Who Controlled America?

Lecture Learning Objectives

1. Explain why representative institutions in Virginia, Plymouth, and New England created habits of local self-government without constituting modern democracy.
2. Analyze sovereignty as a problem of overlapping and competing authority among English colonists, Native nations, proprietors, and the Crown.
3. Evaluate the Pequot War as a conflict shaped by English and Dutch expansion, Native rivalries and alliances, trade, land, security, religious ideology, and competing historical interpretations.
4. Explain how the English Civil Wars and Interregnum altered colonial politics, trade, religion, and expectations of political liberty across the English Atlantic.
5. Analyze how the Restoration monarchy attempted to organize a more coherent empire and why proprietary plans in Carolina and New York repeatedly collided with settler demands and local realities.

Essay Outline

Introductory Framing

Lecture 4 asks a question that cannot be answered with the name of a single government: who controlled America? By the middle decades of the seventeenth century, English colonies possessed assemblies, town governments, courts, churches, militias, and property systems that exercised real authority over settlers. Native nations continued to govern their own peoples, make war and peace, control access to land and trade, and pursue alliances. Proprietors claimed powers granted by royal charter. The English Crown asserted ultimate sovereignty over English settlements and, after 1660, increasingly tried to turn scattered colonies into a more coherent imperial system.

The resulting political landscape was not neatly hierarchical. Authority was layered, negotiated, and frequently contradictory. A Virginia planter might regard the House of Burgesses as an expression of the rights of English subjects while living on land whose acquisition had depended on the destruction of Native sovereignty. A New England town might govern local affairs with considerable participation while excluding women, servants, many religious dissenters, enslaved people, and Indigenous neighbors from its political community. A Native sachem could make an alliance with English settlers to strengthen his position against Native rivals, only to discover that English authorities later treated the alliance as evidence of political subordination.

The essential interpretive move is therefore to avoid equating representative government with democracy and to avoid equating English claims with uncontested sovereignty. Jack P. Greene's constitutional scholarship is especially useful here: colonial political authority developed through negotiation between metropolitan claims and provincial practices. Andrew Lipman, Michael Oberg, Alfred Cave, and other historians of Native-colonial relations likewise show that Indigenous peoples were active diplomatic and military actors whose strategies shaped the balance of power. Carla Gardina Pestana and Robert M. Bliss place those colonial developments inside the revolutionary crisis of the English state. Together, this scholarship reveals seventeenth-century America as a field of competing jurisdictions rather than a territory governed from a single center.

1. Representative Government and the Growth of Colonial Political Habits

Representation Before Democracy

English colonists did not cross the Atlantic as modern democrats. They lived within a political culture that accepted monarchy, hierarchy, property qualifications, household patriarchy, and unequal status. At the same time, English political traditions included local offices, common law, representative institutions, petitions, juries, and the expectation that taxation and legislation should operate through recognized constitutional forms. Colonial conditions gave those practices unusually important local expression.

The distinction between representative government and democracy is essential. Elected assemblies could protect the interests of property-owning men while excluding large portions of the population. Political participation expanded in some places without establishing universal political equality. The historical importance of early assemblies lies less in how closely they resembled modern democratic institutions than in the habits they created: colonists repeatedly came to expect that local taxation, lawmaking, and community decisions required local participation.

Virginia: House of Burgesses and Government by Adaptation

The House of Burgesses, first convened in 1619, emerged from the Virginia Company's broader effort to make its troubled colony more attractive and stable. The assembly met with the governor and council and gave eligible settlers a representative voice in local legislation. The same reform period also introduced private landholding and English common law in place of earlier martial discipline. Representative government was therefore part of Virginia's institutional adaptation after the disasters of its first decade.

The assembly did not establish popular sovereignty in a modern sense. Governors retained substantial power, franchise rules changed, and the planter elite increasingly dominated officeholding. Yet the institution created a durable expectation that local representatives belonged within the legitimate structure of government. That expectation outlived the Virginia Company after the Crown converted Virginia into a royal colony in 1624.

Plymouth and New England: Covenant, Town, and General Court

Plymouth's Mayflower Compact, discussed in Lecture 3, was an emergency agreement to create a legitimate civil body in an uncertain jurisdiction. Massachusetts Bay developed a more extensive political system in which freemen elected magistrates and deputies, towns managed local affairs, and the General Court acquired legislative authority. The religious boundaries of political participation remained important, especially in Massachusetts, but the process accustomed many male householders to recurring elections and town-level decision making.

Town government mattered because authority was experienced close to home. Roads, fences, common lands, taxes, schools, meetinghouses, poor relief, livestock, and local offices all required decisions. These practices did not eliminate hierarchy. They created a political culture in which hierarchy increasingly had to operate through procedures recognizable as legitimate to members of the community.

Jack P. Greene and Negotiated Authority

Jack P. Greene's Peripheries and Center and later essays in Negotiated Authorities provide a powerful framework for understanding colonial constitutional development. Greene rejects a simple model in which metropolitan institutions dictated political forms to passive colonies. Distance, weak administrative capacity, local circumstances, and settler bargaining allowed provincial governments to acquire powers through practice. Authority became legitimate not simply because it had been granted from above but because it had been exercised, defended, and accepted locally.

This framework helps explain why seventeenth-century assemblies matter even before imperial constitutional disputes became acute. Colonists gradually converted local practice into political expectation. A right that had begun as a corporate concession, charter privilege, or improvised necessity could later be defended as an inherited liberty of English subjects.

Analytical Significance

2. Sovereignty, Jurisdiction, and Overlapping Political Worlds

Using 'Sovereignty' Carefully

Sovereignty is useful shorthand for the claimed right of a political community to govern people, make binding decisions, control territory, conduct diplomacy, and defend itself. The term requires caution in early America because neither English nor Native political systems mapped neatly onto the later nation-state model. Authority could be personal, territorial, tributary, corporate, religious, proprietary, or imperial, and several claims could overlap in the same place.

Native polities possessed governments, diplomatic protocols, territorial understandings, kinship obligations, tribute relationships, and systems for making war and peace. English colonists nevertheless interpreted royal patents and land purchases through European legal assumptions that could convert limited transactions into claims of permanent exclusive possession. Native negotiators could understand the same agreement in terms of shared use, alliance, tribute, or reciprocal obligation. The problem was not that one side understood property and the other did not. The problem was that political and legal meanings differed.

Land Transactions Were Political Transactions

Land in seventeenth-century New England was never merely real estate. Sales, gifts, permissions, and settlement agreements altered political relationships. English towns sought clear documentary title, while Native communities operated within overlapping use rights, kin claims, sachemship, and communal expectations that could make a single deed an incomplete statement of ownership.

The strongest recent scholarship avoids two opposite myths: that English settlers simply stole all land without negotiation, and that fair-looking deeds automatically prove equitable consent. Transactions occurred, but the bargaining context was transformed by epidemic disease, expanding settler populations, debt, trade dependency, military alliance, and English courts that increasingly judged disputes according to English norms.

Native Alliances and the Politics of Survival

Native leaders often treated European settlements as potential resources in regional politics. Ousamequin's alliance with Plymouth, Uncas's alliance with Connecticut and Massachusetts, and Narragansett diplomacy with English and Native neighbors were strategic choices made in a world of shifting power. Those alliances should not be read as evidence that Native peoples collectively submitted to English sovereignty.

Michael Leroy Oberg's biography of Uncas is especially useful. Oberg depicts the Mohegan sachem as a skilled political actor who adapted to the new colonial order while pursuing Mohegan interests. Uncas's alliance with the English strengthened the Mohegans against the Pequots and Narragansetts, but it also required continuous negotiation with increasingly powerful colonial governments. His career makes the phrase 'English versus Indians' analytically useless.

Andrew Lipman and the Saltwater Frontier

Andrew Lipman's The Saltwater Frontier broadens the geography of sovereignty by treating Long Island Sound and the southern New England coast as a maritime political world. English and Dutch empires, Native boatmen, traders, raiders, fishermen, and diplomats moved across water that later maps divide into colonial territories. The sea was not an empty boundary separating peoples; it was a zone of interaction, commerce, intelligence, violence, and imperial competition.

Lipman's perspective is particularly valuable for the Pequot War because it links local conflict to Dutch-English rivalry, wampum and fur exchange, coastal mobility, and Native control of maritime routes. It replaces a land-bound frontier model with a contested regional network.

Analytical Significance

3. The Pequot War: Alliance, Conquest, and the Making of a Frontier Myth

A Regional Conflict, Not a Simple Race War

The Pequot War of 1636-1638 emerged from a dense field of competition rather than from a simple binary opposition between English settlers and a unified Native population. The Pequots were an important power in the Connecticut and Long Island Sound region, with influence over tributary communities and valuable access to wampum and trade. The Dutch, English colonies, Narragansetts, Mohegans, Niantics, and other Native peoples all pursued distinct interests.

English settlement in the Connecticut River valley altered the regional balance. Disputes over the deaths of English traders John Stone and John Oldham, English punitive expeditions, Pequot retaliation, trade rivalries, and the breakdown of diplomacy escalated into open war. The sequence matters because later English narratives often represented the war as a necessary defensive response to an undifferentiated Native threat. The evidence instead shows repeated decisions, misunderstandings, provocations, alliance-building, and strategic calculation.

Narragansett and Mohegan Alliances

The participation of Narragansett and Mohegan forces is indispensable to understanding the war. Uncas and the Mohegans used the conflict to break Pequot power and expand their own regional influence. Narragansett leaders also had reasons to oppose Pequot dominance, although English violence at Mystic shocked some Native allies and complicated the relationship.

Native alliances did not make the war less colonial. They reveal how colonial expansion operated through Indigenous political divisions as well as through direct English force. English settlers did not conquer southern New England alone. They entered existing rivalries, empowered some allies, destroyed or subordinated others, and then used the changed balance of power to expand English claims.

Mystic, 1637

The attack on the fortified Pequot village near the Mystic River became the defining event of the war. English forces under John Mason and John Underhill, accompanied by Native allies, surrounded the settlement and set it on fire. Hundreds of Pequot men, women, and children died. The massacre was militarily decisive and morally revealing because English commanders interpreted the destruction through a providential framework that could transform overwhelming violence into evidence of divine favor.

Recent work by Matthew Rowley places the Mystic massacre within a broader Puritan theology of war, providence, justice, and holiness. His contribution does not reduce the violence to religion alone; rather, it shows how religious interpretation shaped the way Puritan soldiers justified and remembered what they had done. Political interest, fear, vengeance, strategy, and theology reinforced one another.

Treaty of Hartford: From Military Defeat to Political Erasure

The 1638 Treaty of Hartford formalized a new political order. Surviving Pequots were distributed among the Narragansetts and Mohegans, tribute obligations were imposed, and Pequot control of their homeland was explicitly rejected. The treaty attempted something more ambitious than ending hostilities: it sought to erase Pequot political identity.

The phrase 'English by conquest' makes the relationship between war and sovereignty explicit. English claims that could previously be described through purchase, charter, or settlement were now supplemented by conquest. The treaty also placed Narragansett and Mohegan allies within an English-dominated diplomatic structure by requiring disputes to be mediated under English authority.

Enslavement and the Atlantic Consequences of Victory

The war's aftermath included captivity and enslavement. Some surviving Pequots were distributed among Native allies, some were held in English households, and others were shipped into Atlantic slavery. This is important for connecting New England's supposedly free-labor society to the coercive labor systems discussed in Lecture 2. War against Native people could generate captives who became commodities within the larger Atlantic world.

The Yale and Slavery Research Project has recently drawn renewed attention to these connections, including the exchange of Pequot captives through Atlantic networks and the arrival of enslaved Africans in New England in the aftermath of the conflict. The point is not that the Pequot War created New England slavery, but that conquest, Indigenous enslavement, African slavery, and colonial commerce were interconnected much earlier than older regional narratives acknowledged.

Historiography: Vaughan, Cave, Oberg, and Lipman

Alden T. Vaughan's New England Frontier, first published in 1965 and later revised, argued against a picture of uniformly hostile Puritan-Indian relations and emphasized substantial periods of negotiation, legal exchange, and missionary engagement. That work was an important corrective to crude conquest narratives, but its relatively favorable assessment of Puritan policy generated substantial criticism.

Alfred A. Cave's The Pequot War offered the first full-scale modern monograph on the conflict and directly challenged claims that the settlers acted primarily to forestall a Pequot plan to exterminate Europeans. Cave emphasizes English preconceptions, trade and wampum competition, political interest, ideology, and the way postwar narratives converted conquest into defensive necessity. His final emphasis on 'the mythology of the frontier' is especially important for this course.

Oberg and Lipman further complicate the story by centering Mohegan strategy and the cross-cultural maritime world of Long Island Sound. Together, the scholarship has moved interpretation away from a simple question of which ethnic side 'started' the war and toward a more difficult analysis of power, alliance, expanding settlement, commerce, violence, and historical memory.

Analytical Significance

4. The English Civil Wars and the Transformation of the Atlantic

The Crisis of Charles I

The political crisis that erupted in England during the 1640s was rooted in disputes over royal authority, Parliament, taxation, religion, and the governance of the three Stuart kingdoms. Charles I's years of Personal Rule, conflict with Scotland, and renewed need for parliamentary finance contributed to a breakdown that became civil war in 1642. Parliament's military victory eventually led to the king's execution in 1649, the abolition of monarchy and the House of Lords, and the declaration of a commonwealth.

Oliver Cromwell emerged from the parliamentary army as the dominant figure of the 1650s and became Lord Protector in 1653. The political forms changed repeatedly: parliamentary government, military influence, republican ideals, religious experiments, and authoritarian measures coexisted uneasily. After Cromwell's death in 1658, the regime unraveled, and Charles II was restored in 1660.

The Colonies Were Part of the Crisis

Older American narratives often treated the English Civil War as distant background. Carla Gardina Pestana's The English Atlantic in an Age of Revolution makes the opposite case: the upheavals of 1640-1660 transformed colonial religion, trade, labor, political alignments, and arguments about liberty. Colonies chose sides, resisted metropolitan instructions, adjusted commercial relationships, and took advantage of political disorder.

Maryland's conflicts between Catholic proprietors and Protestant settlers, the growing political power of assemblies in the West Indies, Puritan New England's relationship with parliamentary governments, and resistance by royalist colonies all demonstrate that the Atlantic was politically connected. The English state was not simply absent; its changing forms repeatedly altered what colonial legitimacy meant.

Local Autonomy Expanded During Metropolitan Instability

Periods of metropolitan crisis often increased the practical room for local decision making. Colonies developed trading relationships and political practices that London could not easily supervise. Assemblies in the West Indies expanded their roles. New England colonies coordinated defense through the New England Confederation. Colonists increasingly learned to govern in an environment where imperial oversight was intermittent and contested.

This does not mean the 1640s were a simple age of colonial independence. Parliamentary and Cromwellian governments also pursued stronger imperial policies, including the Navigation Act of 1651 and military action against resistant colonies and rival empires. The English revolution simultaneously widened local experimentation and stimulated new efforts to build an integrated Atlantic state.

Pestana and Bliss: Revolution Before Restoration

Pestana argues that the mid-century upheaval helped create an English Atlantic that was more economically integrated, religiously polarized, socially exploitative, and politically anxious about liberty by 1660. Her interpretation is particularly useful because it prevents the Restoration from appearing as the first moment when England suddenly discovered imperial organization.

Robert M. Bliss's Revolution and Empire similarly places colonial development within seventeenth-century English political crises. Bliss emphasizes that changes in English political thought and institutions repeatedly generated colonial reactions. Both historians make the larger point that constitutional development in America cannot be understood without treating England's own revolution as an imperial event.

Analytical Significance

5. Restoration: From Scattered Colonies Toward a More Deliberate Empire

Charles II and the Reconstruction of Monarchy

The Restoration of Charles II in 1660 reestablished monarchy, the House of Lords, and the Church of England, but it did not simply return England to the political world of 1640. The Crown inherited colonies that were larger, wealthier, more numerous, and more accustomed to local authority. The central imperial problem was therefore how to reassert royal influence without destroying the institutions and economic systems on which colonial prosperity depended.

Charles II's government increasingly treated colonies as parts of a larger commercial and strategic system. Royal officials sought to regulate trade, secure customs revenues, restrain foreign competitors, supervise governors, and bring colonial governments into more regular relation with metropolitan authority. The Navigation Acts belong to this broader development, even though their enforcement remained uneven.

Proprietary Colonies as Instruments of State and Patronage

One Restoration strategy was proprietary colonization. The Crown could reward loyal supporters with enormous grants while shifting much of the expense and risk of settlement to proprietors. Proprietors received broad governmental powers but still operated under the English monarch. Their projects therefore combined private ownership, delegated sovereignty, imperial strategy, and social experimentation.

The textbook's emphasis on Restoration colonies as planned experiments is useful, but the word 'planned' must not imply success. Proprietors repeatedly discovered the same problem encountered by earlier companies: settlers had choices. Colonies needed migrants, and migrants could compare land terms, taxes, religious policies, and political rights across jurisdictions. Top-down plans therefore had to compete with the political expectations already created in older colonies.

Crown Authority Versus 'Inherent' Colonial Rights

The central constitutional tension was conceptual as well as practical. The Crown could argue that colonial governments existed because royal charters had created them and that constitutional privileges remained dependent on imperial authority. Colonists increasingly understood assemblies and English liberties as rights they possessed by virtue of their status as English subjects and through long local practice.

Jack Greene's center-periphery model clarifies why the disagreement could deepen without immediate revolution. Both sides could accept monarchy and empire while disagreeing about where legitimate authority resided inside the imperial constitution. That ambiguity was productive in the seventeenth century because compromise remained possible, but it also created an unresolved constitutional tradition that later generations would inherit.

The Restoration Is an Early Chapter, Not the American Revolution

It is tempting to make the Restoration a straight road to 1776: assemblies rise, the Crown centralizes, conflict follows. That reading is teleological. Seventeenth-century colonists overwhelmingly remained committed to English identity and monarchy. Their arguments usually concerned the rights of English subjects within empire, not the legitimacy of empire itself.

The better connection forward is institutional. The Restoration made explicit a tension that would recur: metropolitan officials sought coherent imperial administration, while colonists defended local practices that had become constitutional expectations. The later imperial crisis would transform that tension into revolution, but the seventeenth century should be understood on its own terms.

Analytical Significance

6. Carolina and New York: The Limits of Top-Down Colonial Design

Carolina: Aristocratic Design Meets Migration Reality

Carolina was granted in 1663 and 1665 to eight Lords Proprietors, many of them closely associated with the restored Stuart regime. The proprietors imagined a hierarchical society that would reward large landholders, attract settlers, and secure English claims south of Virginia. The Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina, traditionally associated with Anthony Ashley Cooper and his secretary John Locke, embodied an especially elaborate attempt to prescribe social and political order from above.

The document proposed hereditary ranks, large estates, and a carefully structured political hierarchy. Its association with Locke has long attracted attention because the same thinker is later identified with natural rights and government by consent. The apparent contradiction should be treated cautiously. Locke participated in drafting within Shaftesbury's political circle, but the Fundamental Constitutions were a collaborative proprietary document and not a simple statement of his later political philosophy.

Most importantly, the plan never governed Carolina as its authors imagined. Settlers wanted land on practical terms, local political influence, and institutions adapted to local conditions. Migration from Barbados and other colonies also brought plantation experience and slavery into Carolina's development in ways that the abstract constitutional design could not fully control.

Robert Weir and the Carolina Paradox

Robert M. Weir's Colonial South Carolina remains a standard synthesis because it emphasizes the colony's persistent paradoxes: aristocratic ambitions alongside contentious political participation, enormous later prosperity alongside racial slavery, and proprietary authority alongside repeated struggles over local control. For Lecture 4, Carolina is most useful as evidence that a charter could grant sweeping powers without guaranteeing that those powers would work as intended.

New York: Conquest and an Experiment in Proprietary Authority

New York began as the conquered Dutch colony of New Netherland. In 1664 Charles II granted the territory to his brother James, Duke of York, before English forces took control. The colony inherited a diverse population, Dutch legal and property traditions, established commercial networks, and settlements whose residents had political expectations formed under Dutch as well as English rule.

James initially governed without an elected assembly, relying on a governor and council. That arrangement made New York a particularly clear test of proprietary authority. English settlers, especially those accustomed to assemblies in neighboring colonies, repeatedly pressed for representative government and resisted taxation without an assembly.

The Charter of Liberties, 1683

In 1683 Governor Thomas Dongan convened an elected assembly. The resulting Charter of Liberties and Privileges asserted that legislative power in the province involved the governor, council, and representatives of the people.

The charter is a striking example of the way representative government could move from settler demand into constitutional language. Yet the victory was temporary. When the Duke of York became James II, the charter was rejected and the assembly abolished in 1686. The episode therefore demonstrates both the strength of colonial expectations and the continuing capacity of the Crown to challenge them.

New York's Dutch Inheritance

Jaap Jacobs's work on New Netherland is useful for avoiding a purely English account of New York. The English did not create a political society from blank space in 1664. They inherited Dutch institutions, property arrangements, religious diversity, commercial networks, and a population that negotiated continuity under a new sovereign.

That inheritance made New York an especially revealing Restoration colony. The Crown could change the flag and proprietor, but it could not simply erase the accumulated expectations of residents. Imperial rule had to work through an existing society.

Analytical Significance

7. Negotiated Authority: Why No One Fully Controlled Seventeenth-Century English America

A Layered Political Order

By the late seventeenth century, English America contained multiple kinds of authority operating simultaneously. The Crown issued charters, appointed governors, regulated trade, and claimed ultimate imperial sovereignty. Proprietors exercised delegated powers. Colonial assemblies taxed, legislated, and defended local privileges. Towns governed everyday life. Churches disciplined members. Native nations continued to negotiate, resist, accommodate, and defend political autonomy even after English military victories had shifted regional balances.

The system worked precisely because no level of government could easily impose its will everywhere. Distance slowed communication. Colonial economies depended on local cooperation. Assemblies could withhold money. Proprietors needed settlers. Governors needed local elites. Native diplomacy remained essential in many regions. Imperial power was therefore real but incomplete.

Liberty and Conquest Developed Together

One of the most important analytical tensions in early American history is that colonial self-government expanded at the same time as Indigenous sovereignty contracted. English settlers developed assemblies, defended consent to taxation, and increasingly described political participation as a liberty of English subjects. Those same settler governments authorized military campaigns, distributed conquered land, enforced racial slavery, and excluded large populations from their political communities.

This is not an accidental contradiction to be explained away. It is a structural feature of settler colonial development. The political liberty of the settler community could be strengthened by control over land and labor that depended on the subordination of others. The course's recurring themes of liberty, equality, and power become inseparable at precisely this point.

From Pequot Country to the Later Frontier

The Pequot War provides an early pattern that will recur in later chapters. A settler population expands into Indigenous political space; violence is framed as a response to insecurity; Native alliances complicate the conflict; victory produces new land claims; and later memory emphasizes the danger faced by settlers more readily than the conquest that followed.

This pattern should not be turned into a claim that every later frontier war was identical. Different Native nations, colonies, environments, economies, and federal policies produced very different conflicts. The continuity lies in the political problem: expanding settler governments repeatedly treated Indigenous sovereignty as an obstacle to territorial growth while representing expansion as security, improvement, or destiny.

The Constitutional Thread Forward

The other long-term thread concerns colonial self-government. The seventeenth-century conflict between Crown claims and provincial practice did not automatically produce independence, but it established the language and institutions through which later disputes would be fought. Assemblies controlled taxation locally, defended chartered privileges, and cultivated political memories of long-standing autonomy.

When eighteenth-century imperial governments later attempted tighter regulation, colonists would not experience those measures against a blank constitutional background. They would compare them against generations of negotiated authority. The roots of later resistance therefore lie less in an early desire for independence than in a long history of governing locally within an empire whose constitutional boundaries were never fully settled.

Analytical Significance

Closing Synthesis

The political history of seventeenth-century English America cannot be reduced to a story of steadily expanding democracy. Representative institutions developed early and mattered greatly, but they functioned within societies defined by monarchy, property, patriarchy, religious boundaries, servitude, slavery, and colonial conquest. Their deeper importance is that they created habits of local political participation and a memory of constitutional practice that colonists increasingly defended as legitimate.

At the same time, English self-government developed inside Indigenous homelands. The Pequot War makes the convergence stark. Narragansett and Mohegan alliances show that Native politics cannot be reduced to racial solidarity, while the Mystic massacre and Treaty of Hartford show how an English military victory could be converted into territorial claims, captivity, and an attempt to erase Pequot political identity. The war therefore belongs simultaneously to the histories of Native diplomacy, settler expansion, slavery, religion, and the mythology of the American frontier.

The English Civil Wars then destabilized the metropolitan center from which colonial authority supposedly flowed. Colonies gained practical experience governing amid revolution, while Commonwealth rulers experimented with stronger Atlantic coordination. The Restoration inherited both developments. Charles II's government pursued a more deliberate imperial system, but its proprietary projects repeatedly encountered colonists who already possessed local institutions and could threaten to move elsewhere when political conditions became unattractive.

The chapter therefore ends with a productive paradox. English colonists were becoming more capable of governing themselves at the very moment that England was becoming more capable of governing an empire, while Native nations faced an increasingly powerful settler population claiming jurisdiction over their homelands. The open question is not simply which institution was legally supreme, but how political legitimacy changes when several communities claim the right to govern the same people, territory, or resources - and when one of those communities acquires the power to make its claim prevail.

Suggested Reading for Deeper Preparation

Colonial Constitutional Framework - Jack P. Greene, Peripheries and Center: Constitutional Development in the Extended Polities of the British Empire and the United States, 1607-1788 (1986)

Greene's classic study explains how constitutional authority developed through a long contest between metropolitan claims and provincial practice. It provides the best large-scale framework for understanding why colonial assemblies could become powerful without rejecting monarchy and why later imperial centralization encountered deeply rooted local expectations.

Political and Constitutional Essays - Jack P. Greene, Negotiated Authorities: Essays in Colonial Political and Constitutional History (1994)

This collection develops Greene's argument that colonial authority was constructed through bargaining, precedent, and local practice rather than simply imposed from London. It is especially useful for the lecture's central idea that political control in the colonies was layered and negotiated.

Pequot War - Major Reassessment - Alfred A. Cave, The Pequot War (1996)

The first full-scale modern monograph on the conflict, Cave challenges explanations that treat the war chiefly as a defensive response to a Pequot conspiracy against the English. He integrates Native politics, wampum and trade, English ideology, and settler interest, and his discussion of postwar frontier mythology directly supports the course's national-myth thread.

Native Strategy - Michael Leroy Oberg, Uncas: First of the Mohegans (2003)

Oberg reconstructs the career of the Mohegan sachem Uncas as a political strategist adapting to a rapidly changing regional order. The biography is particularly useful for breaking the English-versus-Indians binary and for showing how Native alliances could advance Indigenous interests even as English colonial power grew.

Maritime and Indigenous Reframing - Andrew Lipman, The Saltwater Frontier: Indians and the Contest for the American Coast (2015)

Lipman reorients early northeastern history toward the waters connecting New Netherland, New England, and Native communities. His emphasis on Native seafaring, commerce, mobility, and English-Dutch rivalry makes the Pequot conflict part of a larger contested coastal world rather than a local frontier episode.

Classic Puritan-Indian Interpretation - Alden T. Vaughan, New England Frontier: Puritans and Indians, 1620-1675, 3rd ed. (1995; orig. 1965)

Vaughan argues that early Puritan policy toward Native peoples was more often negotiated and legally structured than older conquest narratives suggested. The book remains valuable precisely because later scholars such as Cave challenge its relatively favorable assessment, making the two works useful for understanding the historiography rather than treating either as the final word.

English Revolution and Empire - Carla Gardina Pestana, The English Atlantic in an Age of Revolution, 1640-1661 (2004)

Pestana integrates the English Civil Wars, Commonwealth, Protectorate, and colonial world into one Atlantic history. Her central contribution is to show that mid-century revolution altered colonial religion, labor, trade, and political claims before the Restoration, making 1640-1660 a formative imperial era rather than a metropolitan interruption.

Politics and Colonial Reaction - Robert M. Bliss, Revolution and Empire: English Politics and the American Colonies in the Seventeenth Century (1990)

Bliss examines how seventeenth-century English political crises shaped colonial reactions and constitutional expectations. Read alongside Pestana, it helps explain why colonial political development cannot be separated from the upheavals of the Stuart state.

Carolina - Robert M. Weir, Colonial South Carolina: A History, rev. ed. (1997)

Weir's standard synthesis explains the colony's proprietary origins, political conflict, social hierarchy, economic development, and emergence as a slave society. For Lecture 4, its greatest value is demonstrating the distance between aristocratic proprietary design and the contentious political society settlers actually created.

New Netherland and New York Background - Jaap Jacobs, The Colony of New Netherland: A Dutch Settlement in Seventeenth-Century America (2009)

Jacobs provides a comprehensive account of the Dutch colony's government, economy, religion, immigration, and social structure. It is valuable preparation for the New York section because it prevents 1664 from being treated as a clean institutional beginning: English proprietors inherited a mature and diverse Dutch colonial society.

Recent Study of Puritan Violence - Matthew Rowley, Godly Violence in the Puritan Atlantic World, 1636-1676 (2024)

Rowley examines the theology and rhetoric through which Puritan participants interpreted warfare, including the Mystic massacre. The work is useful for understanding providential justification without reducing colonial warfare to religious belief alone.