Equality and Empire The New York Charter of Libertyes, 1683

H _ > ISTORIANS of colonial America have given over a good deal of space to the course of events between the founding of the colonies and the American Revolution. Through them we have learned much about how colonies were settled and developed and how they were expected to fit the demands of the emerging British Empire. What historians have found difficult to determine is how American colonists felt about themselves as British subjects outside the realm, and what they believed was the colonies' role within the empire. Such an inquiry is, of course, less difficult for the eighteenth century, particularly for the period just before the American Revolution. Events at that time at last forced the colonists to come to terms with the idea of empire and to set limits upon it and upon the power of Parliament in accordance with their own needs and historic assumptions. In the seventeenth century, colonial society was less mature, less stable, and less reflective about itself and its relationship to the Mother Country. No single momentous event like the Revolution united or crystallized colonial thought around definite political or constitutional theories. Rather, each colony went its way, influenced by its own peculiar political, economic, and religious circumstances on the one hand, and by the emerging, yet fitful, colonial policy on the other. At the same time, the English government had not yet determined precisely what the colonists' role was in the larger scheme. Crown, Parliament, and ministry after the Restoration had only begun to decide how their general conclusions about empire ought to be implemented. Despite the unsettledness of the connection between colonies and Mother Country, certain events affecting individual colonies did produce in the seventeenth century reactions which help the historian determine what went on in the minds of the people, who they thought they were, and how they believed they stood in relation to England. A unique situa

Charter · Empire · Political science · American Constitutional Law and Politics · History · Law

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