The Common Law in Colonial America: Volume III: The Chesapeake and New England, 1660–1750
William E. Nelson
Abstract
This volume begins where volume 1 ended and traces legal development in Maryland, Virginia, Massachusetts, and the smaller New England colonies from 1660 to the mid-eighteenth century. A main claim of the volume is that the Glorious Revolution changed England’s policy toward its colonies. Prior to the revolution, Charles II and James II sought to centralize power in the English empire; the means they chose to achieve centralization was to continue governing Maryland and Virginia through the common law and to impose the common law on Massachusetts and the rest of New England. After the Glorious ... More
This volume begins where volume 1 ended and traces legal development in Maryland, Virginia, Massachusetts, and the smaller New England colonies from 1660 to the mid-eighteenth century. A main claim of the volume is that the Glorious Revolution changed England’s policy toward its colonies. Prior to the revolution, Charles II and James II sought to centralize power in the English empire; the means they chose to achieve centralization was to continue governing Maryland and Virginia through the common law and to impose the common law on Massachusetts and the rest of New England. After the Glorious Revolution, William III continued the policy of imposing the common law. But William III and his Hanoverian successors were less concerned than their Stuart predecessors had been with centralizing power; their aim was to ensure the hegemony of Protestantism in each colony as they assembled a Protestant coalition to defeat the efforts of the Catholic Louis XIV to establish what William III called “universal monarchy.” Thus, although every one of Britain’s North American colonies received the common law by the mid-eighteenth century, the reception assumed different forms in different colonies. Local interests retained significant power everywhere and used that power to preserve divergent, customary patterns of law that had arisen in the seventeenth century.
Keywords:
common law,
localism,
mercantilism,
money supply,
Protestantism,
Puritan law,
religious toleration,
salutary neglect
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2016 |
Print ISBN-13: 9780190465056 |
| Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: May 2016 |
DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780190465056.001.0001 |
