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— six — Traditions of Consensual Governance in the Construction of State Authority in the Early Modern European Empires in America In 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 constru çâo 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 portugu ês, 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 governan ça 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. Greene, final pages 101 Greene, final pages 101 2/12/13 2:27 PM 2/12/13 2:27 PM 102 Governance 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...

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