In his new book, The Atlantic Imperial Constitution: Center and Periphery in the English Atlantic World, Ken MacMillan identifies “two closely related arguments” that he is seeking to challenge. One is the contention that the constitutional relationship between the English metropole and its Atlantic colonies—what he calls the “Atlantic imperial constitution”—was “an attenuated one in which the king delegated key state functions to colonial bodies” that in turn governed themselves without royal interference (3). The second argument is that, “because imperial control was not asserted,” there was “no constitutional basis for the central government” to involve itself in colonial affairs (3). According to MacMillan, both American patriots and their modern historians adopted this understanding of the center-periphery relationship, arguing that the eighteenth-century effort by the metropole to expand its authority over the colonies was an illegitimate innovation that violated the constitutional autonomy established during the empire's founding.
MacMillan posits a provocative new thesis to replace this “current orthodoxy” (3). Rather than being “absentminded, intermittent, or neglectful,” the early Stuarts, he argues, pursued “historically based, ideologically principled, and broadly consistent systems of imperial governance” (8). They were always careful to protect their “sovereign and imperial rights and obligations” (8), and their policies toward the colonies “established precedents for how the overseas empire was later supervised from the center” (1). The Atlantic imperial constitution that MacMillan identifies was shaped by energetic and sustained royal oversight, not colonial independence.
MacMillan's placement of the Crown at the center of the story is fundamental to his reinterpretation. The early Stuart kings, he argues, exercised “a form of absolute sovereignty” (imperium) over their Atlantic possessions that allowed them an atypical measure of freedom to direct imperial policy (2). In contrast to domestic governance, where royal authority was constrained by institutions like the common law and Parliament, the Crown's Atlantic imperium gave it “greater powers of oversight over its wider empire than it could otherwise exercise in the realm of England” (13). MacMillan's reliance on the manuscript Privy Council registers as his principal source base reflects his emphasis on the central role played by the Crown. Because it was the executive body through which the king governed the colonies, the Privy Council was intimately involved in crafting and executing imperial policy. According to MacMillan, the Council's “underutilized” (4) manuscript records provide “a more complete picture of Crown involvement [in colonial governance] than historians have previously recognized” and are vital to any reconstruction of the Atlantic imperial constitution (6).
The body of MacMillan's work consists of six thematic chapters. Chapter 1 analyzes the letters patent, royal proclamations, and Privy Council decisions that “created the theoretical model of the Atlantic imperial constitution” and served as the legal basis for Crown oversight (14). Chapter 2 traces how royal intervention in a series of international disputes between English and Spanish colonists embodied the Crown's claim that it was “supreme in the politics and legalities of foreign affairs” (57). Chapter 3 examines the Crown's attempt to regulate emigration and the movement of its subjects throughout its Atlantic empire, while Chapter 4 focuses on the Crown's proto-mercantilist efforts to exploit the burgeoning trade in tobacco. Chapter 5 examines the Privy Council's role as the arbiter of petitions involving the transport of prohibited commodities, intercolonial disputes, and appeals of colonial civil and criminal cases. Chapter 6 traces the evolution of the various royal commissions and committees established by the early Stuart monarchs that later evolved into the permanent boards responsible for governing the colonies.
While much of this material will be familiar to students of England's early empire, MacMillan's careful reconstruction of royal interventions across a variety of Atlantic enterprises provides compelling support for his argument that the Crown was actively engaged in governing its empire from the earliest stages of overseas expansion. His discussion of the Privy Council's handling of the wreck of the Spanish ship San Antonio off the shores of Bermuda, for example, shows the Crown acting adroitly to balance its imperial commitments against the demands of foreign diplomacy. The chapter on petitions presents an assertive Crown exercising its prerogative right to hear subjects' appeals and overturn the judgments of colonial authorities, while the chapter on commissions and committees illustrates the persistent—if not always successful—efforts of the early Stuarts to create sustainable institutions of imperial governance that served as models for later regimes.
MacMillan's argument for an Atlantic imperial constitution based on the royal imperium is convincing, and it offers a salutary challenge to the traditional narrative that the early Stuarts' supposed abrogation of sovereignty over their Atlantic colonies sowed the seeds of American independence some two hundred years later. However, MacMillan's approach leaves one critical question largely unexamined: how did peripheral subjects view royal claims of imperial sovereignty? He writes in his conclusion that “there is little evidence” that the peripheries “resented the nature and degree of central oversight,” but his treatment of the question is a bit perfunctory (171). More compelling glimpses at an answer emerge throughout the book, most notably in the chapter on petitions, where we encounter a variety of peripheral actors using appeals to the Crown as a means of circumventing colonial authorities. Such actions suggest that peripheral subjects were often eager to invoke the royal imperium if they felt it could advance their particular interests. But MacMillan's reliance mainly on Crown sources means the role of the periphery in shaping the constitutional relationship is never fleshed out in detail. In this respect, The Atlantic Imperial Constitution surely is provocative, for it invites scholars to engage in a sustained reexamination of the actions and responses of the peoples over whom the Crown claimed such broad imperium. If, as MacMillan suggests, the Atlantic constitution's development required “mutual negotiation and compromise” between central authorities and peripheral subjects, we need to understand how both groups viewed claims of imperial sovereignty (106). MacMillan has provided a well-researched and compelling treatment of the view from the center. The periphery awaits its historian.
