robert, 92 War, international: and colonial American experience, 12; and state formation in early modern Europe, 36–37 War of the Spanish Succession, 115; British acquisitions as result of, 210 Ward, Edward (Ned), satirizes Jamaica and New England, 329–30 Ward, Samuel, on fi rmness of American union and differences among American colonies, 345

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Index Warner, Michael, on the term “colonial,” 64 Washington, George, 348 Weber, David, on Spain’s legacy to legal systems in formerly Spanish territories, 418–19 Wellenreuther, Herman, on German immigration to colonial British America, 393 Welsh, as percentage of white immigrants to British colonial America, 382 West Florida, 124, 370; assembly of, 108; as British colony, 408; as conquered colony, 24; extension of consensual government and rule of law to, 211; metropolitan bureaucrats in, 126; retroceded to Spain, 113, 211 Western Design, 115 West Indies: effects of repeal of Declaratory Act of 1766 upon legislatures of, 247; liberty, slavery, and the construction of a British identity in, 293–322. See also Barbados; Dominica; Grenada; Jamaica; Lesser Antilles; Montserrat; Nevis; St. Christopher; St. Vincent; Tobago White Andrew, 7 White, Charles, on Knowles’s departure from Jamaica, 189 Williams, Samuel, on the state of society in late colonial British America, 375–79 Williams, William, on depth of American attachments to state government, 351 Wilson, James: on centrifugal tendencies in American union, 356; on colonial social development and emergence of civil life, 375; on counting slaves for taxes under Articles of Confederation, 349; on relationship between society and government in colonial British America, 378–79

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Wilson, Kathleen: on creole conceptions of cultural status, 269; on empire and British national identity, 267; on English system of law and liberty, 257, 258, 285; on moral costs of empire, 266, 272–73, 276–77 Winthrop, John, 7 Witherspoon, John, urges strong national union, 349 Woceck, Marianne, on German immigration to colonial British America, 393 Wolf, Stephanie, on German immigration to colonial British America, 393 Wood, Gordon S., 33 Wood, William, on slavery and internal security in West Indies, 302 Worsley, Henry, and efforts to deprive Barbadian settlers of English rights and legalities, 297 Wynter, William, and the Delap affair, 179 Yariko, and Thomas Inkle, story and evils of colonial slave systems, 328 Yorke, Charles, metropolitan solicitor general, on establishing courts in Jamaica, 195–96 Young, Arthur: on British colonial administration, 138, 220–22; on British Empire as free, 226; on colonial claims to British liberty, 270; on commerce with American colonies, 265; on subjecthood of overseas Britons, 269 Zavala, Silvio, on comparative colonial history, 13–14 Zeeland and Netherlands Revolt, 41

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early american histories A series of studies on early modern North America and the Caribbean from 1500 to 1815, Early American Histories promises innovative research and analysis of foundational questions central to the work of scholars and teachers of American, British, and Atlantic history—books that bring the early American world into focus. Douglas Bradburn and John C. Coombs, editors Early Modern Virginia: Reconsidering the Old Dominion Denver Brunsman The Evil Necessity: British Naval Impressment in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World Jack P. Greene Creating the British Atlantic: Essays on Transplantation, Adaptation, and Continuity

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