In 1773, with the empire on the brink of revolt, the Privy Council gave the final ruling in the case of the Mohegan Indians versus the colony of Connecticut. Thus ended what one eighteenth-century lawyer called “the greatest cause that ever was heard at the Council Board.” After a decades-long battle for their rights, involving several appeals to the Crown, three royal commissions, and the highest court in the empire, the Mohegans' case against Connecticut was dismissed. The dispute centered on a large tract of land (~20,000 acres) in southeastern Connecticut, which, the Mohegans claimed, the colony had reserved for them in the late seventeenth century. Concerned that the colony had violated its agreements, the Mohegans, aided by powerful colonists with a pecuniary interest in this tract of land, appealed to the Crown for redress. As a result of this appeal, what had been a narrow dispute over land became part of a larger conflict between the Crown, the colony, and the tribe over property and autonomy in the empire.
The crisis experienced by the British Empire during the 1760s and 1770s has been linked to the decentralized nature of the empire built by the English on the far shores of the Atlantic world in the seventeenth century. The Crown, unwilling to pay the full costs of colonization, granted charters to corporations and proprietors. After delegating so much authority to the colonists, it was unable to unilaterally dictate how the empire was to be governed. For the most part, it was the colonial elites who were able to negotiate their relationship with the imperial center. This de facto decentralization did not sit well with royal officials, who wanted a more politically centralized empire and thought that colonies existed mainly for the mother country's economic benefit. To implement this contrasting vision, Parliament passed a series of Navigation Acts designed to confine colonial trade to English possessions and English-flagged vessels. In America, the debate over the Stamp Act of 1765 gave rise to a radically different view of the relationship between the mother country and its colonies.
Traces the emergence of a revolutionary conception of political authority on the far shores of the eighteenth-century Atlantic world. Based on the equal natural right of English subjects to leave the realm, claim indigenous territory and establish new governments by consent, this radical set of ideas culminated in revolution and republicanism. But unlike most scholarship on early American political theory, Craig Yirush does not focus solely on the revolutionary era of the late eighteenth century. Instead, he examines how the political ideas of settler elites in British North America emerged in the often-forgotten years between the Glorious Revolution in America and the American Revolution against Britain. By taking seriously an imperial world characterized by constitutional uncertainty, geo-political rivalry and the ongoing presence of powerful Native American peoples, Yirush provides a long-term explanation for the distinctive ideas of the American Revolution.
In the last twenty years, the history of legal and political ideas has experienced a renaissance as scholars in these fields have discovered important connections between many of the seminal theorists of the early modern period and empire. 1 While this new scholarship on the intellectual justifications of European expansion has brought the question of the rights of the indigenous peoples of the Americas to the center of our understanding of seventeenth and eighteenth-century political thought, it has, for the most part, ignored the ideas of the indigenous peoples themselves. Yet in these encounters, Native Americans were not merely passive objects of European discourses. Rather, they responded to European claims with their own conceptions of law, property, and political authority.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.
hi@scite.ai
10624 S. Eastern Ave., Ste. A-614
Henderson, NV 89052, USA
Copyright © 2024 scite LLC. All rights reserved.
Made with 💙 for researchers
Part of the Research Solutions Family.