Ch. 3.1. Imperial Efforts to Reform Colonial Governance

Adapted from Yirush, pp. 183-93.

Debate About Settlers’ Rights within the British Empire

By 1764 the British Empire was on the brink of a serious dispute: What was the extent of parliamentary authority in the internal affairs of the British American colonies? That this became the point of contention in the mid-1760s indicates that the locus of authority in the empire had shifted from the royal bureaucracy to the Prime Minister’s office.

Over the early and mid-eighteenth century, in an era of Whig hegemony at home and peace abroad, the colonies were left largely to their own devices. This laissez-faire policy facilitated the gradual accretion of power by the colonial assemblies at the expense of royal authority. However, a small group of officials in London saw these decades of lax oversight as anything but “a wise and salutary neglect,” as Edmund Burke would later call it. As a result, they called for a wide-ranging reform of the empire’s loose and unwieldy political structure. These reforms, predicated on the claim that Parliament was the ultimate sovereign in the empire, would tear the British Atlantic world apart in the 1770s.

Martin Bladen’s Report for the Board of Trade (1721)

A report of 1721 written by Martin Bladen, an official at the Board of Trade in London from 1717 to 1741, expressed the Board’s long-held views in a way that foreshadows most of the debates that take place over the next decades. Bladen began with his fears about the gradual North American expansion of the French. By founding or reviving a series of forts around the Great Lakes and along the Mississippi and Ohio River valleys, the French began to make good on their long-standing claim to all the land between French Canada and the Gulf of Mexico. Perhaps most ominously for Bladen, in 1718 the French founded New Orleans near the Mississippi River’s outlet into the Gulf of Mexico.

The Board of Trade also lamented the weakness of royal authority in the colonies, especially those that retained their charters. In them, the report said, “not only the soil but likewise the dominion or government of several colonies is absolutely alienated  from the Crown.” Bladen’s report recited the by now familiar litany of charges against the colonies: they flouted the laws of trade; they failed to contribute to imperial defense; they sheltered pirates (which further undermined the empire’s trade); they refused to send their laws home for review; and, on the rare occasions when they did so, and one of them met with royal disapproval, they simply reenacted it with a proviso that it expire before it had to be sent to London again.

To rectify this situation, Bladen reiterated a series of measures that were similar to those that the Board had been recommending since the late seventeenth century: the remaining colonies charters should be revoked, all of the colonies should be put under a single, military governor, and jurisdiction over the colonies should be centralized in the Board of Trade. As it was, the Board had to share authority over the colonies with the King’s top advisors in the Privy Council, the Secretary of State (who supervised Britain’s diplomacy), and the Admiralty (which commanded the Royal Navy).

Disputes about the Governors of Royal Colonies

These and other problems the Board of Trade faced in trying to centralize colonial administration may be illustrated by the key sticking point of how to exercise the British government’s authority over its own governors, those it appointed in all of the “royal” colonies. Although the Board of Trade was willing to pay the governor’s salary out of English funds, arguing that the expense was worth it in order to strengthen royal authority in the empire, the Treasury disagreed, insisting that the colonists should bear more of the cost of royal government.

Robert Walpole, whose leadership of the dominant Whig Party from 1721 to 1742 made him effectively Britain’s first “Prime Minister,” shared the Treasury’s view. One of the first results of this stalemate among British officials was that Massachusetts was able to successfully resist the Board of Trade’s almost decade-long efforts over the 1720s to secure funding from Parliament for the colony’s royally appointed governor.

Instead, British officials had to recognize that the Massachusetts colonial assembly would provide the governor’s salary—and thus exercise effective control over this nominally “royal” official. Moreover, Massachusetts’ success emboldened other colonies to resist similar efforts, so that Connecticut and Rhode Island were able to retain their “corporate” charters that made their governors a locally-elected official, and New York, which like Massachusetts maintained its control over the royal governor’s salary.

Gains for Imperial Control in the Colonies

Yet the Board of Trade’s efforts to gain better control over the colonies also met with some successes. In 1729 Parliament purchased the proprietor’s rights in South Carolina, which capped a long effort to convert corporate and proprietorial colonies into royal ones (i.e., colonies having a royally-appointed governor), leaving only four “chartered” colonies: Connecticut, Rhode Island, Maryland, and Pennsylvania. Yet having a royal governor by no means assured effective control.

The royal government’s authority in the colonies grew, albeit modestly, in other ways too. For example, in 1732 Parliament established a new colony in Georgia, which at first it funded directly. Parliament also responded to English commercial interests by passing the Hat Act (1732) and the Molasses Act (1733), both of which attempted to favor English producers (of hats and rum) by restricting colonial manufacturing.

Patronage and Venality in Appointments to Colonial Offices

Overall, however, these efforts at reforming and more closely governing the colonies had little real impact. One of the most fundamental weaknesses that limited Britain’s effective control over the colonies was Parliament’s overriding concern with domestic politics, which led it to grant important colonial posts to those who could offer support to the Whig party. This policy had the effect of taking patronage away from the royal governors, thereby weakening their ability to build up loyalty in their colonies.

Venality—as the practice of offering positions to those who provide financial or political support in return is called—aside, Walpole’s ministry also believed that the empire was best governed with a light hand. This policy was encapsulated in the following advice from the Privy Council to Francis Nicholson, the new governor of South Carolina, in 1722: in the “Plantations” the “Government should be as easy and as mild as possible to invite people to Settle under it.”