This chapter takes stock of institutional configurations in the New World colonies at the time of the American Revolution. It observes that the same bundle of institutions that made individual colonies autonomous relative to the crown also made them autonomous relative to each other. In turn, this mutual autonomy presented major constraints when American state elites bargained over a national constitution. These bargaining constraints, as well as the institutional models of imperial government, resulted in some of the core institutions of the American state that structure so much policy making today: Federalism, checks and balances with a powerful legislature, judicial review, and even specific executive bureaucracies. The chapter concludes with a summary of the book’s argument.