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King and People in Provincial Massachusetts (Paperback, New edition)
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King and People in Provincial Massachusetts (Paperback, New edition)
Series: Published by the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture and the University of North Carolina Press
Expected to ship within 10 - 15 working days
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The American revolutionaries themselves believed the change from
monarchy to republic was the essence of the Revolution. "King and
People in Provincial Massachusetts" explores what monarchy meant to
Massachusetts under its second charter and why the momentous change
to republican government came about.
Richard L. Bushman argues that monarchy entailed more than having a
king as head of state: it was an elaborate political culture with
implications for social organization as well. Massachusetts,
moreover, was entirely loyal to the king and thoroughly imbued with
that culture.
Why then did the colonies become republican in 1776? The change
cannot be attributed to a single thinker such as John Locke or to a
strain of political thought such as English country party rhetoric.
Instead, it was the result of tensions ingrained in the colonial
political system that surfaced with the invasion of parliamentary
power into colonial affairs after 1763.
The underlying weakness of monarchical government in Massachusetts
was the absence of monarchical society -- the intricate web of
patronage and dependence that existed in England. But the conflict
came from the colonists' conception of rulers as an alien class of
exploiters whose interest was the plundering of the colonies. In
large part, colonial politics was the effort to restrain official
avarice.
The author explicates the meaning of "interest" in political
discourse to show how that conception was central in the thinking
of both the popular party and the British ministry. Management of
the interest of royal officials was a problem that continually
bedeviled both the colonists and the crown. Conflict was perennial
because the colonists and the ministry pursued diverging objectives
in regulating colonial officialdom. Ultimately the colonists came
to see that safety against exploitation by self-interested rulers
would be assured only by republican government.
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