English imperial administrators sought to unify metropolitan and colonial political authority in the seventeenth century. The segmented social structures of the English Atlantic limited this effort at consolidation. Distance and geographic differentiation created conditions for provincial autonomy. In the American colonies, social factions emerged with significant powers of political self-determination. Authorities in London successfully managed to use merchants’ knowledge and wealth to create common interests and obligations among dispersed English subjects. This served metropolitan economic interests by expanding access to revenue. However, this did not result in a state that was unified by hierarchical institutions.
Limited coercive capacities constrained any attempt by the English state to create universal compliance with any predominant imperial goal. Political and economic thinkers in England sought unsuccessfully to remedy such multicentric proliferation of authority. Imposing uniformity on transatlantic institutions depended on England’s sovereign control of the fiscal system. In periods of colonial war, distant provincial government could successfully challenge many of the tenuous holds that metropolitan authorities exercised over them from London. The exigencies of war necessitated delegation to local leaders with access to regional commercial networks, political support, and geographic knowledge. For example, the governor and military leader of Massachusetts, William Phips, along with his allies in the colonial militia and ministry, accumulated significant power because of such delegation during King William’s War. Phips used local resources in the limited successes enjoyed by colonial forces against the French in Atlantic Canada. Within 4 years of his rise to political and military command in Massachusetts, Phips’s provincial authority challenged the fiscal relationship between Massachusetts and England, provoking his removal by authorities in London. Massachusetts’s participation in the colonial theater of the Nine Years’ War revealed the weak relationship between English subjects enmeshed within different sites of transatlantic governance. Resolution of such tensions depended on a social equilibrium reached not by amicable diplomacy or binding financial obligations but by mutual confrontation and acceptance of a tacit stalemate between town, province, and metropole.
Historians have long described the combative constitutional relationship between provincial legislatures, colonial governors, and metropolitan policy makers in England. They have also noted the escalation of this transatlantic relationship in the last two decades of the seventeenth century. Jack P. Greene writes that colonists interpreted Parliament’s 1689 Declaration of Rights, and the Glorious Revolution in general, as a common fight to obtain constitutional rights in both mainland England and North America. In practice, Greene writes, this interpretation did not extend universally among metropolitan administrators and legislators who restricted the crown’s prerogative in England but did not agree on the extension of this restriction to colonial societies. Tense relationships continued between colonial assemblies and Whitehall in the 1690s even as wartime conditions temporarily unified colonists and England around common objectives. Greene and other historians point to the introduction of metropolitan reforms during this same period, such as the stricter 1696 Navigation Acts, which sought to integrate the colonies into a unified commercial and political system.Footnote 1
Owen Stanwood interprets the Glorious Revolution as a transformative period in England’s transatlantic empire. To Stanwood, the late seventeenth century represented a reconfiguration of English imperial government and provided foundations for a new Protestant Empire in which religious anxiety, imperial geopolitics, and local politics fundamentally rebuilt the transatlantic relationship between colonies like Massachusetts and the metropole. In this interpretation, the late seventeenth-century colonies were not isolated from social transformation in England. Stanwood draws on shared elements of political culture including antipopery rhetoric and other cultural discourse contributing to a more unified Protestant empire. In the case of Massachusetts, Stanwood emphasizes local political responses to events in England—namely the uprising against Edmund Andros and the imperial administrative system that resulted from colonial reorganization into the Dominion of New England.Footnote 2
Like Greene, Stanwood addresses how metropolitan authority interacted with colonial autonomy in the seventeenth century. Whereas Greene emphasizes long-term changes in colonial constitutional interpretation, Stanwood focuses specifically on the transformative politics of the Glorious Revolution. Stanwood and Greene stress the importance of political ideology including representation, provincial legislative authority, and Whig political discourse. Such interpretations of seventeenth-century colonial politics prioritize the determinative influence of ideas. Both authors indicate that the colonies did not exist in a simplistic subordinate relationship to the metropole and instead negotiated authority through selective resistance to imperial mandates. However, despite this autonomy, interpretations like those of Greene and Stanwood nonetheless argue for a strong institutional interconnection between colony and metropole in terms of both political culture and common understandings of governance.Footnote 3 Such interpretations fit within an understanding of the colonial development of English America as a trend toward interconnection between metropolitan and colonial societies and cultures. In this case the Atlantic served not as a barrier but as a “highway” that linked both sides of the Atlantic into a cohesive cultural, commercial, and political unit.Footnote 4
Although it is true that communication of ideas, norms, and political news informed action across the Atlantic, emphasis on interconnection obscures the localized and insulated administrative realities of colonial governance, particularly during periods of war. Fiscal limitations and on-the-ground knowledge made practical administration less a question of shared political ideology than practical knowledge of provincial finances, military geography, and the intricacies of regional alliances between merchants, statesmen, and officers. Foremost, localized realities of governance, rather than mutual political discourse, yielded colonial autonomy. Historians have suggested transatlantic colonial relationships that reflect this more localized interpretation of politics in late seventeenth-century English America. David S. Lovejoy argues that political changes in late seventeenth-century New England, such as the revolt against the Andros administration, were not so much an echo of the Glorious Revolution in England but a nearly simultaneous uprising with its own internal logic that drew on similar anti-Stuart sympathies. Colonists used the news of William and Mary’s coup as ideological legitimization for largely independent, localized, rebellions against unpopular leaders.Footnote 5 The personal motivations and practical powers of provincial governing bodies and governors indicate that social and political order emerged first at the local level.
Greene’s interpretation of the constitutional relationship focuses primarily on accepted political roles of assemblies, governors, Parliament and crown officials. Such an interpretation of constitutional relationships between core and periphery reflects transatlantic English subjects’ understandings of political culture and abstract notions of the proper roles of provincial and imperial governments. In several volumes, Greene draws on examples of multiple political bodies vying for power through intellectual debate and through legislative practice, including legislation pertaining to financial affairs. Such emphases include efforts by metropolitan administrators like those of the Board of Trade, who sought to subordinate colonial assemblies to the metropolis through the recall of charters. Furthermore, based on the interpretations of other historians, Greene emphasized the significance of economic integration with metropolitan commerce in regions like New England, particularly after the 1670s, where an emerging class of politically active merchants emerged. In Greene’s analysis, population growth and transitions from a more traditional economic culture spurred land speculation, interregional trade, and demand for agricultural goods and manufactures. In the New England context, Greene views this commercialization as an integrative force in that it connected provincial and metropolitan commercial communities through trade and transatlantic communication. Additionally, in Greene’s development model, this process saw New England become more culturally British as it developed from a traditionalist communal society to one more individualistic, cosmopolitan, and integrated with a broader transatlantic British community.Footnote 6
Greene accurately represents the constitutional tensions between provincial and metropolitan governments. However, much of his discussion of these topics focuses on the more abstract elements of constitutional relationship evident in sources such as treatises and assembly records. An understanding of the exact relationship between colony and metropole is improved by further study of the physical mechanisms that gave provincial governments the coercive power that they exercised. Much of the subsequent deliberation over constitutional rights that Greene studies can be thought of as superstructural events that arose from the constraints faced by dispersed communities. De facto provincial power emerged from the reality of localized knowledge, networks, allegiances, and access to resources. Imperial endeavors like Anglo-French colonial wars not only did little to subvert this de facto autonomy but strengthened it by forcing the metropole to rely on the capacities of provincial military leaders like Sir William Phips. Metropolitan officials did seek to contest such influence, particularly in peacetime, but this did little to undermine the fundamental economic conditions that limited their influence across the Atlantic. In this way, contrary to many interpretations of the transatlantic relationship after the 1670s, the commerce and economic culture of New England and England remained significantly unintegrated, at least relative to the intensification of domestic commercial relationships within a colony like Massachusetts. Consequently, commercial intensification within Massachusetts did not imply the strengthening of transatlantic linkages that could allow imperial infiltration of colonial wartime activities. Instead, Massachusetts commercial classes distinctly favored the influence of provincial government under autonomous leaders like Phips. In return for such support from the emerging merchant class, Phips could protect Massachusetts merchants from deleterious intrusion from the English trade laws and fiscal system. This capacity to insulate Massachusetts from competing interests within the English empire gave Phips influence that was indicative of the course of American political and economic development in the early modern period. The colonies would retain significant state capacity relative to Parliament and crown ministers. The colonists could use this capacity to obstruct the centralizing intentions of metropolitan theorists.
Stanwood emphasizes the significance of the 1691 Massachusetts Charter which, according to the black-letter powers and rights it granted to the colonial government, ended the corporate era of the Massachusetts Bay Colony and merged the colony with Plymouth and other adjacent territories into one royal province. Focusing on the terms of the 1691 Charter supports the Glorious Revolution as a unifying imperial turn that bound Massachusetts more fully into an imperial framework after the failure of the Dominion of New England.Footnote 7 In this interpretation, a royal governor, like William Phips, replaced the old autonomous system in which Puritan freemen elected a governor independent of metropolitan control or oversight. In one sense, this was true in that Phips was a royal appointee subject to recall. However, the terms of the new charter could not override the de facto reality of provincial power arising from the daily interaction with local communities and immediate knowledge that did not travel quickly enough across the Atlantic to inform administration and policy in England.
Where the terms of the Charter conflicted with the realities of on-the-ground provincial administration, local imperatives took priority. Many of the stipulations in the 1691 Charter, by necessity, reflected this reality. This included substantial military, judicial, and veto powers exercised by the governor, reflecting the continued importance of the provincial executive over colonial affairs. Additionally, the crown intended to exercise significant oversight over Massachusetts’s finances, yet the colony retained the power to tax and initiate legislation relating to spending even though it had lost its ability to mint provincial coins.Footnote 8 Despite the intention of unifying imperial reform the Charter represented, Massachusetts retained a great deal of fiscal autonomy, which proved particularly necessary for the function of warfare against rival north American powers during King William’s War. In this context, Phips’s aggressive independence gave him substantial provincial support, often at the cost of aggravating metropolitan administrators and their representatives in the colonies.
Concerning wartime finance, Phips favored the maximation of colonial fiscal autonomy. As Jonathan Barth argues, fiscal and monetary policy were central to the imperial political economy of seventeenth-century colonial America and, consequently, control over currency became a primary point of conflict between crown officials and the American colonies. Barth argues that colonists accepted a limited degree of economic subordination given that they continued to enjoy freedom to engage in intercolonial commerce.Footnote 9 The wartime case of Phips and the Massachusetts government indicates that this willingness to accept economic subordination was likely even more limited than Barth acknowledges and, furthermore, that the efficiency of colonial government during imperial conflicts depended on de facto limits on colonial subordination. War proved a significant force in determining the realities of Massachusetts provincial fiscal policy and autonomy. Phips’s disagreements with metropolitan monetary controls and limitations placed on colonial currency production arose in the context of pressing wartime necessity. The result was limited, and largely ineffective, issues of paper bills backed in large part by private bullion reserves. This indicates the emergence of Massachusetts paper money arising from the exigencies of war finance.
Dror Goldberg challenges the explanation that such paper currency arose from war-related specie shortages but instead arose from Massachusetts’s inability to enforce legal tender laws or back currency with land. Goldberg argues that private paper bills of credit emerged as an alternative that would survive imperial scrutiny but also serve as a functional currency for paying troops. Relatedly, Katie Moore argues that paper money, and specifically bills of credit, was more than a financial innovation but a critical element of the colonial social and political order necessary for ensuring the survival of colonial communities. Similarly, regarding the wider English imperial context, Christine Desan argues that such an emergence of paper money was necessary in order to effectively govern, painting 1690 issues as a foundational, effective, experiment in linking finance to political authority.Footnote 10 The experience of Phips, Massachusetts ministers, and military officers indicates that such emissions of private bills did not fully serve the needs of the provincial war machine or the needs of the colonial economy during periods of conflict. Phips’s administration soon tried to have the right to mint coin in Massachusetts restored, indicating the continued importance of specie through the 1690s. The private paper emissions of 1690 did little to resolve the problem of balance between imperial scrutiny and colonial fiscal autonomy. The coercive warmaking function of the colonial state faced limits because of its control over specie. Disputes over public funds, commerce, and coinage would all contribute to Phips’s removal as governor.
Ultimately, the case of wartime finance in late seventeenth-century Massachusetts indicates that provincial state capacity remained the primary determinant of the nature of colonial government through the Glorious Revolution. Additionally, finances and military administration indicate substantial localism and insulation of colonial government from the reach of the English imperial state. Rather than a period of unification, King William’s War was a time when colonial autonomy on most practical issues proved necessary from both the colonial and metropolitan perspectives even though crown officials saw such colonial independence as antithetical to their centralizing ambitions. Such wartime realities reveal a key tension in English transatlantic imperialism. Colonial autonomy improved wartime efficiency but decentralized control. This lessened the influence of metropolitan administration. Increased centralization of colonial administration and fiscal policy brought the colonies within the control of the crown but inhibited colonial capacities to serve imperial purposes by pursuing successful campaigns against rival French colonists. Maintaining a balance between such centralized control and necessary peripheral autonomy was a necessary and universal component of the transatlantic English empire.
I. Finance and Efficiency in Seventeenth-Century Imperial War Economies
In 1690, the English merchant and politician Josiah Child published the final edition of his tract A New Discourse of Trade. Originally published in 1668, 13 years before Child rose to prominence as governor of the English East India Company, the book described changing relationships between imperial states, warfare, and finance. Child wrote, “all war is become much rather an expence [sic] of money than men, and success attends those that can most and longest spend money, rather than men; and consequently Princes [sic] armies in Europe are become more proportionable to their purses, than to the numbers of their people.” Furthermore, because of introductions in the use of “powder, shot and fire-arms,” Child wrote, the coercive capacity of late seventeenth-century states depended increasingly on manufacturing capacity and commercial transportation.Footnote 11
At the time Child wrote, the construction of large forts, especially in colonial outposts, prolonged periods of warfare due to extended sieges. The extension of the time during which English forces engaged in the siege of forts required significant expenditures of public revenues over unpredictable periods.Footnote 12 Consequently, prolonged conflict also put significant costs on societies who diverted resources and people toward the conflict and away from domestic economies.Footnote 13 In 1690, the English political economist Nicholas Barbon wrote that “Men fight more upon equal Terms than formerly; and like two Skilful [sic] Fencers, fight a long Time, before either gets Advantage… . But now both Parties are Equally Disciplin’d and Arm’d; and the Successes of War are not so great; Victory is seldom gained without some Considerable Loss to the Conquerer.”Footnote 14 The social cost of lost lives and increased demand on scarce resources put severe strain on colonial communities.
As English merchant-writers like Josiah Child and Charles Davenant noted, military officers and government officials could not consistently predict the duration of conflict, so they had difficulties effectively forecasting the revenue that they would need to cover the necessary expenditures.Footnote 15 The cumbersome methods of revenue collection in both England and the North American colonies relied on co-opting local assemblies, proprietors, or tax farmers to extract revenue from local populations and then direct it toward some governing body like the Exchequer in England. Revenue collection through tiered networks of government put two substantial constraints on spending for warfare.Footnote 16 First, local governing bodies and tax farmers took a portion of revenues for their own maintenance and welfare that otherwise might have found its way into that part of the public purse directed toward war. Second, interaction between local revenue collectors and the higher-ups of the imperial state produced friction between the colonial and metropolitan interests over the allocation of funds.Footnote 17 Determining a concerted policy between collectors and spenders, along with the transference of revenue from subjects through a network of local institutions, delayed the efficient functioning of English military forces.
Quick and powerful supply lines and financial liquidity increasingly determined the outcomes of wars. In the North American colonies, this concern for speed developed into a largely autonomous system for wartime allocation by the eighteenth century because of two factors: (1) the reliance on provincial populations to provide personnel and provisions to the sites of conflict closest to where they lived and (2) the costs of shipping and financing the allocation of resources across the Atlantic from England.
Reliance on autonomy of colonial populations and provincial government to fund England’s military during the Nine Years’ War faced strong opposition from both merchants as well as policy makers in England. These merchants and policy makers directed this concern particularly at New England, where powerful local assemblies, ministers, and some governors interpreted imperial mandates loosely. Colonial leaders could defy policy from Whitehall when they felt it did not adhere to the customary rights they had exercised.Footnote 18 Perhaps most problematic from the perspective of England’s increasingly commercially minded elite, New England did not conform to a colonial model whereby planters and merchants extracted local commodities for export to the imperial metropole. The commodity trade between New and Old England created only weak direct economic linkages. Instead, New England primarily competed with England as an importer, especially from the West Indies, and derived most of its net regional income from providing shipping and commercial services to other colonies.Footnote 19 Josiah Child called New England “the most prejudicial Plantation to the Kingdom of England,” for this reason. He called particular attention New England’s lack of conformity to imperial economic controls of trade as outlined under the Navigation Acts.Footnote 20
From the perspective of the early modern English state, lack of colonial conformity hindered metropolitan statecraft. Institutional incoherence limited the ability for imperial policy makers to manipulate colonial action according to a unified vision. James C. Scott writes that states aim to simplify and regiment components of society to make them “legible.” The legible state, in Scott’s formulation, abstracted social information, which then allowed a modernized, increasingly scientific, state to reform societies to match that abstract vision. He writes that the “social simplifications thus introduced not only permitted a more finely tuned system of taxation and conscription but also greatly enhanced state capacity.”Footnote 21
Scott specifically writes that capitalism was a component of this modernist tendency toward homogenization because it abstracted material into abstract commodities with market value. His interpretation explains modern states’ conquest of the organic diversity of a premodern or “nonstate” society. In this social model, utilitarian abstraction for the purpose of state management tends toward radical simplification that uproots symbiotic relationships. State authorities have limited understanding of the complexities of such relationships and, consequently, negative ramifications can be severe. Scott provides examples of complications that arise during the state’s efforts to enforce uniformity on human populations across large distances, including the specific problems of fiscal conformity under state taxation. He argues that state management necessitates consideration of resistance and revolt. Taxation requires both knowledge of economic conditions along with the perception of subjects’ willingness to accept tax policies. The state, consequently, draws on coercive tools in addition to information collection to transform society according to a unified plan. Crisis occurs when crude state intelligence jeopardizes state security when misidentifying the demands it can place on its constituents, such as if it were to coerce excessive contributions to state revenue.Footnote 22
Scott’s concept of the modernizing state correctly identifies the information-gathering activities of the early modern British state. However, this conception misses the extent to which coercive authority lagged state intentions in the process of modernization as in the case of late-seventeenth-century New England. In the Massachusetts Bay Colony, state function relied considerably on strategic application of both incentives and coercive punishments to meet, as near as possible, the vision of a metropolitan rule. Such activity relied extensively on coopting individuals with conflicting goals, competing strategies, and regionally specific knowledge. Strong core-periphery models of early modern state creation fail to account for the regional authority allowed under regimes reliant on aggregated, incomplete, perspectives of dispersed individuals.Footnote 23 Scott’s model, therefore, presumes that centers of state power imposed their influence onto populations lacking the institutional organization to take on state roles themselves. Colonial British America, with its well-developed provincial governments, in contrast, requires adapting Scott’s theories of the modern information state to account for such polycentric development.
II. Massachusetts and its Provincial Financial Interests and Limitations
In 1690, the New England colonies had a population of around 87,000 people. Many of these colonists lived in large coastal towns like Boston and Salem, but with a 6.2% population increase over the following decade, colonists put increasing pressure on outlying territory.Footnote 24 Settlers moved into Maine and sought outposts with access to fisheries along the northeastern seaboard. This territorial expansion yielded disputes over resources with the French and Abenaki, which Bay Colonists interpreted as a threat to the security of their colony. A colonist and ship captain from near the Kennebec River, William Phips, positioned himself as a leader of an endeavor to supplant the French in Canada by capturing the prominent towns and military outposts of Port Royal and then Quebec. This plan received popular support from colonists and political backing from the local ministerial elite.Footnote 25 Fortifying frontier towns against French predation from the sea entailed significant costs that fell largely on local populations. Requisitions on towns placed substantial strain between provincial and municipal levels of government. This strain produced conflict during war. For example, in 1690 Marblehead residents formed a mob to prevent Captain John Alden from completing orders from the colonial government of Massachusetts to impress two large guns from a ship in the Marblehead harbor.Footnote 26
Representatives in town assemblies and the General Court agreed that an offensive to wrest control over French territory in Canada was essential for Massachusetts Bay’s security. Many colonists noted specifically the burden of taxation they experienced under this state of prolonged threat, which administrators and military officers recognized even outside of Massachusetts.Footnote 27 On the fiscal burden that Massachusetts faced in 1690, Captain Francis Nicholson wrote from Virginia to the Earl of Nottingham in England that “there hath been great Taxes and likely to be greater, the Countrey [sic] very much impoverished, which makes the people very uneasy, and there are great Divisions amongst them.” Colonial leaders saw that the financial costs of colonial warfare fell substantially on the local population. Nicholson recognized that high fiscal burdens turned compliant subjects into evaders of the trade restrictions mandated under the Navigation Acts.
In late seventeenth-century England, merchants and administrators raised the rates of duties to the point that it incentivized both illicit commerce and disincentivizing legal trade on which administrators placed the duty. Writing on the topic of funding conflict during prolonged engagements of warfare, Charles Davenant observed, that “in Taxing the People, we should have regard not to create Disaffection to the Government… . We should likewise see that our present Gifts should not, in their Consequences, bring Damage to the ordinary Revenue of the Crown; for, in such cases, we give of one hand, and take away of the other.”Footnote 28 Davenant expressed a core problem that administrators faced in maintaining a coherent fiscal state during periods of high wartime expenditure. If they set taxes too high, colonial traders would resort to illicit trade or leave the market thus reducing revenue to the crown. Writing on such effects from beer and ale duties in England, Davenant wrote, “This great Decrease is, by the Commissioners of the Revenue, chiefly attributed to the new Additional Duties, which in the Country have made numbers of Victuallers, in every County, leave of their Trade.”Footnote 29 Because policing compliance itself required revenue, the seventeenth-century English imperial fiscal state faced a significant practical limit to its authority. This cost of enforcement was particularly high in colonial regions most distant from the seats of central government and capital accumulation in Whitehall.
In cases of Davenant’s upper limit to taxation—the threshold beyond which traders would exit the legal market—colonial leaders sought a popular mandate within their provinces to impose taxes to meet local as well as imperial military ends. Such local funding of defense in the colonies allowed provincial leaders to direct the coercive capacity of their states, demands that sometimes put them in competition with the imperial metropole’s claims to local revenue. Such a conflict occurred between 1690 and 1694 in Massachusetts under the military and civil authority of William Phips and his supporters, who mobilized predominantly domestic colonial resources against the French and their Native allies in Canada. They then took on autonomous executive authority over military and fiscal administration.
In the summer of 1690, a force composed of some 2,500 New England colonists under William Phips and John Wally left Massachusetts with the intention of taking control of French-Canadian territory, including the city of Quebec. The failed expedition suffered from inadequate supplies, the inability to transport supplies efficiently from place to place, and a problem of maintaining a concerted force of militia forces in prolonged siege warfare. These challenges affirm Child’s characterization of seventeenth-century war as fundamentally about the mobilization of resources through financial channels. Most of the resources Phips and Wally struggled to obtain and move, including personnel and provisions, came directly from the domestic colonial economy. Given the state of colonial development and capacity at that time, such demands took a substantial toll and precluded indefinite engagement in the conflict. The Massachusetts minister John Wise, who witnessed the expedition under Phips wrote that the “Want or Scarseness [sic] of Provision might be a great Disadvantage and Discouradgment [sic] under some of our last Thoughts, our Stoares [sic] being so far Spent and the Countrey [sic] not capable of Recruiting us now upon easy termes [sic] might much disadvantage us from taking such Measures as we might have thought of when we were put by our first Attempts.”Footnote 30 Projecting power with enlisted colonists and resources long enough to enact an effective siege proved prohibitive even over the limited distance between Massachusetts and Quebec, let alone across the Atlantic from England.
Moving supplies, especially fieldpieces, proved a critical factor in the failure of the siege. The failure arose from an overextension of supply lines whereby the Lieutenant-General John Wally landed the force’s field pieces at a location where the soldiers could not easily defend them after the force made a partial retreat. Although this placement of guns was a strategic blunder that Wise attributed in part to Wally’s cowardice, this failure also indicates that the campaign depended on a single successful offensive against Quebec City. This single offensive depleted the expedition’s limited stock of manufactures and other supplies, and Phips did not have access to additional resources to sustain it. In the years following this military failure, Phips made arguments to this effect in his requests to the Lords of Trade to obtain a larger quantity of weapons, ammunition, and large ships in addition to the funds necessary to construct a fort 1.5 leagues from Quebec. From such a fort, they could pursue a more sustained offensive given the reduced costs of attacking over a shorter distance. Phips additionally requested greater colonial autonomy for engaging in a subsequent attack, specifically on the issue of raising money locally, asking that the “People of New England [be] restored to their former Rights and privileges, so as to enable them to raise men and money as before they have done.”Footnote 31 The Lords of Trade did not meet these requests, and Phips made no subsequent attack according to his modified plans after the failure of 1690.Footnote 32 Wise reiterated Phips’s concerns after the event, especially concerning the shortage of ammunition, stating, “in all probability our Ammunition was not at first [proportionable] to our Undertaking.”Footnote 33
In line with Phips’s request for greater fiscal and monetary autonomy in a future attack on the French in Canada, the initial failure of the summer of 1690 arose largely from the insufficiency of financial means to pay troops and spend on supplies. Phips and the Massachusetts government funded the siege using ad hoc methods that relied on a short-term emission of colonial paper currency, with no long-term plan to back the notes with anything other than public credit. Eventually, colonists that had received these notes, including soldiers that had received them for pay, demanded that they receive silver for the notes. The Bay Colony government had no public bullion reserves to meet these outstanding demands, so wealthy colonial elites, particularly William Phips, paid off these notes in silver from their own private accounts.Footnote 34
Phips argued that the colonies struggled under conditions of monetary scarcity, whereby they had inadequate bullion-based money beyond a small supply of Spanish coins.Footnote 35 Some historians have rejected the claims regularly put forward by North American colonists of a persistent shortage of money. Advocates for this position argue that trade imbalances causing the money supply to leave the colonies is either statistically overstated or that the colonists would have made up this shortage in their trade with bullion imports from the West Indies including imported Spanish and Portuguese gold coins.Footnote 36 Although such Iberian coinage does appear regularly in accounts through the colonial period, the limited supply of these coins did not prove sufficient to provide liquidity for the public expenditures necessary to fund war. The insufficiency, specifically of public reserves, is evident in the out-of-pocket burden on private subjects to remit on the public debt underlying the short-term paper emissions of 1690. Available sterling could not cover the costs of Massachusetts’s operations, so Phips’s and Mather’s petition called attention to the deficit and its impairment of the province’s ability to take offensive action during the Nine Years’ War.
Phips and Increase Mather made the argument that colonial New England’s lack of money limited the extent of colonial trade. Insufficient liquidity hindered colonial exchange by necessitating additional steps and transaction costs to parties making commercial transactions.Footnote 37 Exchange without what contemporaries referred to as “ready money,” or physical units of specie, meant that parties had to negotiate on credit. This demanded careful bookkeeping, determination of interest rates, and the assessment of a borrower’s creditworthiness.Footnote 38 Phips and Mather pointed to the specific barrier to trade that lack of a strong medium of exchange imposed on those who hired labor with wages, like shopkeepers and artisans who could not easily hire on credit.Footnote 39 In the context of funding war and the time-sensitive need for immediate allocation of large amounts of resources, military outcomes depended on the speed and extent of trade directed toward the war effort, much as Child and Davenant argued.
In addition to the divergent monetary norms between Old and New England, divergent administrative systems developed between the two regions. According to the Hobbesian hierarchical state model proposed during the English Civil War, polities depend on ultimate deference to some sovereign power with capacity to determine the rightful projection of coercive force. Some merchant-writers like Josiah Child supported such sentiments with statements likening punctual payments of public debt to the health of the allegorical body of the state: “such fatal stops being to the body politick like great obstructions of the liver and spleen to the body natural, which not only procure ill habits, but sometimes desperate and acute diseases, as well as chronical.”Footnote 40 Furthermore, Child decried division within the state, which he believed kept people continually in fear and “consequently apt to Sedition and Rebellion.”Footnote 41 His perspective commended fiscal coherence as stable, peaceful, and conducive to the health of society. However, although such ideals could perhaps be applied to the state within England, transatlantic distance necessitated the use of colonial state capacity. Inability to project influence from the metropole made a uniform system, under a single fiscal regime, prohibitive.
Child’s conception of the state and its finances reflected imperial norms and the centralizing impulses of state actors. Although forced to accept a degree of colonial autonomy in fiscal and military matters, London maintained a threshold past which it could not tolerate deviation. English officials did not tolerate deviation on the questions of currency and revenue that linked the Atlantic economy back to a central node at London. Consequently, colonists’ attempts at fiscal autonomy provoked strong reactions from the Lords of Trade and other institutions of English government. Although delegation to colonial military authorities, like Phips, maximized military efficiency, England’s imperial state drew the line at permitting provincial fiscal independence because such autonomy challenged metropolitan fiscal sovereignty.
III. Provincial Capabilities and Wartime Autonomy
Despite the failed attempt on Quebec in 1690, New England exhibited a number of strengths in its ability to pursue conflict against hostile forces in Canada. These capacities drew resources from domestic economic development and local networks operating autonomously from metropolitan oversight. First, the central loci of decision making for colonial warfare tended to be proximate to sites of conflict. This gave colonial commanders like those of the 1690 expedition significantly more flexibility to make decisions with respect to the movement of people and resources. It also gave them the ability to effectively delegate authority. This capacity to delegate was strengthened by the participation of preeminent executive authorities as military commanders present at sites of conflict, as was the case with William Phips’s various military and government roles between 1690 and 1694. Examples of this are evident in the military success preceding the failed Quebec expedition. Speed of acquisition and deployment of local resources from Boston allowed for the capture of Port Royal from the French earlier in the summer of 1690. The resources included two large ships with 62 guns and 417 men, along with an additional three smaller ketches and a bark under the command of William Phips and Cyprian Southack. The rapidity of the event left the French unprepared, and the force captured the fort at Port Royal with no effective opposition.Footnote 42
The role of Boston and colonial port towns in such conflicts indicates how colonial government and capital allowed local authorities to act as a de facto autonomous state. On the relationship between urban centers and state capacity, historian Charles Tilly writes that “cities are loci of capital accumulation, furthermore, gives their political authorities access to capital, credit, and control over hinterlands.”Footnote 43 Boston performed such a role in the campaign against Port Royal. Phips launched these vessels from Boston with resources derived from its hinterland, including residents to serve as soldiers and sailors who manned the expedition. By orchestrating campaigns from Boston, Phips and other commanders could delegate, divide, and repurpose its forces without appeal up a long chain of command. For example, following the successful capture of Port Royal and the transportation of captured ammunition and other stores back to Boston, Phips redirected forces under Cyprian Southack’s command toward Cape Sable, a strategic site along Acadia’s Atlantic coast, and Newfoundland, where the French and English contested access to the region’s valuable fishery. There, the deputy force engaged in small conflicts along the coast, allowing Southack to capture several small French outposts. Southack reported that he had “cleard [sic] some parts of Newfoundland from the French.”Footnote 44 News of this event only reached England via transmission from Southack when he presented it in a petition requesting a formal advancement of position within the “Royal Services.” Southack’s successes did not arise from a central directive from Boston or Whitehall. Information concerning these conflicts traveled from the colony to the metropole, not vice versa. Local commanders made critical strategic decisions in Massachusetts and executed these strategies at sites of conflict, with little input or support from central authority.Footnote 45
The successes of Phips and Southack, operating with significant autonomy in the late spring and early summer of 1690, indicate that colonial military endeavors to fight for territory during King William’s War achieved success when the colonists pursued more limited objectives. Unlike the failed 1690 expedition, these successful attacks took the form of quick assaults with fixed costs rather than prolonged engagements that required consistent supplies and spending. The failure of the siege of Quebec arose from a shortage of manufactures and, most specifically, field pieces. The New England economy centered on agrarian production, shipping, shipbuilding, and fishing. Firearms were a primary component of a successful expedition and required importation from England. Seventeenth-century New England had limited capacity to produce manufacturers, and the primary attempt to establish a proto-industrial base there had failed with the ironworks on the Saugus River in the 1650s.Footnote 46 Thereafter, New England could not manufacture its own iron products, including weapons. England had this capacity but lacked the ability to supply implements of war in sufficient quantities to New England forces.
As Phips and Southack’s military successes in Acadia and Newfoundland prior to the failed expedition against Quebec attest, colonial forces proved capable of executing small attacks with limited financial requirements. Colonial leaders operated autonomously as a de facto norm, with little capacity for the English imperial state to give directives. Importantly, these same colonial leaders directed the finances allowing for local conflict, although this meant working within the fiscal constraints of the colonial economy. In the 2 years following the Quebec expedition, the Lords of Trade recognized the need to grant additional powers to local leaders to enable them to conduct wars from the colony. At the time, the Lords of Trade saw no threat to state autonomy in allowing substantial decision-making power among colonists given that wartime expediency made it necessary. However, within 3 years, the ramifications of this provincial authority produced reconsiderations in the metropole when provincial government exercised increasing authority on fiscal and judicial matters. The quick rise and removal of William Phips as governor and preeminent military leader took place during a period of provincial self-determination. In this short period, Bay colonists internalized authority and resources in response to the military threat of the French and Native forces from the north. This included exercising authority in courts outside imperial oversight and challenging crown representatives tasked with maintaining fiscal linkages between the colony and London through customs duties. It also included provincialization on matters of defense and allocation of public resources as a response to the enforced political union with other colonies.
IV. Provincial Power and Intra-Imperial Conflict
On November 25, 1691, English Attorney General Sir George Treby approved William Phips’s commission as Captain General and Governor in Chief over the jurisdiction of the “colony of Massachusetts Bay, the Colony of New Plymouth, the Province of Main [sic] in New England, the territory of Acadie or Nova Scotia, and the Lands lying between the Territory of Nova Scotia and the province of Main [sic] aforesaid into One Real Province, by the name of the Province of the Massachusetts Bay in New England.”Footnote 47 The commission granted Phips full power to judge all offenders in capital and criminal matters, to grant pardons, and, critically, to remit all fines and forfeitures including captured vessels under maritime law. Phips had “full Power and authority to erect one or more court or courts administered within our said Province and Territory for the hearing and determining of all marine and other causes and matters proper.”Footnote 48 The sole stated exception to this grant of authority mandated that Phips had to refer all cases of treason to London.
Phips’s commission also granted him full power to levy and command military forces to any location within the stated territory and to construct fortifications and supply them with ammunition and ordnance. The approved commission granted Phips the formal military position of Vice Admiral for the “seas and Castles about your Government according to such Commissions Authorities and Instructions as you shall receive from Ourself or from our High Admirall [sic].”Footnote 49 Although the commission established a chain of deference to these authorities in London, Phips retained most practical powers that he had practiced prior to the commission including appointing and directing the activities of ship captains. The position also allowed Phips to punish “any offender or offenders which shall be mutinous, seditious, disorderly or any way unruly, either at sea or during the time of their abode or residence in any of the Ports, Harbours, or Bays of our said Province and Territory,” the exception being that Phips could not prosecute officers acting under direct authority of the High Admiralty.Footnote 50 The commission granted Phips significant power, although as the events prior to the commission indicate, Phips had exercised significant power over military matters before this formal recognition.
In the year following the approval of Phips’s commission, he made full use of his authority to procure wartime necessities. On July 2, 1692, Phips released an order to secure colonists who failed to appear at a militia muster to the officers of the Regiment of Boston. Phips combined civil and military authority to make demands of the local population. In addition to his initial order, Phips added that “all Constables of Boston and Charlestown are to be aiding & Assisting in the Execution of this warrant.”Footnote 51 He further instructed constables to aid in the collection of duties that merchants had avoided paying to that time, thus addressing deviations from mercantile law at the provincial level. In emphasizing the role of local constables in enforcing military participation and commercial compliance, Phips assumed the coercive capacity of a state consolidated within the province.
Phips used his executive authority to allocate resources in support of the provincial population rather than participating more broadly in the Atlantic anglosphere. For example, in September 1693, Phips responded to a proposal for the meeting of the colonial governments of New England, Virginia, Maryland, and Pennsylvania to “correct and agree upon a certain quota of men and money for the defense of the frontiers”Footnote 52 of New York. Phips rejected this proposal of a defensive union protecting an endangered region of the colonies. He cited the pressing need to retain resources within Massachusetts.Footnote 53
In his decision not to participate in the intercolonial defensive union, Phips also argued that Massachusetts’s participation had become unnecessary because Connecticut had already made an “alteration” to their colonial militia to transfer command to New York for the defense of Albany. Phips previously had command of these Connecticut forces and argued that he would have directed them to aid New York had he retained command. Given the costs the colony had then recently assumed in terms of both lives and resources, Phips decided that it would not be in the best interest of Massachusetts to participate in any union of defensive forces for the protection of the whole of the American colonies. Instead, he argued that Massachusetts had already taken on too significant a burden in combating French and Indian forces and, furthermore, had done so with little help from the other colonies. He noted specifically the public financial burden that conflict had placed on the government and people of Massachusetts with little aid from neighboring colonies, adding that the Massachusetts colonists “are so exhausted, and such a vast Debt contracted as is almost insupportable, and still continue to be at a very considerable growing Charge for the necessary guarding of the Frontiers of this Province.”Footnote 54 The methods for short term colonial war finance, by Phips’s account, fell on the colonial population in the form of a nearly unserviceable public debt. In the money-scarce colonial credit economy, expenses entailed credit obligations. Payments on credit necessitated finding some form of revenue to repay debtors.
The Bay Colony government relied on the more manageable short-term option of paper currency backed by public credit in the case of the Quebec expedition. This method afforded the colonial government greater time between expenditure and remittance so long as the recipient of the public note recognized its validity. However, as the scramble to make payments in silver following the expedition illustrates, recipients did not recognize this colonial paper as valid currency without redeemability in bullion. Consequently, Phips’s government faced political pressure for repayment every time it borrowed money to finance a military operation. This pressure placed the difficulties of overcoming monetary scarcity on the local government. Colonial leaders needed to accumulate a reserve to back its currency, or borrowing would risk the province’s public credibility.
The inadequacies of the colonial fiscal state when the central government in London failed to provide funds to support colonial military initiatives meant that the province had to limit its role in the war. Financial barriers imposed by the limitations of revenue collection urged Phips to limit the colony’s military efforts. This was a matter of ability more so than intention. Local priorities prevented participation in a wider intercolonial defensive coalition even if Phips and the Massachusetts colonial legislature wished to contribute to the defense of other colonies. For example, Massachusetts provided some military aid upon request of Governor John Usher and the Council in New Hampshire in the summer of 1692 for defense “from the Invasion of the French & Indian Enemy.”Footnote 55 This aid, however, did not entail large-scale diversion of resources from Massachusetts but only seven barrels of powder lent on the short term public credit of New Hampshire and backed by a future promise of mutual assistance with Usher stating that he “shall be ready to assist you as occasion shall offer.”Footnote 56 This quid pro quo relationship between Massachusetts and New Hampshire indicates that rather than one sovereign unit consolidated in defense against a common enemy, the colonies practiced a form of weak intercolonial political allegiance based on a calculated exchange of resources. Subsequent territorial conflicts and rights over military matters, disputed between Phips and Usher, illustrate this provincialized relationship between the colonial governments.
On May 26, 1693, Phips wrote to Usher concerning a complaint he had received from the merchant William Pepperell. Pepperell had complained to Phips that New Hampshire colonists had fired on his ship from the fort on Great Island as he transported a cargo to his home port of Kittery in Maine. The New Hampshire forces in the fort then commanded Pepperell, by his own account to “anchor under the Fort and the Master required to enter and unlade his Vessel at said Island, and the Vessel seized, the hatches sealed up, and … armed men put aboard her.”Footnote 57 Pepperell stated that the party that confiscated his vessel did so under the authority of a warrant from Usher, although they refused to produce a copy to Phips. Advocating for Pepperell against what he saw as an unjust seizure, Phips wrote that the “Vessell lies there to the great loss and damage of the owner, being ignorant of any Transgression committed.”Footnote 58 Phips’s argued that he had received similar prior complaints from other merchants and demanded Usher to inform him the reason why this confiscation occurred. Phips’s challenge to Usher arose from his concerns about the geographic extent of his authority and ability to enforce laws in accordance with his commission.Footnote 59 The dispute reflected a degree of atomization among the colonial governments whereby the needs of particular regions took priority over any consolidated union. Usher and Phips operated colonial governments that conflicted with one another on matters of enforcing rules within territories. Provincial governors like Phips only turned to England in cases when they wished to appeal to external authority to resolve disputes they could not otherwise resolve themselves.
Phips disputed the right for New Hampshire to confiscate Pepperell’s cargo because he argued that doing so was contrary to the intentions of the Crown. However, his attempt at resolving the issue, despite nominal appeal to crown authority, remained an intercolonial issue resolved between the correspondence of the governors rather than external appeals to England. This event also hinged on the issue of the right to confiscate property, a type of resource collection and military power that Phips’s commission had granted him. He disputed a similar right under Usher, however, in Pepperell’s case, specifically preempting the argument for right under jurisdiction.Footnote 60 Phips took a definitive position as the crown’s appointed executive in charge of Massachusetts as well as Pepperell, a colonist within that territory. Phips prioritized Massachusetts’s interests in opposition to those of other colonial government, the empire as a whole, and, at times, metropolitan authority in London.
Phips’s autonomy as a governor, and his regional support, separated him from and placed him in conflict with not only other colonial governments but with the Lords of Trade and Plantations. Beginning in July 1692, the Board of Trade initiated legal proceedings against Phips in response to complaints made against him. Between the summer of 1692 and January 1694, two controversies arose concerning Phips’s authority over military and commercial matters in New England. The first of these controversies concerned a naval captain named Richard Short who commanded the military ship Nonsuch. Short had an altercation with Phips in 1692 following Phips’s accusation that Short had permitted his men to illegally board private merchant vessels where they would work in exchange for wages. According to Phips, Short would take a cut of these wages himself, thus depleting military ships of necessary labor for his own personal gain. Phips also accused Short of misusing funds stored on the ship. Upon docking in Boston, Phips confronted Short about these charges. The confrontation escalated into a physical fight during which, according to the official report of the Lords of Trade, Phips “gave [Short] divers blows with his Cane.”Footnote 61 Although Phips did not deny this, several witnesses would attest that Short initiated the violent conflict. Phips then had Short imprisoned in the “Common Gaol” where Short argued “he was kept in illegal Imprisonment without Bail or mainprize” for 9 months. During this time, Phips did not permit anyone contact with Short unless he first granted permission.Footnote 62
Short remained in prison until freed by a writ of habeas corpus. He then returned to London and made his complaint against Phips. The Lords of Trade began compiling affidavits on the event, including from members of the crew of the Nonsuch, who made a characterization of Short as an ill-tempered captain whose incompetence and drunkenness had pushed the crew to the verge of mutiny. They further requested his replacement with a different, more respected member of the crew named Thomas Dobbins. This characterization of Short concurred with Phips’s initial written response to the accusation in which he noted that the crew had led an attempt to replace Short with the ship’s gunner while still in New England. Testimony from witnesses to the fight between Phips and Short proved slightly more ambiguous as to fault, but those who made definitive statements on the event concurred to varying degrees that Short, either through physical attack or insult, bore responsibility for first escalating the interaction.Footnote 63
Two considerations in Phips’s interaction with Captain Richard Short concerning the Nonsuch drew specific scrutiny from the Lords of Trade. First, Phips made the decision to confiscate the money chests onboard the Nonsuch. Phips justified this decision because of Short’s extravagant spending of public funds allocated to the ship, an accusation that the testimony of the crew supported. However, dispute as to Phips’s subsequent transference of these funds appears to have concerned the Lords of Trade. Phips would later respond to this accusation, arguing that he had directed all confiscated funds toward the public service rather than self-enrichment. Second, the Lords of Trade’s report indicated apprehension as to Phips’s approach to dealing with the problem. By imprisoning a naval officer, Phips’s indicated a lack of deference to established legal procedures. Short accused Phips of using his authority as Vice Admiral to bring a captured French prize ship to trial in Massachusetts. Much like the confiscated chest from the Nonsuch, this accusation also concerned Phips’s control over public wealth and resources arising from local authority in cases of military.Footnote 64
The suit against Phips concerning the French prize centered, in part, on the customary share owed to the crew that captured the vessel, which Phips acquired when his court condemned the ship. In New England, where no established legal profession had emerged, adjudication of commercial and military matters depended on local town and colonial authorities. Often these authorities drew what they could from English legal texts but otherwise operated as independent institutions with rules and customs fundamentally distinct from the more coherent, connected, common law institutions of England or the emerging law practices in official Vice Admiralty courts.Footnote 65 English merchants expressed their dismay about thus this irregular legal system. For example, Josiah Child decried the difficulty of adjudicating commercial disputes in the colonies, and outside of England generally. He noted that an English merchant had to bring writs of prohibition to the Court of the King’s Bench, a process that put significant costs on the merchant in terms of lost time and fees. Merchants had trouble getting the English courts to understand the complexities of the disputes because lawyers lacked knowledge of transatlantic commerce. Significantly, these courts did not accept paper financial and commercial instruments originating “from beyond Sea” as admissible evidence in the latter half of the seventeenth century.Footnote 66
In the localized colonial legal system, provincial authorities often organized courts for specific disputes, appointing local judges to decide given cases. Phips, using his appointed authority as Vice Admiral, created a court wherein he appointed himself judge. Phips alleged that “by his Commission he [was] authorized to hear adjudge and determine all Matters relating to the Admiralty in that Province, and for the purpose to Erect Courts.”Footnote 67 The black letter terms of his commission approved by the attorney general just 1 year earlier appear to support Phips’s interpretation of his right to this authority.Footnote 68 Practically, however, subsequent accusations brought suspicion on Phips from the Lords of Trade. They noted that “it does not appear that any Account has been made for any part of the said Prize to his Majesty, or for the share belonging to the Ships Company.”Footnote 69 This accusation of failure to transfer funds due to the ship’s crew as well as the crown followed a period of concern about the extent and lawfulness of Phips’s appropriations from private subjects for military purposes in New England. The Lords of Trade further accused Phips of appropriating guns from private ships to fit a “Ship and Brigantine, under pretense of their being employ’d for their Majesties’ Service” and “without taking care any satisfaction should be given to the said Owners.”Footnote 70 England had granted Phips military authority in accordance with the need to manage colonial participation in the ongoing war. However, they soon concluded that Phips intended to use this executive capacity in defiance of customary procedure when he felt it was an issue of necessary military expediency. Phips rejected Short’s claim that he had embezzled the French prize. He argued that he had put together accounts for all prizes and then reported them to the Lords of Admiralty, proof in his view that he had not defrauded the state.Footnote 71 Phips believed his choices were justified. He denied few of the specifics of his alteration of the standard procedure as described in the Lords of Trade’s report. Rather, he argued he had appropriately allocated resources for the necessity of local conflict.
Boston’s proximity to sites of North American conflict during King William’s War made it critical for the success of military expeditions against French Canada. Projecting power directly across the Atlantic proved prohibitive due to limitations of manpower and provisions. Consequently, successful ventures had to organize their plans through Boston, which served as a staging area to equip and man the military expeditions envisioned in London. The required timing, for such plans depended on the season and available resources within Boston at given times of the year. This use of American ports as places of military preparation for the American campaigns made corresponding through provincial government necessary. Officers like Francis Wheler often needed to exercise substantial foresight to arrange resources through intermediaries like Phips well in advance of arriving in North America. In June 1693, for example, Phips wrote to Wheler that he had awaited directions concerning plans from England concerning Wheler’s squadron, but advanced notice did not arrive, so Phips claimed that the “yeare [sic] being now too far advanced” to meet the full demands necessary for Wheler’s expedition.Footnote 72
Wheler ultimately could not pursue expeditions in Quebec or Newfoundland, due in part to inadequate resources and manpower available in New England. However, Wheler and Phips both believed that any potential for military success would depend on effectively tapping colonial resources and knowledge. Much like in the case of the failed Quebec expedition of 1690, the determining variable for military success was the ability to muster, allocate, and deploy resources and personnel from within New England. Wheler did not consider the direct employment of metropolitan financial resources to colonial conflicts as an option. Consequently, the de facto reality of colonial warfare was metropolitan reliance on provincial executive autonomy and, specifically, William Phips’s administration. England proved willing to cede some powers to Phips for the purpose of delegating decisions to local military experts, as evident in the initial terms of Phips’s commission. However, as in the case of the Lords of Trade’s concern over Phips’s response to Captain Richard Short and the Nonsuch, metropolitan English government did have clear limits to the extent of colonial control of resources and public finance. Metropolitan government saw sovereignty and deference on matters of commercial control as interconnected. Subsequent charges levied against Phips in 1693 and 1694 further illustrate this interconnection.
In November 1693, the Commissioners of the Customs in London made a formal complaint against William Phips based on a report of the customs official Jahleel Brenton. The Commissioners wrote that Brenton complained of Phips hindering the execution of his duties.Footnote 73 Much like the recent complaint that Richard Short levied against Phips a year earlier, Brenton accused Phips of publicly confronting and assaulting him. In this case, the confrontation arose from Brenton’s attempt to confiscate enumerated goods from a merchant vessel arriving in the port of Boston. Phips had already expressed general hostility toward the local custom office as conflicting in its purpose and jurisdiction with the Admiralty over which he exercised control. Much as in the earlier case of jurisdictional dispute with the confiscation of William Pepperell’s goods by New Hampshire officials, Phips again found himself as a voice for a specific mercantile interest against commercial controls and confiscations of officials other than himself.
Phips did not see authority over private trade as outside the purview of government. However, in the last 2 decades of the seventeenth century, and specifically given the economic requirements of King William’s War, Phips recognized that the viability of the colonial state he oversaw depended on private commercial participation. Where taxation capacity proved limited by monetary scarcity and a small population, any functional state apparatus required the voluntary contribution of capital, resources, and public financial work by well-networked local merchants. In exchange, these merchants sought protection against foreign predation, competition, and forms of governance less friendly to their trade. Phips’s conflict with Brenton and the Commissioners of Customs was more than ideological preference; it was a step necessary to maintain the political autonomy of a provincial government that had evolved to assume broad powers over money, goods, vessels, and men.
The Commissioners of the Customs presented Brenton’s complaint against Phips to the Lords of Trade, where they compiled it together with the former, strikingly similar, complaint by Richard Short. This second accusation, according to the board’s perspective, represented a clear violation of centralized imperial policy under the terms of the Navigation Acts. Phips, no stranger to metropolitan scrutiny, saw no immediate threat to his position even after the Lords of Trade summoned him to answer the charges in London in person. Phips expressed confidence in the legality of his interactions with Short and Brenton. Then amid war with the French and their Native allies, the logistics of Phips’s extraction from New England to attend the Board of Trade in London to answer these charges proved difficult. Engaged with concerns of local diplomacy, Phips had disconnected himself from political sentiment in England as well as Massachusetts.
At the beginning of 1694, Phips was negotiating peace with Abenaki forces at Fort William Henry in Maine when he was presented with the formal complaint against him. The security of Phips’s authority had weakened over the previous year due to a weakening of support among the Bay Colonies’ ministerial elite. Although long considered a favorite of the Puritan old guard since the dissolution of the Dominion of New England, some powerful colonists, most notably magistrate William Stoughton, had changed their opinion of Phips. His open criticism of their specially appointed Court of Oyer and Terminer in the Salem Witch Crisis strained the relationships between the governor and leading ministers. In January 1694, the Lords of Trade finalized their report containing the accusations against Phips and soon after recalled him to London. He arrived in London in January 1695 at which time he was arrested on the charge of conspiring to withhold money from customs. He died a month later, before his trial, from illness.Footnote 74
V. Conclusion: Provincial Practice as Limitation on Centralization
Writing in the mid-seventeenth century, Thomas Hobbes foresaw that opponents of his political doctrine would criticize it because of its alleged impracticality and absence of precedent. He wrote, “The greatest objection is, that of the Practise [sic], when men ask, where, and when, such Power has by Subjects been acknowledged.”Footnote 75 Hobbes realized that his political model would illicit repugnance based on norms of Western political doctrine and practice as it had evolved up to the English Civil War. As his opponents noted, even if governments might be persuaded in theory of the benefits of universal state sovereignty, entrenched habits and local allegiances could prove an insurmountable barrier to implementation. Hobbes made a counterargument that mirrored the modernizing impulses of would-be state makers over the following century. He wrote that the past could not necessarily be held as a model for the subsequent evolution of government and cited the civil turmoil of the 1640s and 1650s in England as proof of this point. The centralizing effort of the Navigation Acts and expanding territorial imperial expansion reflected this ideology of control and constructed order based on metropolitan knowledge and expertise on matters of statecraft. Under such a conception, the modern imperial state, especially on colonial matters, should prize dominance over accord. In this new vision of centralized politics, multicentered nodes of competing decisions, even if an evolved norm to that time, would by necessity conflict with the proper role of the state.
Expediency in times of colonial war only magnified the risk of decentralization from the perspective of English authorities. If someone like Phips could retain local support, they could leverage wartime expediency to consolidate power outside the oversight of the English state. Any effective attempt to consolidate English power demanded that such provincial authority be curtailed. King and Parliament increasingly came to see transatlantic commercial control as necessary for metropolitan consolidation. By bringing merchants and administrators into the fold of metropolitan politics, the empire imagined unified networks of financial obligations centered around one master node in London, completing their intended project of full commercial hegemony. London could recall Phips for threatening its sovereign control of the imperial fiscal system. However, the provincial economic conditions that created Phips remained.
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