Book contents
- Frontmatter
- 1 Law, Colonization, Legitimation, and the European Background
- 2 The Law of Native Americans, to 1815
- 3 English Settlement and Local Governance
- 4 Legal Communications and Imperial Governance: British North America and Spanish America Compared
- 5 Regionalism in Early American Law
- 6 Penality and the Colonial Project: Crime, Punishment, and the Regulation of Morals in Early America
- 7 Law, Population, Labor
- 8 The Fragmented Laws of Slavery in the Colonial and Revolutionary Eras
- 9 The Transformation of Domestic Law
- 10 Law and Religion in Colonial America
- 11 The Transformation of Law and Economy in Early America
- 12 Law and Commerce, 1580–1815
- 13 Law and the Origins of the American Revolution
- 14 Confederation and Constitution
- 15 The Consolidation of the Early Federal System, 1791–1812
- 16 Magistrates, Common Law Lawyers, Legislators: The Three Legal Systems of British America
- Bibliographic Essays
- Notes on Contributors
- Index
- References
3 - English Settlement and Local Governance
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 November 2008
- Frontmatter
- 1 Law, Colonization, Legitimation, and the European Background
- 2 The Law of Native Americans, to 1815
- 3 English Settlement and Local Governance
- 4 Legal Communications and Imperial Governance: British North America and Spanish America Compared
- 5 Regionalism in Early American Law
- 6 Penality and the Colonial Project: Crime, Punishment, and the Regulation of Morals in Early America
- 7 Law, Population, Labor
- 8 The Fragmented Laws of Slavery in the Colonial and Revolutionary Eras
- 9 The Transformation of Domestic Law
- 10 Law and Religion in Colonial America
- 11 The Transformation of Law and Economy in Early America
- 12 Law and Commerce, 1580–1815
- 13 Law and the Origins of the American Revolution
- 14 Confederation and Constitution
- 15 The Consolidation of the Early Federal System, 1791–1812
- 16 Magistrates, Common Law Lawyers, Legislators: The Three Legal Systems of British America
- Bibliographic Essays
- Notes on Contributors
- Index
- References
Summary
In late 1584, as Sir Walter Raleigh began to organize an effort to send settlers to Roanoke Island, an anonymous author asked, “What manner of geouernement is to be vsed and what offics to geouerne?” The mysterious end to the Roanoke settlement offers no answer. Yet, as the vast record of charters, letters patent, and correspondence about governance testifies, the manner of government preoccupied settlers, investors, and Crown officials. The question of governance also intrigued past generations of historians. Simply put, when English settlement began in the 1570s, not one of the institutions that symbolized American representative government was in existence; by the 1720s, colonial American institutional development was largely complete.
For the casual reader, institutional histories of early America often revel in overly obscure details of colonial and English political organization. The current tendency to reject the entire venture, however, goes too far the other way. As we shall see, institutional history is important for two reasons. First, it helps us understand the development of authority – in this case, the roots of American federalism and representative democracy. Second, it helps us put British North America in its transatlantic context as part of English politics, the expanding English empire, and the Atlantic world.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Cambridge History of Law in America , pp. 63 - 103Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2008
References
- 8
- Cited by