The collapse of the Dominion of New England left the American colonies in the same fragmented state they had been in prior to the accession of James II. However, the old Stuart dream of a centralized empire persisted among imperial administrators in London in the decades immediately following the Glorious Revolution. In 1696, nearing the end of the first of two long wars with the French, William III replaced the old and by now ineffectual Lords of Trade with a new body, the Board of Trade. Along with the Privy Council, the secretary of state, the Admiralty, and other agencies with responsibility for colonial governance, the Board of Trade then embarked on a series of measures to extend royal authority more effectively across the Atlantic, culminating in a wholesale assault on the charters of the private colonies. The result of these policies was an eighteenth-century empire more integrated than the Stuarts' scattered and highly autonomous plantations, but one whose inhabitants were subject to royal authority in a way that, following the revolution settlement, was no longer the constitutional norm within the realm. The ongoing assertion of prerogative outside the realm ensured that the Restoration-era debate about colonial rights continued into the eighteenth century, as settlers periodically clashed with imperial officials over the distribution of political power and legal rights in the empire. Furthermore, as a consequence of the Board's centralizing policies, a newly empowered Parliament began to exert its sovereignty across the Atlantic with ultimately revolutionary consequences.

In the early 1700s, as Connecticut and the other private colonies were combating the Board of Trade's attempts to revoke their charters, a long-running dispute between the colony and the Mohegans, a once-powerful Native American tribe, came to the attention of royal officials. The dispute centered on a large tract of land (approximately 20,000 acres) in southeastern Connecticut, which, the Mohegans claimed, the colony had reserved for them in the late seventeenth century. Concerned that the colony had violated its agreements, the Mohegans, aided by powerful colonists with a pecuniary interest in this tract of land, appealed to the Privy Council. As a result of this appeal, what had been a narrow dispute over land became part of a larger conflict between the Crown, the colony, and the tribe over property and autonomy in the empire.

The origins of the conflict between the Mohegans and Connecticut lie in the complicated aftermath of the Pequot War in the late 1630s. Uncas, sachem of the Mohegans, used the warfare between the English and the Pequots to undermine the powerful Pequot sachem, Sassacus. According to Michael Oberg, “With the Pequots under attack by the Narragansetts and the Dutch, and ensnared in an increasingly tangled web of controversy with the English, Uncas saw alliance with the newcomers as a means to increase his power and that of the Mohegans.”

By the time the controversies over the prerogative in Virginia had died down in 1764, the empire was on the brink of a more serious dispute, one that involved the very question that Bland had raised only to dismiss: What was the extent of parliamentary authority in the internal affairs of the British American colonies? That this became the point of contention in the mid-1760s indicates that the locus of authority in the empire had shifted from the royal bureaucracy to the ministry. To understand this evolution, we need to go back to the oft-forgotten decades of the early to mid-eighteenth century, when, following the ill-fated attempt on the colonial charters, the empire experienced several decades without any serious constitutional strife. In an era of Whig hegemony at home and peace abroad, the colonies were left largely to their own devices. This laissez-faire policy facilitated the gradual accretion of power by the colonial assemblies at the expense of royal authority. However, a small group of officials in London saw these decades of lax oversight as anything but “a wise and salutary neglect.” As a result, they called for a wide-ranging reform of the empire's loose and unwieldy political structure. These reforms, predicated on the claim that Parliament was the ultimate sovereign in the empire, would tear the British Atlantic world apart in the 1770s.

For nearly thirty years, beginning in the early 1720s, Virginian politics had been calm, free of the clashes with royal authority that had plagued other colonies. However, in the 1750s two disputes, one over the Pistole Fee – a tax on landholdings levied by the royal governor – and the other over the Crown's right to veto colonial laws (the Parson's Cause) engendered a wide-ranging debate about the constitutional status of the oldest royal colony in the empire. In both of these disputes, the leading spokesmen of the lower house of Virginia's assembly (the burgesses) defended their rights with many of the same arguments against royal authority used in other colonies earlier in the century. As well, Richard Bland, a leading member of the burgesses, writing as the Parson's Cause was ending, responded to the repeated assertions of royal prerogative in Virginia by articulating the first explicitly federal vision of the empire. According to Bland, Virginians had (via their elected representatives) a zone of internal legislative autonomy, while still being subject to the external control of the Crown and Parliament in areas that affected the empire as a whole.

The placid politics of early to mid-eighteenth-century Virginia were largely due to the stewardship of the royal governor, William Gooch (1727–1748). In a departure from the stormy tenures of Francis Nicholson and Alexander Spottswood, Gooch chose, for the most part, to work with the assembly, often conceding points of constitutional principle to achieve his ends.

Settlers, Liberty, and Empire has traced the emergence of a distinctive settler strand of Anglo-American political thought in the crucial decades between the Glorious Revolution in America and the American Revolution against Britain. Confronted by a succession of centralizing initiatives emanating from London, settler elites drew on the common law and the early modern law of nature to defend their rights in a legally contested transatlantic empire. They supported this claim to equal rights by pointing to the risks they had taken to establish flourishing polities in a New World they persisted in seeing as a wilderness, inhabited by indigenous peoples whose sovereignty and property they had supplanted by purchase, conquest, and labor. This account of the rights of the English settlers in the empire was both coherent, based as it was on the fundamental right that each subject had to liberty and property throughout the king's dominions, and widely shared, being employed at moments of constitutional tension irrespective of whether the colonies using it to defend their autonomy were corporate, proprietary, or royal.

The result of this century-long debate about rights in the empire was the emergence of a revolutionary conception of political authority on the far side of the Atlantic in the decade leading up to 1776. Laid out in its fullest form in a series of late colonial pamphlets, it held that the settlers had a natural right to migrate from England, establish self-governing polities in America, and then delegate political authority to the Crown in return for the benefits of royal protection.

In 1774, Lord Chief Justice Mansfield handed down an important ruling about the rights of settlers in the new territories conquered from the French in the Seven Years' War. Campbell, the plaintiff, was a planter on the conquered French island of Grenada who objected to paying a new duty on all sugar exports on the grounds that the 1763 Royal Proclamation had promised the settlers on the island a representative government. Having extended such a right to a conquered territory, Campbell contended, the king could not then raise money by prerogative without local consent. Mansfield agreed, holding that “the King had precluded himself from the Exercise of a Legislative Authority over the Island of Grenada” by pledging to grant the settlers an assembly of their own.

At first glance, Mansfield's decision was a striking victory for the rights of settlers in the newly expanded empire. In holding that rights once granted were irrevocable, it removed the ambiguity about royal power outside the realm that had existed since Coke's equivocal ruling in Calvin's Case. But on closer inspection, the verdict provided cold comfort to Englishmen in the Crown's dominions. For despite limiting the power of the prerogative over them, Mansfield placed no such limits on Parliament. Indeed, Mansfield simply transferred the authority that the Crown had enjoyed by conquest to the king-in-Parliament.

In June 1762, in the waning months of the Seven Years' War, the Massachusetts General Court sent Jasper Maudit, its new agent in London, a lengthy set of “instructions.” Maudit, a London merchant and dissenter, had taken up his appointment at an auspicious time. The colony had been informed by the previous agent, William Bollan, that the Crown was going to require the insertion of a suspending clause in all future laws, ensuring that they would not take effect until approved by the Privy Council. In Bollan's view, this interference with Massachusetts' legislative authority underlined the long-standing need “for a thorough Examination” “of the Original, inherent and just Title of the Colonies in America to the Rights, Liberties and Benefits of the State, whereof they were Members.”

Taking Bollan's warning seriously, the colony's “instructions” to Maudit laid out a comprehensive account of the rights of the British American settlers in the empire, one that reveals to the modern reader the contours of a lost world of early American political theory, stretching back to before the Glorious Revolution, while anticipating the revolutionary arguments that would convulse the British Atlantic world in the decade to come.

At the heart of the colony's case was a claim that “The natural Rights of the Colonists” were “the same with those of all other British subjects, and indeed of all Mankind.” In support of this claim, Maudit's instructions drew on Locke's Second Treatise.

In Philadelphia in 1687, William Penn printed a small pamphlet entitled The Excellent Priviledge of Liberty and Property Being the Birth-Right of the Free-born Subjects of England. The Excellent Priviledge was an abridgement of a longer tract called English Liberties: Or, the Free-Born Subject's Inheritance published by the radical Whig Henry Care in 1682. Care wanted to provide religious dissenters, then facing the full force of the Test and Corporation Acts, with an accessible guide to English law should they be hauled into court. But Care's primer outlived its dissenting roots to become a publishing phenomenon, with successive editions circulating around the Atlantic world in the eighteenth century, its small size – it could literally fit into a pocket – enabling knowledge of English rights to reach the peripheries of the empire.

Penn had a similar aim for his abridgment of English Liberties, hoping it would aid the settlers in his new colony to understand the laws that were “their native Right and Inheritance.” Penn thought his version would be particularly valuable for those “who may not have leisure from their Plantations to read large Volumes.” The centerpiece of Penn's compendium was “Magna Charta,” “the Store-house of all our Liberties,” to which Penn appended a lengthy comment, drawn largely from the writings of the great seventeenth-century jurist Edward Coke.

The settlers in Maryland had for the most part received what they wanted in the aftermath of the Glorious Revolution. Unlike the inhabitants of Massachusetts, they were happy to embrace royal government, assuming that the rule of a Protestant prince would be superior to that of the Catholic Lords Baltimore. And the years after the fall of the proprietary government were relatively peaceful, with the lower house of assembly able to build on the gains it had made in the seventeenth century and extend its authority against the often ineffectual checks of a succession of royal governors. However, in 1715, after converting to Anglicanism, the Baltimore family resumed control of the colony. Within a few years, Maryland was plunged into a rancorous constitutional conflict over whether the colony could claim the benefit of English law and rights. The leader of the Maryland lower house, the prominent lawyer, Daniel Dulany, drew on the common law as well as the early modern law of nature to defend the colony's claim against the authority of the proprietor.

The Stuart King, Charles I, created Maryland as a proprietorial colony with his 1632 grant to the Catholic courtier George Calvert (Lord Baltimore). Typical of the early English charters, it delegated a large amount of the king's authority to Baltimore. In fact, it was modeled on a fourteenth-century grant to the Bishop of Durham, and the powers it granted were of a quasi-feudal nature.