By Jack P. Greene
Utilizing the British Empire as a case examine, this succinct learn argues that the institution of abroad settlements in the US created an issue of constitutional association that created deep and chronic tensions in the empire in the course of the colonial period and that the failure to unravel it was once the important aspect within the choice of 13 continental colonies to secede from the empire in 1776. tough these historians who've assumed that the British had the legislations on their part in the course of the debates that ended in the yank Revolution, this quantity argues that the empire had lengthy exhibited a excessive measure of constitutional multiplicity, with each one colony having its personal discrete structure and the empire as complete having an uncodified operating favourite structure that made up our minds the best way authority was once disbursed in the empire. Contending that those constitutions can't be conflated with the metropolitan British structure, it argues that British refusal to simply accept the legitimacy of colonial understandings of the sanctity of the numerous colonial constitutions and the imperial structure used to be the serious aspect resulting in the yank Revolution.
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Extra resources for The Constitutional Origins of the American Revolution
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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. 11 Even in situations in which company oficials 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.
6 The lax administration thus thought to have been in some major part responsible for the rapid growth of the colonies was especially evident during the long ministry of Sir Robert Walpole from 1721 until 1742, and it derived largely from the application to colonial affairs of many of the underlying principles and techniques that he had employed with such 6 Archibald Kennedy, Observations on the Importance of the Northern Colonies under Proper Regulations (New York, 1750), 12, 30–1; The Watchman, #4, Pennsylvania Journal & Weekly Advertiser, Apr.
8, 1721, and Joshua Gee to Board of Trade, [Oct. 27, 1721], in W. , Calendar of State Papers, Colonial, 44 vols. (London: H. M. Stationary Ofice, 1860–), 1720–1, 444–9, 475. , 31 (1974): 533–64. Empire Negotiated, 1689–1763 29 colonial laws. Even more seriously, perhaps, they revived and intensiied a long-standing controversy over the legal force of Crown and proprietary instructions in the colonies. 16 At various times following the Glorious Revolution, metropolitan oficials had sought through formal instructions to colonial governors to achieve a variety of objectives, many of which were intended to curtail the powers of the assemblies while maintaining the authority of the prerogative in the colonies.