The Fabricated Region: On the Insufficiency of "Colonies" for Understanding American Colonial History

Who cared about "colonies?"¹ I don't raise Jacob Price's old question: who cared about the colonies in the era of the American Revolution, but rather who (in Britain and America and throughout the colonial period) cared about specific colonies themselves? Certainly, their "owners" did. Proprietors could display remarkably parochial visions about the ends and means of the English overseas experiment. William Penn never looked or sounded less like a pacifist or more like a parent than when interposing himself between Pennsylvania and persons or interest groups who seemed likely to threaten it. And individuals who held official positions in or with respect to specific colonies, or from those proprietors, readily embraced such visions. William Cosby, a colonel in the British army, accepted an appointment as the royal governor of the Leeward Islands in 1731.When he heard that the governorships of New York and New Jersey had become vacant, he managed to exchange his still-unused office for the reputedly more lucrative, and certainly more salubrious, mainland posts. No one could have convinced him that an office of profit in one American colony was no different from one in any other.²

But even before Cosby's day that proprietor-of-proprietors, George I, who spoke no English and spent part of every year on the Continent, was content to allow his ministers to manage his interests on that "other" continent. The agency with the most direct responsibility for American affairs, the Board of Trade, responded to its increasing workload and diminishing status at White-hall by lumping more colonial business under the dismissive administrative sobriquet of "Plantations General."³ Privately interested parties in Britain whose American assets depended in the most literal ways on defining sharp boundaries between colonies could be even more ignorant than their monarch. James Brydges, the first Duke of Chandos, strove heroically between 1731 and 1738 to secure for himself and several partners (all members of Parliament or the Board of Trade) sixty thousand acres in the "Equivalent Lands," then being transferred from Connecticut to New York to settle an ancient boundary dispute. Chandos never understood how or why his company—with the clear support of the Crown and an indisputably prior patent—lost out to a rival group of upstart American provincial gentry, all the while blithely presuming that the redrawn boundary line between the two colonies (and presumably the parallel Hudson River, from which the grant was to be measured) ran from east to west!⁴ The perverse profusion and diffusion of imperial business soon made key players out of a sprawling network of informal lobbyists and part-time advisors known generically as colonial "agents." Those individuals, whether to make the business worth their while or just to fit it in with their other economic activities, often took multiple commissions from clusters of colonies. If the First British Empire was not constructed from the inside out on a colony-by-colony "jigsaw puzzle" basis, why should we use such processes in trying to reconstruct it historically?⁵

What of the colonists themselves? Does behavioral evidence or patterns of identification suggest how they understood their lives along the sprawling edge of the Crown's Atlantic domain? Midway through the survey course, or at the end of the colonial or the start of the American Revolution sequence, it is common to invoke visions of Adams or Jefferson or Lee or Dickinson or Morris—eyeing each other suspiciously in Philadelphia—and to deploy the old cliche that their "country" of reference as late as 1774 was still Massachusetts or Virginia or Pennsylvania or New York. But to use any of these pedagogic junctures is to join the story in progress, and whether the cliché is true or not tells us very little about how it came to be true, or why it faded so quickly. In truth, we still know almost nothing in a systematic way about the spatial consciousness of early Americans and how it evolved between the age of earliest discovery and the era of the American Revolution. The...