Abstract

During the first half century of British colonization of America, a unique form of government that featured not only a triadic structure（governor, council, and assembly）but also a bicameral legislature（with the council as the upper and the assembly as the lower house）emerged in the American colonies. By examining the experience of five colonies—Virginia, Massachusetts, Barbados, Maryland, and Jamaica—from 1606 to 1664, this dissertation delineates the patterns and process of the rise of this indigenous Anglo-American polity in the context of colonial social development and the British imperial administration.

In order to achieve a systematic understanding of the formation of this unique form of Anglo-American polity, I have chosen the above-mentioned five colonies of British America as subjects of investigation. Not only were these five colonies the biggest and therefore most important settlements of British America but also they shared the same pattern of constitutional evolution of developing a triadic and bicameral polity in the years between 1606 and 1664. By putting their experience into the contexts of a general framework of British colonization as well as the particular social circumstances in each location, I seek to explore the dynamics of interactions between the Old World traditions in the forms of institutional structure and constitutional theory and the environmental conditions of the immigrant societies in the New World, and to assess the role of those factors in determining the formation of an indigenous Anglo-American polity.

This study depicts a four-stage model for the formation of Anglo-American polities:（1）the use of a dual council system by James I to establish direct control of colonial affairs during the initial four years（1606-1610）of Virginia colony;（2）the introduction in each colony within one generation of its founding of a representative assembly that made the colonial government a tri-partite phenomenon of governor, council, and assembly;（3）the institutional separation of the representative assembly from the appointive council that led to the emergence of bicameral legislatures in British America during the decade from early 1640s to 1650s; and（4）the metropolitan acceptance of the indigenous Anglo-American“mixed”polities as normative form of colonial government at the time of the Restoration.

The second dimension of this study concerns with the transformation of the metropolitan conceptualization of the colonial government. At the beginning of the 17th century, for the metropolitan authorities, the only conceivable form of colonial governance was a conciliar government composed of appointed governors and councilors. However, after the bicameral form of colonial government emerged in such early colonies as Virginia and Massachusetts, the metropolitan concept of colonial polity changed accordingly. By the 1640s, a triadic government with an executive governor and a two-house legislature replaced a conciliar government to become the commonly recognized norm of Anglo-American polity in the minds of Englishmen in both England and its American colonies.