During the Nine Years’ War, limitations of state capacity required that English imperial policy makers delegate substantial authority to provincial governors and assemblies in North American colonies. Proximity to sites of conflict, along with access to developed regional financial networks, gave provincial leaders relative efficiency when planning and executing military campaigns. Although useful in the short term, imperial policy makers considered the influence of provincial leaders like William Phips in Massachusetts to be a threat to their centralized authority in metropolitan London. Consequently, North American colonial wars revealed a tension in the transatlantic imperial relationship between the metropolitan English state and English colonies—namely, that peripheral expansion required delegation but that same delegation threatened central authority that English authorities considered necessary for sovereignty. This tension reached a breaking point on the issue of monetary policy. Phips’s advocacy for colonial monetary autonomy would ultimately provoke his removal as governor and imprisonment.
