Colonial America and American Political Development

Session Submission Type: Full Paper Panel

Session Description

The panel addresses how the political, social, religious, economic, and intellectual history of Britain’s North American colonies vitally inform us of American political development, where political scientists and APD scholars in particular have effectively ignored the colonial experience.

The four papers address the distinct legacies and implications of the British colonial rule in North America.

“The Unknown Founding,” by Bartholomew Sparrow, establishes the political impact of the immigration to the American colonies of hundreds of thousands of Europeans—a majority of colonists—who could not pay for their passage, were exiled as convicts and political prisoners, or who were abductees. European-American bonded servants have been studied extensively by a number of students of the American colonies, the British Empire, and the Atlantic World, but this “class” element has been missing from accounts of the Founding, the framers’ own lives, and American political development. The paper (a draft article) relies on archival and primary sources, on textual analyses of the Declaration, Articles of Confederation, US Constitution, and Federalist Papers, on primary and secondary research on lives of the framers, and on the extensive literature on colonial America and the Founding Era to show the prevalence of property-based colonial hierarchy and political discrimination among European Americans dating back to Jamestown and extending into the nineteenth century.

“The Family and the State: Colonial and APD Perspectives,” by Eileen McDonagh, examines the family and the state as analogous institutions. For James I, political rulers were the “parents of the people,” according to the kingship theory of the state. This view was accepted by American colonists who expected the English monarchs to be “good parents,” even as increasing dissatisfaction with British policies prompted growing numbers of American colonists to think of British monarchs as “bad parents.” The paper therefore explores how the American Revolution destroyed the kingship state theory, to be replaced by the liberal theory of the state which separates the family and the state into private and public spheres and which does not ever consider political rulers as parents. The paper analyzes the consequences of this binary regime reformulation for American political development in general and the development
of a welfare state in particular.

The third paper on the panel, “Whither the vortex?: The antecedents and implications of power migration across branches,” considers the evidence and reasoning used by the Antifederalists and Federalists to back their disparate claims. The former group held that either executives or the elite Senate would aggrandize power, whereas the latter warned that popular legislatures are an "impetuous vortex." Both cited political theories to support their claims. With passage of time, we are now in a position to at once assess their different claims and point out the lessons we can learn about how to maintain a system of government that separates powers.

Fourthly, “Fiction, State Building and Education Reform: Political Legacies from the Eighteenth Century,” by Cathie Jo Martin, offers a comparative angle to the panel. Her paper explores how cultural projects in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries had long-term legacies for political development. Fiction writers and their literary works were central to the cultural projects associated with nation-building and their early contributions to the foundation of national corpora of literature created crucial political legacies. Specifically authors created symbols and narratives about state, society and class that were reused and reworked by future generations. The assumptions embedded in these fictional works helped to shape future discourse over social and political problems. The paper uses computational linguistics methods and process tracing to shed light on authors’ contributions to education reform in Britain, Denmark and France.

Sub Unit

• Division 7: Politics and History

Individual Presentations

• The Unknown Founding: Bonded Servants, the White Poor, and APD - Bartholomew H. Sparrow, The University of Texas at Austin

• Whither the Vortex?: The Antecedents and Implications of Power across Branches - David Siemers, University of Wisconsin, Oshkosh

• Fiction, State Building and Education Reform: Legacies from the 18th Century - Cathie Jo Martin, Boston University

• The Production of Consensus and Cohesion in the Continental Congress - Richard F. Bensel, Cornell University

Chair

• Bartholomew H. Sparrow The University of Texas at Austin

Discussant

• James H. Read St. John's University/ College of Saint Benedict