Focusing on the province of New York, this book provides an exhaustive examination of the political system characteristic of the American colonies in the eighteenth century, and is the most comprehensive study yet of the interaction of English and American politics in the years before the Revolution. In Part I, Stanley Nider Katz discusses the impact of English politics and imperial administration on the colonies and the general conduct of Anglo–American politics. In Part II, he describes and analyzes in detail New York’s politics from 1732 to 1753 and New York’s relation to the complex web of administrative formalism and patronage that typified the England of the Duke of Newcastle, England’s principal colonial administrator during this era. The author’s conclusions have important implications for the study of the Revolution. During the first half of the eighteenth century, officials in England were relatively uninterested in the internal regulation of colonial affairs. After mid-century, however, the conduct of a major war required that the informality and flexibility of colonial politics give way to a more impersonal, rigid system, and New Yorkers were “forced to consider whether there was not, suddenly, some disparity between king and country.”
Hardcover
Number of pages: 285
The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press