The revolution that occurred in North America during the last quarter of the eighteenth century was the unintended consequence of a dispute about law. During the dozen years between 1764 and 1776, Britons on both sides of the Atlantic engaged in an elaborate debate over the source and character of law within the larger British Empire. Whether the king-in-Parliament, the ultimate source of statute law in Great Britain, could legislate for British colonies overseas was the ostensible question in dispute, but many other related and even deeper legal issues involving the nature of the constitution of the empire and the location of sovereignty within the empire emerged from and were thoroughly canvassed during the debate. On neither side of the Atlantic was opinion monolithic, but two sides, one representing the dominant opinion in metropolitan Britain and the other the principal view in the colonies, rapidly took shape. The failure to reconcile these positions led in 1775 to open warfare and in 1776 to the decision of thirteen of Britain’s more than thirty American colonies to declare their independence and form an American union. The nature and shifting character of this dispute can only be understood by placing it in the larger temporal process of imperial legal and constitutional thought and practice over the previous century and a half.

As recent literature on European state formation reveals, the problem of how to organize and theorize an extended polity was intrinsic to late medieval and early modern state building. As the national states emerging in western Europe sought through conquest, dynastic unions, or annexations to expand their authority over areas already well peopled and possessed of their own peculiar socioeconomic, legal, and political traditions, they could sometimes absorb those areas into the central polity, as England did with Wales in the fifteenth century, but often lacked the resources for such consolidation and had to settle for some form of indirect governance and limited sovereignty, the form of which had to be negotiated with local power holders in those areas. In the resulting constitutional arrangements, authority did not flow outward from a powerful central core but was constructed through a process of reciprocal bargaining between the core and newly acquired territories that usually left considerable authority in the hands of provincial leaders.