Rule Britannia! The English Empire, 1660–1763

This is Unit Four, part one, covering sixteen sixty to seventeen sixty-three — the century in which England turned scattered settlements into an empire, and built the legal machinery to run it. Watch for one thread in particular. The devices England invented here for commercial reasons come back, seventy years later, as the constitutional grievances of the Revolution. By the end you will be able to explain how the Restoration produced proprietary colonies, and what Barbados exported to the Carolinas besides a crop. You will be able to name the two enforcement devices built into the Navigation Acts. You will be able to account for the Glorious Revolution's effect in the colonies and what the sixteen eighty-nine settlement guaranteed. You will be able to state who the Toleration Act left out. And you will be able to explain what the Stono Rebellion produced in law, and what that law actually targeted.

Start with a king coming back, and with the colonies he handed to the men who had supported him.

The Restoration, and the colonial policy that came with it.

USH1 0451 The Restoration

Charles the Second took the throne in sixteen sixty, eleven years after his father's execution and the Civil War that set royalists against Cromwell's forces. He committed to expanding England's overseas possessions through proprietary colonies granted to trusted individuals.

The first of those grants, and who actually turned up.

USH1 0452 The Carolinas

A sixteen sixty-three charter gave eight supporters control as feudal-style proprietors, but the proprietors stayed in England and English plantation owners from Barbados migrated south instead. Charles Town was founded in sixteen seventy.

What those Barbadian planters brought with them, beyond the crop.

USH1 0453 The Barbados Codes and a Black Majority

The Carolinas passed slave laws based on the Barbados slave codes, which reduced Africans to the status of property to be bought and sold as other commodities. By seventeen fifteen South Carolina had a Black majority.

And what that trading economy provoked among the peoples it depended on.

USH1 0454 The Yamasee War

Yamasee and Creek had developed trade dependency, exchanging deerskins and captive people for European guns, and traders taking Native women captive as payment for debts provoked resistance. A coalition nearly annihilated the Carolina colonies from seventeen fifteen to seventeen eighteen.

North to a colony England took rather than founded, and to neighbours who spent fifty years refusing to choose between empires.

How New York became English, and how long self-government took.

USH1 0455 New York from New Netherland

England seized New Netherland during the Second Anglo-Dutch War, and Charles granted it in sixteen sixty-four to his brother James, Duke of York. James resisted local governance for nearly two decades before colonists convened a legislature and produced a charter setting out trial by jury.

And the confederacy that dealt with both empires at once.

USH1 0456 The Five Nations' Neutrality

The Five Nations Iroquois pursued neutrality between English and French through the first half of the seventeen hundreds, living in their own villages under their own government while trading with both sides. Neutrality was a strategy, not an absence of one, and it worked for fifty years.

Then a colony founded on a religious idea, which produced one genuinely different frontier record and one uncomfortable fact alongside it.

Who the Quakers were, and what their belief implied socially.

USH1 0457 Pennsylvania and the Quakers

Pennsylvania was granted to William Penn in sixteen eighty-one to settle royal debts owed his father. Quakers held that everyone had an inner light, a spark of divinity, and addressed all others as equals, using thee and thou rather than your lordship.

What that produced on the frontier, and what it did not prevent.

USH1 0458 Penn and the Lenni Lenape

Penn formed a covenant of friendship with the Lenni Lenape, buying their land for a fair price instead of taking it by force, and Pennsylvania avoided frontier war in its early history. Quaker merchants nonetheless participated in the thriving African slave trade.

Now the commercial machinery, and the entry to hold onto hardest in this part. Two enforcement devices are created here that a later unit turns into grievances.

The Acts themselves, and the two devices worth memorising.

USH1 0459 The Navigation Acts

Only English ships could carry goods, with enumerated articles shippable only to England — sugar, tobacco, indigo, rice, molasses and naval stores. Enforcement came through vice-admiralty courts prosecuting customs violators without a jury, and writs of assistance letting officials board and search vessels suspected of smuggling.

And the period when none of it was pressed very hard.

USH1 0460 Salutary Neglect and the Molasses Act

Britain kept lax control under Robert Walpole, who held that commerce flourished best unencumbered by restrictions. The seventeen thirty-three Molasses Act placed a sixpence duty on French and Dutch sugar, rum and molasses, and Britain did not enforce it, so New England mariners smuggled more cheaply than English islands sold.

Then a king who pressed everything at once, and a merger that took colonial self-government away in a single stroke.

The new king, and the specific things that alarmed his subjects.

USH1 0461 James II

James the Second took the throne in sixteen eighty-five and modelled his rule on Louis the Fourteenth, giving the monarchy absolute power. He kept a standing army in peacetime, which alarmed the English, who believed such forces threatened their liberties.

And what he did to New England's governments.

USH1 0462 The Dominion of New England

In sixteen eighty-six James merged six colonies into one dominion, adding New York and New Jersey two years later. Andros questioned land titles that lacked royal acknowledgment, imposed reconfirmation fees, and rigorously enforced the Navigation Acts, disrupting an economy that depended significantly on smuggling.

Four entries on how that ended, and on the settlement it produced — which is where several ideas the colonies later fight for are written down.

The deposition, and what colonists did the moment they heard.

USH1 0463 The Glorious Revolution

The Whig party deposed James in late sixteen eighty-eight and William of Orange and Mary took the throne. Boston citizens overthrew the Dominion in sixteen eighty-nine and imprisoned Andros. Jacob Leisler led Protestant New Yorkers, assumed the role of King William's governor, and was executed for treason.

The document that settled the terms, and two guarantees inside it.

USH1 0464 The 1689 Bill of Rights

The English Bill of Rights of October sixteen eighty-nine established a constitutional monarchy with Parliament independent of the crown, and rights of free speech, regular elections and petition. It guaranteed trial by jury and habeas corpus — both of which reappear as colonial grievances.

The religious settlement, and the group it left out.

USH1 0465 The Toleration Act and Who It Excluded

The sixteen eighty-nine Toleration Act granted religious tolerance to nonconformist Trinitarian Protestants such as Baptists and Congregationalists. The tolerance did not extend to Catholics, who were routinely excluded from political power.

And the philosopher who gave all of it a theory.

USH1 0466 Locke

Locke published Two Treatises of Government in sixteen ninety, arguing that government is a contract between leaders and people and exists to protect life, liberty and property. The course says his philosophy established the paramount importance of representation for future colonists.

Four entries to close, on the institution running underneath all of this — its scale, its reach, one rising against it, and the law that answered.

The company, and what happened when its monopoly ended.

USH1 0467 The Royal African Company

Charles the Second established the Royal African Company in sixteen sixty with a monopoly on the slave trade to English colonies, and one hundred twenty-five thousand captives were purchased between sixteen seventy-two and seventeen thirteen, twenty percent dying in the Middle Passage. The monopoly ended in sixteen eighty-nine and the volume rose sharply.

How far the institution reached, and one effect the course names precisely.

USH1 0468 Slavery in Every Colony

Every colony had enslaved people, from the southern rice plantations to the northern wharves of Boston, in a system the course says influenced every aspect of colonial thought and culture. It gave White colonists an exaggerated sense of their own status by contrasting their liberty with the unfreedom of enslaved Black people.

The largest rising of the period, and one detail about how it may have been organised.

USH1 0469 The Stono Rebellion

In September seventeen thirty-nine Jemmy, a literate Angolan, led a large group of captive Africans in armed insurrection in South Carolina. A shared Kongo background may have helped the rebels coordinate. The militia suppressed it, and survivors were executed or sold to the West Indies.

And the statute that followed within a year, read for what it actually forbids.

USH1 0470 The Negro Act of 1740

South Carolina's Negro Act of seventeen forty prohibited enslaved people from assembling, prevented them growing their own food, banned learning to write, and restricted free travel. Banning food cultivation and literacy attacks independence and communication, not labour.

Look at what you can now do. You can explain how the Restoration produced proprietary colonies, and say that Barbados sent the Carolinas a legal system as well as a crop. You can name the two devices the Navigation Acts created — vice-admiralty courts without juries, and writs of assistance permitting search — and you know to expect both again. You can account for the Glorious Revolution in the colonies, where Boston overthrew the Dominion and New York's leader was hanged for it, and state what the sixteen eighty-nine Bill of Rights guaranteed. You can say who the Toleration Act excluded. And you can explain what the Negro Act of seventeen forty went after: not labour, but the ability to feed oneself, to write, and to gather.