In "Hybrid Constitutions," Vicki Hsueh contests the idea that
early-modern colonial constitutions were part of a uniform process
of modernization, conquest, and assimilation. Through detailed
analyses of the founding of several seventeenth-century English
proprietary colonies in North America, she reveals how diverse
constitutional thought and practice were at the time, and how
colonial ambitions were advanced through cruelty toward indigenous
peoples as well as accommodation of them. Proprietary colonies were
governed by individuals (or small groups of individuals) granted
colonial charters by the Crown. These proprietors had
quasi-sovereign status over their colonies; they were able to draw
on and transform English legal and political instruments as they
developed constitutions. Hsueh demonstrates that the proprietors
cobbled together constitutions based on the terms of their charters
and the needs of their settlements. The "hybrid constitutions" they
created were often altered based on interactions among the English
settlers, other European settlers, and indigenous peoples.
Hsueh traces the historical development and theoretical
implications of proprietary constitutionalism by examining the
founding of the colonies of Maryland, Carolina, and Pennsylvania.
She provides close readings of colonial proclamations, executive
orders, and assembly statutes, as well as the charter granting
Cecilius Calvert the colony of Maryland in 1632; the Fundamental
Constitutions of Carolina, adopted in 1669; and the treaties
brokered by William Penn and various Lenni Lenape and Susquehannock
tribes during the 1680s and 1690s. These founding documents were
shaped by ambition, contingency, and limited resources; they
reflected an ambiguous and unwieldy colonialism rather than a
purposeful, uniform march to modernity. Hsueh concludes by
reflecting on hybridity as a rubric for analyzing the historical
origins of colonialism and reconsidering contemporary indigenous
claims in former settler colonies such as Australia, New Zealand,
and the United States.
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