How did colonies develop under contractual imperialism? This chapter reviews three important cases – Virginia, Massachusetts Bay, and Barbados – and argues that contractual imperialism had important successes. Under contractual imperialism, colonizers did search vigorously for resource endowments, and made and re-made their economies at significant cost to exploit them. Patent terms for balanced colonial polities did restrain some of the excesses of colonial government under their founding elites. At the same time, experience revealed important problems with contractual imperialism: It was not effective at coordinating an empire of multiple colonies, and it provided such strong incentives that it generated significant factional disputes within colonies. Nevertheless, under contractual imperialism, English colonies established successful cash-crop economies.

Traces migration of impeachment from Great Britain to British North American colonies. Summarizes impeachment proceedings in colonies before American Revolution. Catalogues the impeachment provisions of the constitutions of the newly independent American states from 1776-1788, and describes use of impeachment by the states prior to enactment of U.S. Constitution.

This chapter describes and explains the emergence of majoritarian decision-making in twenty-seven lower colonial assemblies in Ireland, mainland North America, and the Caribbean between 1619 and 1776. It documents the peculiar conditions under which majoritarian politics developed in the colonies while also registering the importance of attempts to imitate parliamentary practices. Colonial lower assemblies were created under conditions fundamentally different from those that prevailed in the Westminster House of Commons. Some were part of corporations and proprietorships, not royal colonies; and some initially admitted all freemen, not simply elected representatives. These factors led to distinctive institutional trajectories. In general and over the long run, these factors appear to have reinforced a tendency for the colonial lower assemblies to be or become majoritarian. By scrutinizing the available evidence, one is left with the overwhelming impression of a total embrace of majoritarian politics before the American Revolution and, in most cases, long before that time. As the colonial lower assemblies of North America became provincial congresses and then state lower assemblies, they predictably continued their majoritarian practices. This pattern continued in the first intercolonial assemblies and in the US House of Representatives.