This special section offers fresh perspectives on political assemblies in the earliest period of European colonial expansion into the Americas, India and East Asia. Exploring the adaptation of European practices and culture of political deliberation and decision-making to new worlds and territories, as well as encounters and interactions with Indigenous traditions of assembly, these essays bring to a colonial context some of the more expansive, at once comparative and interdisciplinary, approaches we have recently proposed in relation to European representative bodies – diets, estates, Cortes and parliaments.Footnote ¹ The essays will, we hope, begin a new conversation about the meaning and development of political institutions within widely differing societies beyond Europe; and not just in a single metropole or colony but in the transcontinental public domain.

By 1500 representative assemblies were a common feature of many European polities. As we have argued in earlier articles, modern scholarship has approached these bodies as legal-constitutional structures rather than as cultural phenomena, and has largely studied them within national and linguistic boundaries. Even trans-European approaches are rare, let alone comparisons with other continents. Yet, as we have suggested, despite their formal and institutional diversity, political assemblies shared a common core of customs, ideas and discourses which amounted to a European parliamentary culture.Footnote ²

When, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, European settlers established colonies in India and Eastern Asia, in North, South and Central America and in the Caribbean, they brought that culture with them. Far distant as they were geographically, the settlers not only retained intimate ties to the ideas and habits of mind of their respective homelands, but they took their political associations, controversies and contests along with them. The links between domestic politics and colonial projects such as the Virginia Company in England in the 1620s or the Suriname Company in the Netherlands in the 1680s have long been recognised.Footnote ³ Many of those pursuing colonial adventures were well connected; a number were politicians themselves. Colonial exile might also be seen as a refuge for persecuted religious minorities, as it did for the Protestant nonconformists of the Massachusetts Bay Colony in America or Jews in Brazil and Surinam.Footnote ⁴ As a result, colonial and domestic affairs were often intensely intertwined.

Political assemblies of one sort or another were introduced into the overseas territories of a number of European powers (though not, to any great extent, in those of France, whose monarchy retained a tight structure of legal and political control over its colonies in America, the Caribbean and India).Footnote ⁵ Dutch settlers founded assemblies in their colonies in North America, Brazil and Formosa (Taiwan); the English did the same in Bombay, Jamaica and North America; major towns in the Spanish colonies of New Spain and Peru came together in juntas or congresos; similar bodies emerged in the Portuguese overseas territories. In addition, the Portuguese ultimately granted delegates from Goa and several Brazilian cities seats in the Cortes in Lisbon. The same idea was put forward from time to time by Spain’s South American colonial elites, but never accepted.

These assemblies have been relatively little studied as institutions, as opposed to sites of political ambition and contention. The British colonial assemblies of North America and the Caribbean are the most familiar to an anglophone audience, especially because they have attracted so much attention in the context of the eighteenth-century pre-Revolution debates over representation. Even these bodies, however, have hardly ever been scrutinised comparatively, or from a cultural perspective, or considered as a form of transatlantic exchange.Footnote ⁶ The sort of research that has recently gone into uncovering political cultures in England for example, incorporating sermons, printed and manuscript polemic, and imaginative writing, is as yet much less deployed by scholars of early America. The lack of comparative study is perhaps particularly surprising, given that, at the time, some European settler communities that lived in close proximity to or competed and fought with their close neighbours, or themselves comprised diverse nationalities, were in an even better position than those at home to recognise in the practices of other colonists modes of debate and collective decision-making equivalent to their own.

As well as comparing their own, and their neighbours’, institutions with those back in Europe, settlers were also appraising the Indigenous modes of assembly which they variously sought to exploit or suppress. In conceptualising the latter, however seemingly odd or outlandish, in terms they found intelligible, they reached for parliamentary analogies. When seeking peaceful relations with the Indigenous they created meetings that built on those same cultures of parliamentary assembly. Such meetings were undoubtedly reflective of the fundamentally violent and exploitative nature of colonial rule. But at least some of the native peoples, having mastered the colonists’ language and understood something of their government, endeavoured to acquire – or retain – a modicum of political agency by participating in forms of assembly blending European and Indigenous customs and procedures. Little has been written about the structure and forms of such engagements with Indigenous cultures of assembly in the pre-Revolutionary period. Yet it is an essential element of the unfolding of representative politics across the overseas colonies.

The essays in this special section concern a variety of political assemblies. They include traditional gatherings of Indigenous peoples that already existed in these lands; special institutions that colonial powers established to manage their relationship with the Indigenous; and the local and regional consultative bodies that were set up among settler communities. These were not the only forms of political meeting in overseas territories: negotiations and diplomatic exchanges within and between different political societies took place in many different contexts, but our focus here is on those larger and more formal consultative assemblies that made some claim to gather together representatives of the political communities concerned, much as did the parliaments, estates, and Cortes in the European metropoles. Two of the essays, those by Pedro Cardim and Jim van der Meulen, offer comparative overviews of how assembly cultures developed in, respectively, the Iberian and Dutch empires. Cardim provides the first account of its kind of the quest for representation both locally and in the metropole by the Spanish and Portuguese colonial elites. Van der Meulen weighs the long-established landdagen of the Dutch homeland provinces against the similar bodies settlers created in their colonial possessions. Lauren Working and Bruno Miranda, by contrast, each take as their starting point a specific assembly. Working discusses what we can learn about the parliamentary culture of the settler assembly in Virginia through reflections on the material cultures the participants brought with them and the material culture they encountered through their political and economic interactions with Indigenous peoples. Miranda scrutinises the assembly held by the Amerindian Potiguara of Brazil in Tapesserica in 1645, seeking to identify how far it drew on the political traditions of the Potiguara and how far the native peoples, previously colonised and converted by the Catholic Portuguese, assimilated the political practices of their new allies – and colonial masters – the Protestant Dutch, about which some of them had learnt after having mastered the Dutch language.

Collectively, the essays explore three principal themes. The first of these involves the way in which English, Spanish, Portuguese and Dutch colonists and settlers interpreted Indigenous political gatherings. The second relates to how the encounters between European settlers and Indigenous peoples influenced cultures of political assembly – both directly, through the establishment of new assemblies or adaptation of old ones to manage the relationship between them, and more subtly, as they coloured the way in which both behaved in or thought about forms and traditions of political assembly. A third theme is how the relationship between metropolitan regimes and settlers was mediated through assembly politics: was it practical for them to be given a voice in the national general assembly back in the metropole? How did settlers and governments respectively view the establishment of colonial assemblies and their possible aspirations to autonomous action?

The first of these themes chiefly addresses the political and historical perspectives of the settlers. European authors, traders and colonists often filtered what they saw of such Indigenous non-European politics not only through what they knew of their own or other European assemblies, but also through a classical education.Footnote ⁷ They already regarded the various assemblies in Europe itself as broadly equivalent. Jean Bodin, the sixteenth century’s finest political philosopher, assessed representative bodies, both general and provincial, in a variety of political systems, ancient and modern, in his République (1576).Footnote ⁸ The Spanish–English dictionary of 1623 simply translated ‘Parliament’ as ‘Córtes’, the action of calling a Parliament as ‘hazer Córtes’, and ‘Parliament house’ as ‘la Sála, de las Córtes’.Footnote ⁹ By the later seventeenth century, Thomas Rymer tendentiously chronicled the decline and fall of ‘parliaments’, with the salient exception of the Westminster assembly, which he saw as steadily gaining in significance; and William Penn, an English MP and founder of Pennsylvania, with its own colonial assembly, proposed ‘the Establishment of an European Dyet, Parliament, or Estates’.Footnote ¹⁰ In these European comparisons, there was always some common basis in history, classical and biblical tradition, and centuries of contact and exchange through diplomacy, travel, conquest and constitutional transformation. But there is nothing specifically European about political consultation and discussion through some form of assembly. The societies early modern Europeans found overseas had their own well-embedded assembly cultures and traditions. Although there was no common history and culture to help them to interpret such Indigenous gatherings, European observers naturally resorted to familiar vocabularies. The Franciscan friar Claude d’Abbéville wrote in his Histoire (1614) that a chief of the Tupinamba in Brazil, while he ‘was not elected through a public assembly’ (assemblée publique), nevertheless had ‘no authority other than giving advice, especially when [the Tupinamba] are in their assembly, or “carbet”, which they hold every evening in the open space where their houses are’.Footnote ¹¹ In other contexts European authors simplified wholly autonomous traditions to bring them in line with Old World mythologies and histories, theorising, for instance, that the peoples of the Americas were descended from monotheistic ancestors they shared with the Europeans or early Christians.Footnote ¹² Yet they were also prone to emphasise aspects of non-European assembly cultures that struck them as particularly strange, even unnatural. Patriarchally minded European observers were bewildered by the matrilineal Iroquois’ practice of allowing women a voice in council, and drew attention to it in their accounts.Footnote ¹³ In turn, their remarks can distort our own grasp of these Indigenous assembly cultures, the written sources for which are overwhelmingly European in origin. But Bruno Miranda’s contribution demonstrates that historical documents kept for and by the European invaders can be deployed to retrieve hitherto overlooked traces of Indigenous voices and political agency; while Lauren Working discusses how material cultures can offer us some routes into a better understanding of the political cultures of the Indigenous as well as of settlers finding their way in a strange new world.

Our second theme concerns those ways in which European and Indigenous cultures of assembly affected each other in practice. Sometimes colonisers sought to co-opt existing assembly structures to serve their own purposes. In Dutch-ruled Taiwan officials of the colonial government appointed by the Dutch East India Company sat together in an assembly with Indigenous village elders. Indigenous peoples – such as the Potiguara described by Bruno Miranda, the Mapuche by Pedro Cardim, or the Formosans of Taiwan by Jim van der Meulen – could use such gatherings to challenge the colonisers, strengthen their own voices, and occasionally to secure tangible concessions. But as Cardim points out, there was a great deal of mutual incomprehension as well as opportunism about such meetings. Besides, the ability of the Indigenous (who may not have represented a single political community) to assert their voice within the European colonies was generally limited.

Contacts between settlers and Indigenous had more indirect effects on assemblies and assembly cultures as well. In North America, the settler threat strengthened the intra- and inter-political connections of the Haudenosaunee (or Iroquois) Nations, and resulted in the increasing prominence and frequency of meetings of the Haudenosaunee Great Council.Footnote ¹⁴ They could even be said to have affected the sociable culture of elite meetings: when some Members of the English Parliament took up smoking tobacco during their own sittings they were echoing the practice, known to their contemporaries, of Native American ‘savages’ such as the Algonquians, who used the plant at their religious gatherings.Footnote ¹⁵

Our third theme is the relationship between colonial aspirations and European parliamentary culture itself. Anglophone historians are of course very familiar with how colonial demands for political representation within the metropole ultimately produced the American Revolution, and in turn fuelled demands for political reform in Europe. But the other European empires saw similar debates, driven on the one hand by the metropole’s need for information, security and control and on the other by the colonial society’s need for material, financial, military and commercial backing. Not simply channels through which the metropolitan government could control the colony, but also structures which could be used by colonial elites to challenge the distant authority of king or republic, these bodies possessed a delicate relationship with the governments of the metropole, a source of both strength and weakness. For the huge competing empires of England/Britain, the Netherlands, France, Portugal and Spain, anxious for the security of their overseas possessions, assemblies could be supportive in the face of predatory powers, or they could be irritatingly disruptive. They could even seem a subversive fifth column – especially where confessional and sectarian differences complicated colonial governance. While settler communities needed metropolitan support, the exercise of metropolitan authority was frequently irksome, and sometimes oppressive. Some continental elites were sufficiently well versed in European political theory and history to worry both about the threat to their own liberty and property from the encroachment of hostile empires and about the creeping interference of their own metropolitan state.Footnote ¹⁶

This was of course a conflict about authority. But it was also about the political and social status of local elites: parliamentary culture was also elite culture. Pedro Cardim’s discussion of the call for representation in the Portuguese and Spanish American colonies demonstrates the considerations of status both on the side of the Iberian governments, and on that of the emerging colonial elites, demanding partnership with an often-condescending peninsular establishment while also seeking recognition and acceptance of their own independent authority. Indeed, part of the point of participating in a major assembly lay in emulating the leadership status of those whom the new colonial elites deemed their peers in Europe. The importance of the colonists’ aspirations for political and social status and aristocratic ways of life is a striking undertone to their interest in assembly participation. These colonial aristocracies – whether urban-based merchants or planters – were typically of European ancestry and modelled themselves on the noble and seigneurial lords of the old country, as in the case of the ‘patroons’ of the Dutch North American colony of New Netherland.Footnote ¹⁷ Lauren Working’s piece shows that political membership of colonial assemblies was closely tied with a desire to engage in and display civil and gentlemanly behaviour. This type of elite sociability, based on the consumption of luxury items such as jewellery, tableware and lavish clothing – all absurdly impractical items for the early colonists – connected the political culture in European cities such as London to that of colonial outposts such as Virginia, just as it did their respective social cultures. At the same time, the landscapes they inhabited also presented opportunities for elite self-assertion that were absent from the metropole.Footnote ¹⁸

As all these essays demonstrate, political assemblies are complex structures, constructed out of relationships of power which offer possibilities and hazards for all of those involved. They help governing powers to build coherent communities, which can cooperate in the process of ruling. They help those communities to access, for their own purposes, the resources and prestige available from the governing authority. They reflect and consolidate political, economic and social power. But from the point of view of a governing power they threaten to build local centres of power that can confront and defy it; the communities themselves might fret that they offer a government a simple means of reaching into their own economic resources. All colonial regimes grappled to a lesser or greater extent with the question of whether and how to use assemblies to manage their relationship with the new colonies; settler communities thought about what sort of assemblies to construct and how they would employ them. In doing so, they naturally harked back to the assemblies that existed in the metropole, and imported their traditions and ways of thought into their own. In searching for ways to communicate and negotiate with the Indigenous communities the models were less obvious. But often settler experience of councils and assemblies back home would provide them with templates on which they could base structures for regular interaction – and control. Crucially, in other words, they relied on a commonly understood culture of political assembly – a parliamentary culture – in coming to grips with how authority and consultation might work in a new context.

This was not a new or unique process. Earlier settler communities, closely linked to their old countries, had established traditions of assembly before: for the English, the conquest and colonisation of Ireland furnished a significant precedent in determining the foundation and management of colonial assemblies. There, a parliament had been created in the thirteenth century as a forum for leading English settler magnates and a means for collectively managing their relationship with the Crown. As the area under their control grew, some Indigenous Irish would come to form part of an Anglo-Irish aristocracy and participate in the sittings and culture of those assemblies (indeed, remarkably it was an Irish cleric, Archbishop Risdéard Ó hÉidigheáin, who is probably responsible for the preparation of an Irish version of the classic fourteenth-century description of parliamentary proceedings, the Modus Tenendi Parliamentum).Footnote ¹⁹ But Irish kings and chieftains would hold their own customary conciliar gatherings and large assemblies, oireachtas, well into the sixteenth century.Footnote ²⁰ From at least 1541, though, the colonial government was dedicated to eliminating such bodies; and when the Catholic Confederacy set up its own General Assembly at Kilkenny in 1642–8, it operated much more like a parliament than any such traditional, Indigenous, body.Footnote ²¹

While political assemblies would (as in eighteenth-century Ireland) become in the hands of elite settlers formidable mechanisms both in their confrontations with the metropole and in the assertion of dominance over Indigenous communities, Indigenous communities could also find ways to deploy the ideas and rhetorics of parliamentary culture as tools in their confrontations with the settlers.Footnote ²² In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, parliamentary bodies could be powerful symbols of movement towards independent statehood for the former colonies of many European states. But since they were only a pale imitation of fully representative assemblies they also signalled the hypocrisy of Europeans who claimed to have pioneered representative government at home while suppressing it abroad. Nevertheless, the dominance and worldwide spread of a specifically Western culture and language of ‘parliamentarism’ was clear, even if it had already developed numerous European variants and its subsequent history in the old colonies would show its capacity to spawn many more.Footnote ²³

And yet the roots of parliamentary culture in the colonial context are not straightforward. If no institution is created from an original design, all are adapted, extended and translated from previous ones, and many are the product of the merging of different traditions and cultures. Old habits of thought are immensely influential; but new situations demand different solutions and creative reinterpretations of older structures. Nineteenth- and twentieth-century commentaries would celebrate ‘England’, and more specifically the British parliament, as the ‘Mother of Parliaments’.Footnote ²⁴ Certainly for the independence movements of the time the existing British Parliament, and French, Spanish and US legislatures in part derived from it, provided the most influential examples of national political assembly.Footnote ²⁵ But their dominance has obscured the fact that political assemblies had been a feature of both Indigenous political societies and of Spanish, Portuguese and Dutch settler communities in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and that they were based on a variety of models, both European and Indigenous. Parliamentary culture did take root in colonial societies: their origins, however, lay not in a single model but in a more complex evolution. These essays suggest that the development of representative bodies and constitutional government in former European colonies might have a longer history than has often been appreciated; and that its history is one in which strands from the various European states are deeply intertwined with each other and subtly coloured by the particular circumstances of their new and taxing environments. To take our understanding of colonial political institutions further we will need, in other words, both to investigate the legion ways in which they continue to connect with the structures and conflicts of the metropole, and to explore how these were refracted through changing colonial contexts – political, environmental, social and material – to form distinctively new systems and ideas.