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The article focuses on committees of correspondence, groups formed roughly a decade previous to the American Revolution that used intercolonial communication to create newspaper articles, town halls, and street literature to spread their radicalized feeling against the British and to foster revolutionary support among those living in the colonies. This move was in protest to taxes and levies enacted after the French Indian War in which Great Britain attempted to recoup it's war expenses by the people in colonial America.

In the colonial period of American history, the British Crown reviewed, and sometimes nullified, acts of colonial assemblies for "repugnancy to the laws of England." In this way, Crown review established external, legal constraints on American legislatures. I present a formal model to argue that Crown legislative review counteracted political pressure on imperial governors from colonial assemblies, to approve laws contrary to the empire's interests. Optimal review in the model combines both legal and substantive considerations. This gives governors the strongest incentive to avoid royal reprisal by vetoing laws the Crown considered undesirable. Thus, review of legislation for consistency with higher law helped the Crown to grapple with agency problems in imperial governance, and ultimately achieve more (but still incomplete) centralized control over policy. I discuss the legacy of imperial legislative review for early American thinking about constitutional review of legislation by courts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the role that the British Empire in the Atlantic Ocean region played in the unity of Protestant sects during the 18th century. An overview of Anglicans in colonial U.S., including efforts to exempt Anglicans from taxation in Connecticut and Massachusetts, is provided.

Separation of powers existed in the British Empire of North America long before the U.S. Constitution of 1789, yet little is known about the strategic foundations of this institutional choice. In this article, I argue that separation of powers helps an imperial crown mitigate an agency problem with its colonial governor. Governors may extract more rents from colonial settlers than the imperial crown prefers. This lowers the Crown’s rents and inhibits economic development by settlers. Separation of powers within colonies allows settlers to restrain the governor’s rent extraction. If returns to settler investment are moderately high, this restraint is necessary for colonial economic development and ultimately benefits the Crown. Historical evidence from the American colonies and the first British Empire is consistent with the model. This article highlights the role of agency problems as a distinct factor in New World institutional development, and in a sovereign’s incentives to create liberal institutions. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article explores the role of committees of correspondence in U.S. colonial history. Emphasis is given to topics such as collective action and resistance to taxation by Great Britain, the search and seizure of vessels under the Sugar Act of 1764, and reaction to the Boston Tea Party resulting in the formation of the First Continental Congress.

The article explores the religious life of Blacks and slaves in the Dutch and English colonies of North America in the seventeenth- and early eighteenth-centuries prior to the First Great Awakening. Topics include the influence of Caribbean, African, Iberian religions on Black Christianity; Black Muslims and Christianity; Protestantism; and the influence of the religious beliefs of slaveholders upon slaves.

The article discusses the enforcement of British imperial power over its colonies in America by the British Royal Navy from 1740 to 1776 and reaction to such enforcement by American colonists. It examines why American colonists began to resent the British Royal Navy and its officers, the significance of the aftermath of the Seven Years' War and the political significance of the British Royal Navy. It also discusses the ideological forces identified as authoritarian whiggery and patriotism.

English people were fascinated, disgusted, and frightened by the new American habit of tarring and feathering officials. Eighteenth-century England experienced more riots than America, but English rioters never sought to change the status of upper-class targets with theatrical disfigurements. Polite English folk feared the spread of tar and feathering to England’s underclass and, thus, became convinced that Americans had to be violently transformed or allowed to leave the Empire. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since Carl Bridenbaugh published The Colonial Craftsman in 1950, historians have asserted that artisans supported the pre-Revolutionary nonimportation movements largely because these trade stoppages benefited artisans economically. This article summarizes the historiography of this argument, highlights weaknesses in it, and offers evidence which demonstrates that most artisans were negatively impacted by the boycotts. Finally, it highlights the need for further research into the transition that urban artisans faced as they moved from their early dual roles as husbandmen and artisans to a near-exclusive reliance on their trades for sustenance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reports on how depictions of the British colonies in America in the late 17th and early 18th centuries in British discourse turned the British conception of America towards the negative. Citations of the forced labor system, reliant on poor people who were willing to sell themselves for a few years made America seem like a difficult and ignoble place.

This article considers the use of language to create theories of empire in Great Britain and America in early America. Massachusetts Governor Thomas Pownall used Isaac Newton's concept of attraction to explain the relationship between Britain and its colonies, with the colonies containing a center which drew in peripheral activity. Pownall drew his ideas from Scottish theories of conceptual history, Newtonian theories of gravity and the idea that empire migrated from east to west.

Discusses the civic aims of the Virginia Company for its colony, which was the first permanent English settlement in America in the early 17th century. Civic tradition hostile to commerce; Portrayal of wealth as Asiatic luxury and corruption; Commercial and human disasters characterizing the colony's first years; Ideological motivation for potential investors and colonists.

Focuses on British-American colonial history. Publication of `Colonial British America: Essays on the New History of the Early Modern Era'; Story of the American past in `Encyclopedia of the North American Colonies'; Value of old England as paradigm.

Examines the eighteenth-century empire in England, which had virtually no army and only a handful of administrators in its American colonies. The three different types of Anglo-American interests, including merchant groups; English and American dissenters; What the group of dissenters consisted of; Description of the lay group; The number of useful resources that dissenting lobbyists had; Details of the Toleration Act; More.