John Locke, Territory, and Transmigration by Brian Smith

Author:Brian Smith [Smith, Brian]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780367345587
Google: vZHGzQEACAAJ
Goodreads: 55198038
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Group
Published: 2020-12-29T00:00:00+00:00

a system of control that did not effectively materialize until the Navigation Act reforms of 1696.26 Given the multiple types of colonial administrative structures in this period, one must be careful not to retroject a more or less uniform colonial policy onto the seventeenth century. In reality, the styles and modes of governance, and indeed, the ability of England to exert influence, varied.

The most restrictive type of governance was felt in Royal Colonies, like Virginia.27 In those places, governors were directly appointed in England, and the king maintained veto power over the colonial legislatures. In his assessment of the Virginia colony, Locke complained of the “arbitrariness of the government” there.28 Corporate and Proprietary charters, in contrast, offered much more political independence. In Corporate charters, like those in New England, the settlers had a great deal of autonomy to select their own governors and to enact their own laws, “subject in the main only to a general obligation to the British sovereign, and even this obligation seems to have been sometimes very lightly felt.”29

Proprietary charters, like Pennsylvania and South Carolina, differed in two main ways from corporate charters. First, they tended to divide the function of church and state a little more extensively, unlike the “little theocracies” in New England.30 While the constitutions of Proprietary colonies typically required some kind of professed congregational membership, they were largely built on the principles of religious tolerance and commerce. Second, the corporate colonies were able to achieve a much higher degree of self-governing autonomy. In contrast, proprietary colonies had constitutions imposed onto them from without, by proprietors who typically had “an external and separate existence” from the colony.31 In effect, this meant that the proprietors, as external supervening authorities, could concoct whatever schemes of governance they wished, that is, as long as they honored the terms of their charter and didn’t explicitly contravene English law (or the laws of nature).32 Quite literally, proprietors could found new governments.

Broadly speaking, given the financial position of England in the mid-seventeenth century, the crown largely relied on the proprietary system to colonize the Americas, that is, colonization was outsourced to individuals or corporate entities. As Alan Taylor explains,

During the early seventeenth century, the underfunded English crown had lacked the means to launch and administer distance colonies. Instead the crown entrusted early colonization to private interests licensed by royal charters, which awarded the proprietors both title to colonial land and the right to govern the colonists – subject to royal oversight, which was sporadic at best.33

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