In late 1584, as Sir Walter Raleigh began to organize an effort to send settlers to Roanoke Island, an anonymous author asked, “What manner of geouernement is to be vsed and what offics to geouerne?” The mysterious end to the Roanoke settlement offers no answer. Yet, as the vast record of charters, letters patent, and correspondence about governance testifies, the manner of government preoccupied settlers, investors, and Crown officials. The question of governance also intrigued past generations of historians. Simply put, when English settlement began in the 1570s, not one of the institutions that symbolized American representative government was in existence; by the 1720s, colonial American institutional development was largely complete.

For the casual reader, institutional histories of early America often revel in overly obscure details of colonial and English political organization. The current tendency to reject the entire venture, however, goes too far the other way. As we shall see, institutional history is important for two reasons. First, it helps us understand the development of authority – in this case, the roots of American federalism and representative democracy. Second, it helps us put British North America in its transatlantic context as part of English politics, the expanding English empire, and the Atlantic world.