Speaking in the House of Commons in March 1775, Edmund Burke delivered an impassioned attack on the administrative infrastructure of the British Empire. The “three thousand miles of ocean” separating London and the American colonies rendered metropolitan commands ineffectual: “Seas roll, and months pass, between the order and the execution; and the want of a speedy explanation of a single point is enough to defeat [a] whole system.” Only the colonies’ inherent “trust” and “interest in the British constitution” could bind them within the imperial framework. Burke was particularly dismissive of the key “contrivance” employed by government to bridge the oceanic distance and warned the Commons: “Do not dream that your letters of office, and your instructions, and your suspending clauses, are the things that hold together the great contexture of the mysterious whole. These things do not make your government. Dead instruments, passive tools as they are, it is the spirit of the English communion that gives all their life and efficacy to them. It is the spirit of the English Constitution which, infused through the mighty mass, pervades, feeds, unites, invigorates, vivifies every part of the Empire, even down to the minutest member.”Footnote 1
For Burke, forms of bureaucratic paperwork—the “letters of office,” “Instructions,” and other documents that the governing institutions of the British imperial state relied upon to communicate and enforce their authority—were ineffectual without a shared belief in “the spirit of the English constitution.” Yet Burke's veneration of the “constitution” as the binding glue of the British Atlantic world, against the bureaucratic formality of “dead” documents devoid of this constitutional “spirit,” was paradoxical when evaluated against the practices of imperial administration. While the British Empire was indeed governed by an imperial constitution, this article argues that documents were the mechanism through which its spirit was enforced. For nearly eight decades prior to the American Revolution, the institution responsible for circulating much of this paperwork was the Board of Trade, whose archive of “2,300 volumes” of “great, dead authorities” Burke ridiculed in 1780 as offering less insight into imperial affairs than the “small volume of common sense” contained in his mind.Footnote 2 He spoke from a position of intimate knowledge with the inner workings of imperial government, for, as the London agent for the New York colonial legislature in the 1770s, he had appeared before the board to lobby on behalf of the assembly's interests.Footnote 3 His attack raises a fundamental question: how did the Board of Trade use and manage documents, and what role did these documents play in imperial governance? In seeking to abolish the board, Burke also implicitly pointed to an issue that would manifest itself after the board's dissolution in 1783: what would happen to the vast number of volumes contained in its archive?
“Constitution” had multiple meanings in early modern political thought. Rather than connoting a codified, single document containing foundational principles of government, the term referred, in the words of the early eighteenth-century politician and political writer Lord Bolingbroke, to “that assemblage of laws, institutions and customs . . . that compose a general system” directed toward the achievement of the common good.Footnote 4 Historians have extensively mapped the divergence throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries between how the British imperial government and its subjects understood this constitution and the powers it conferred upon Parliament to legislate over the colonies. That scholarship engages with the concept of the constitution as a set of customary, birthright liberties enjoyed by British subjects that could not be abrogated by the sovereign.Footnote 5 It has also pointed to the broad meanings encapsulated by the use of the term “constitution” in early modern political discourse, especially the extent to which the concept referred not simply to legislation but also to the idea of the body politic as a well-“constituted” whole.Footnote 6 This was the constitution famously described by the jurist William Blackstone as a division of administrative power between “a single person” (the crown), “an aristocratical assembly” (the Lords), and “a kind of democracy” (the Commons). Blackstone wrote in his Commentaries on the Laws of England [1765–1769] that these bodies acted together “like three different powers in mechanics” to “jointly impel the machine of government in a direction . . . which constitutes the true line of the liberty and happiness of the community.”Footnote 7 Invoked by contemporaries in this sense, “constitution” referred to the balance of power both within the body politic and within the body's own internal divisions; especially important in this regard was the concept of “constitution” as a bureaucratic division of crown authority, which delegated administrative responsibility among different institutions.Footnote 8 This bureaucratic manifestation of royal prerogative turned imperial officials into bearers of the sovereign's authority and executors of its policy.
The imperial constitution of the British Atlantic world established the supremacy of royal rather than parliamentary authority in the governance of the American colonies, placing responsibility for administrative execution in bureaucratic institutions created and administered by the crown. Crown-appointed bureaucrats remained central to the administration of empire even as Parliament more aggressively asserted that it was the supreme sovereign of empire and possessed the ultimate authority to legislate for the colonies.Footnote 9 Over the past few decades, scholar have mapped the ideological contours of the imperial constitution as it was manifested in law, bureaucratic custom, and administrative policy. Jack Greene, Jack Sosin, Mary Sarah Bilder, Daniel Hulsebosch, and Ken MacMillan have characterized the constitution as an evolving set of tensions related to the distribution of power between imperial administrative institutions in the metropole and local, colonial bodies within the “extended polity” of the empire.Footnote 10 Within this literature, there is an emphasis on the complex constitutional problems raised by the crown's issuance of one particular form of bureaucratic document: charters. More accurately known as “letters patent,” charters were documents granted to proprietors (private interests), corporate bodies, and, in some cases, royal colonies, which invested the recipient to act with the authority of the sovereign in the justification of territorial claims and the design of local government.Footnote 11 A second line of inquiry in the literature explores the evolution of ideas about the legitimacy and nature of imperial power in metropolitan and provincial political thought and culture, especially in relation to evolving ideas about the nature of king-in-council and king-in-Parliament sovereignty over the empire.Footnote 12 A third and comparatively less explored axis defines “constitution” in terms of the internal culture of imperial bureaucratic governance: the intellectual and institutional edifice through which the crown sought to “constitute” authority over both the colonies and its own bureaucratic servants, such as governors, judges, and customs agents.Footnote 13
This article contributes to this third area of inquiry by investigating how imperial constitutional norms manifested in the bureaucratic technology of documents. It has long been fashionable to observe that at least at the level of doctrinal substance, the British state lacked a “written constitution.” But this assertion masks a more complicated relationship between constitutional form and governing practice: the reliance of the imperial state upon written documents as tools for enforcing norms of bureaucratic performance, in spite of no single codified text upon which its legitimacy rested.Footnote 14 Through the mundane technology of paper, the constitutional edifice of empire was enacted and sustained across vast oceanic distances. Examining bureaucratic practices alongside doctrinal substance, this article examines how the imperial state used documents to structure and deploy constitutional norms, with specific reference to that administrative body that Burke ridiculed: the Board of Trade.
As recent scholarship has emphasized, politicians and political philosophers in England from the late Elizabethan period onward argued that effective government required the organized collection, collation, and use of information to execute its administrative tasks, including the development of attendant bureaucratic practices of writing, circulation, and archiving.Footnote 15 Furthermore, over the course of the seventeenth century, English political culture was characterized by a pronounced emphasis in both rhetoric and practice on the need for mechanisms that would render officials accountable to superior authorities for their actions in office.Footnote 16 In both early modern England and its continental rivals, the archive emerged as a crucial tool through which governments pursued these twin imperatives of data collection and administrative accountability.Footnote 17 The crown's assertion of oversight over colonial settlement in the English Atlantic world in the mid seventeenth century saw metropolitan administrators articulate these expectations for imperial administration and specify paper as the technology through which these expectations would be implemented and enforced.
The Board of Trade used documents to enforce bureaucratic norms in a manner that reflected its peculiar administrative role and its core policy priority: the imposition of control over colonial governments through eliminating provincial challenges to royal sovereignty. Growing out of previous councils of trade, the board lacked independent executive authority to generate and enforce policy. Rather, it operated as an advisory body whose influence upon policy depended upon convincing the Privy Council, the secretary of state, and Parliament to pursue its counsel.Footnote 18 At the same time, the board's commission empowered it to investigate and inquire into imperial affairs. Its execution of this power through correspondence with the colonies and interviews with experts generated a substantial archive of documents and papers. Possessed of knowledge but deprived of power to make (rather than simply advise on) policy, the board circulated and used documents to advance a consistent vision of the imperial constitution as rooted in crown sovereignty rather than proprietary right or Parliamentary control, from its founding to the end of the American Revolution.Footnote 19 The vast oceanic distances between the metropole and its governed territories meant that personal appearances at court, previously the main way to demonstrate obedience to the sovereign, were increasingly impractical. Instead, royal intention and administrative deference were now enacted through paperwork, as part of an attempt to render the empire into a uniformly governed space, despite its local diversity.Footnote 20 As this article shows, central to the Board of Trade's transaction and enforcement of these constitutional norms was its circulation of precisely those documents that Burke dismissed: “Instructions” to governors detailing the modes and expectations of official conduct, and an interrelated form, “Queries,” which sought to gauge governors’ compliance to these norms and reinforce their importance. However, due to the board's advisory rather than executive role within the administrative configuration of the British imperial state, its impact depended upon the adoption of its advice by powerful officers of state. This article concludes by tracing the fate of the board's archive after the body was disbanded. Even after its administrative dismantling, its archive continued to be used by bureaucrats in a manner consistent with the ends of enforcing metropolitan visions of administrative practice within the empire.
The Archival Organization of Imperial Documents
The imperial archive was born through the crown's exertion of authority over English colonization in the early seventeenth century. In response to the failure of the Virginia Company's Jamestown settlement, the Privy Council created a series of commissions to investigate the company's management. During the first of these commissions, the Privy Council issued an order in 1623 demanding that “all charters, books, letters, and any other writings belonging to the plantations of Virginia and the Somers Islands be delivered to the Commissioners for those plantations, and that all boxes and packets of letters hereafter brought over from those parts . . . be immediately delivered . . . to be . . . broken open, perused, and disposed of, as they shall find cause.”Footnote 21 The council established that it would possess and manage “all charters, writings, and seals of the Company,” which were to be “left in custody of the clerk and used by the Commissioners at their pleasure.”Footnote 22
The council's demand for the Virginia Company's documents inaugurated a practice of metropolitan command for documentary evidence of compliance and good governance from imperial officials or commissioned bodies. Metropolitan officials in subsequent Instructions to governors in English (and then British) America, repeated the order to regularly return paperwork, enforcing a center-periphery relationship that placed the American colonies under the administrative jurisdiction of the crown.Footnote 23
These documents formed the basis of an imperial archive whose system of organization coalesced during the 1670s under the Council for Foreign Plantations (1670–1672) and its successor, the Council for Trade and Foreign Plantations (1672–1674). The Council for Foreign Plantations kept three kinds of records—a “Journal” recording its proceedings, a book of general letters into which it copied correspondence, and a series of “entry-books” that classified papers under different titles. The Council for Trade and Foreign Plantations continued these practices and added two new letter-books of “In-Letters” from the colonies and “Out-Letters” to them, with indexes of entries made at the back of each letter-book.Footnote 24 Between 1675 and 1696, the Privy Council formed a series of Committees of Trade and Plantations.Footnote 25 At each new establishment, the council instructed the preceding committee to deliver its records to the succeeding body. Thus, in the commission establishing the first of these committees in 1675, the Privy Council demanded that any member of the previous bodies “who have or shall have any Books, Papers, or Writings touching any matter or thing acted or done” in relation to the governance of the colonies “deliver or cause the same to be delivered” to the new administrators.Footnote 26 On 13 March 1675, the committee formally ordered “that all Bookes and Papers which were lately on possession of the Councill of Plantations be enquired after and taken into the Councill office, and that a true List of all such Papers be made, Also that Enquiry be made for Globes, Mappes, Sea Charts, and Journalls.”Footnote 27 At the committee's next meeting, on 18 March, John Locke, acting as “late Secretary of the Councill of Plantations,” provided a “list of all such Papers as he received” but reported that he had never received any “Globes and Mapps,” prompting further demands for these to be transferred.Footnote 28
Over the course of its existence, the committee largely accumulated records in a similar manner, ordering clerks to previous councils of trade to surrender documents, instructing imperial bureaucrats to deliver any papers in their private possession, and expanding the inherited archive through the issuance of orders, the generation of minutes, and the receipt of documents from governors and imperial officials.Footnote 29 This burgeoning body of records was placed under the management of the committee's clerks, whom it reimbursed on 11 July 1676 for the cost of “stationary Ware” and “Paper Bookes” for writing and keeping records.Footnote 30
The committee used this archive as a source of precedent, consulting the documents to determine ways of governing in line with previous practices and organizing the collection to facilitate this end. For example, at its 24 May 1675 meeting, the committee ordered “a generall Collection” of all “Commissions and Instructions given to foreign Governors,” a “List of the Governors’ Names,” and “all Charters relating to Grants in America.” The committee wanted these documents arranged in this manner so that “that it may appear to the Lords at what time, and by what means they came under the Sovereignty of His Majesty, and in what Manner They now hold and depend upon him.”Footnote 31 Similarly, when it considered the complaint of a British captain regarding “reparation” for the seizure of his ship in Jamaica by the Spanish, the committee ordered “that the Councill Bookes be searched for all the late Complaints of hardshipps don his Majesty's Subjects by those of Spain.”Footnote 32
The secretaries associated with this Committee of Trade—Robert Southwell, who briefly served in mid-1675, and then his successor, William Blathwayt—instituted a system for organizing the documents. Following the 24 May directive to prepare collections of charters, commissions, and instructions, Southwell informed his superiors that “it was impossible for him to make searches up and down in the offices and put together the Patents and Charters of all the Plantations . . . without some help.” The committee then moved to make “some allowances” to hire more clerks.Footnote 33 After an accident incapacitated Southwell in early 1676, the task of organizing the records fell to Blathwayt. Blathwayt's method of arranging the committee's papers by geographic region was modeled after the system instituted in the State Paper Office by Sir Joseph Williamson for the organization of diplomatic correspondence. Blathwayt was familiar with Williamson's system, having served as a clerk to Sir William Temple during the latter's ambassadorship at The Hague, during which time he corresponded with and procured manuscripts for Williamson.Footnote 34 Blathwayt thus implemented an archiving regime for the central administration of the English Atlantic colonies based on a system of information management that originated in the context of managing foreign relations. Under Blathwayt, the entry book system expanded to encompass distinct books for each colony, in which were recorded all incoming and outgoing correspondence and related papers concerned with the specific place.Footnote 35 In the initial entry book for a given colony, the board's clerks usually began by copying the colony's charter and then copying the earliest records related to the colony. They included both the records generated by bureaucrats in the colony and the proceedings of metropolitan institutions, especially the Privy Council, touching on the affairs of that colony. These books also contained an index of each volume's contents.Footnote 36 Subsequent entry books followed this design of copying records into a single book and then indexing them.Footnote 37
The establishment of the Board of Trade in 1696 placed these advisory and investigatory powers on what would become a more durable institutional foundation. The board's creation was the result of William III's efforts to assert monarchical authority over the administration of empire in the aftermath of the dissolution of the Dominion of New England and the crisis of state finance resulting from wars with France.Footnote 38 Inherent in this program was the crown's effort to assume control over all records related to imperial governance. The Privy Council's commission to the board thus empowered it to take into its care “all Records, Grants and Papers remaining in the Plantation Office or thereunto belonging.”Footnote 39 When the board first met in Whitehall on 25 June 1696, the commissioners began by appointing a secretary, William Popple, to manage the office's written correspondence and archive.Footnote 40 The board spent early meetings renovating rooms in Whitehall for its office spaceFootnote 41 and contracting with a stationer “to furnish this Board with all sorts of Stationary Ware proper for their Service.”Footnote 42 An order was issued to Thomas Povey, the clerk of its predecessor, the Committee of Trade, “for the Books & Papers of the late Plantation Office” to be transferred to the board's possession.Footnote 43 These papers were delivered between July and August 1696.Footnote 44 Popple, who now as first secretary of the board had responsibility over the management of these papers, created an inventory describing the transferred records. He assigned the papers twenty-one subject headings, mostly corresponding to the relevant colony or corporate body to which they pertained. Papers within each subject heading were grouped into bundles, each assigned a letter designation. For example, “Papers relating to New England” were grouped into eight bundles labeled A through H. Each document was assigned a number according to its place within each bundle, which in the inventory of the transferred records was arbitrary; it was not based on the size or date of the paper, and papers were not arranged in chronological order either within or across bundles.Footnote 45 After a fire in Whitehall in December 1699, the board ordered the secretary to transcribe records into copybooks as a means of “securing the Books and Papers in this office” from damage, and obtained “a Competent Number of Sacks . . . for carrying away the said Books upon any such accident.”Footnote 46
The board's duties included drafting commissions and instructions to governors for review and approval by the Privy Council, advising the council upon demand on issues of colonial policy, and corresponding with the governors of the colonies.Footnote 47 At each of the board's meetings, members considered the information contained in documents received from the colonies and other offices of state and decided on courses of action in response. Until the 1770s, the chief clerk of the board recorded in the meeting minutes the titles of documents received from the colonies. The documents from each royal colony (in which the governor was directly appointed by the crown) were filed within their own series, while documents from proprietary colonies (where the crown granted private interests known as proprietors the right to govern) were classified under a heading of “Proprietaries.” If they became royal colonies, they too were filed in a distinct series. There were also more general series, such as “Plantations General,” in which documents deemed to pertain to multiple colonies were filed; “Miscellanies”; and “Trade,” a category that began in 1717 and absorbed three previous series: “Trade Foreign,” “Trade Domestic,” and “Trade and Fishery.” After the board had considered a document, the clerk assigned it a letter corresponding to the bundle to which it was to be assigned, gave it a number in terms of all of the documents in each bundle, and then filed it in the bundle. The clerk recorded the title of the document, initially in an entry book (assigned a letter) and later in a numbered register. From 1703, the board's clerks began to generate separate “calendars” listing documents in small paper books corresponding to each bundle.Footnote 48 Around this time, it seems, clerks also began creating indexes listing papers according to several modes of categorization. Some of these indexes simply listed papers within a bundle in order of appearance in the file, by date of creation, or under subject keywords (such as “Admiralty,” “Africa,” or “Plantations”).Footnote 49 Other indexes were more elaborate: in addition to listing papers under keywords, they included cross-references to the entry of the paper's receipt as recorded in the board's “Journal,” the entry book in which the paper had been recorded, and the place of the paper in the bundle.Footnote 50 The crown's vision of the imperial constitution thus manifested itself bureaucratically in an archival system that centered and organized imperial information in the sovereign's hands.
Enforcing the Constitution through Documents
In its commission, the Privy Council empowered the Board of Trade with the duties of “promoting the Trade of this our Kingdom” and “Inspecting and Improving Our Plantations in America.” To that end, the council demanded that the board regularly produce “Representations to be made in writing” on the state of colonial governance. The council required that the board regularly investigate the administrative situation of the colonies by “send[ing] for Persons and Papers, for your better information.”Footnote 51 The Privy Council thus made the regular return of documents from imperial officials, foundational to earlier instantiations of royal government over the colonies, central to the function of the modern board.
A key mode of the council's method of discipline through documents was through the issuance of Instructions and questionnaires.Footnote 52 Early Councils of Trade had used these instruments for two overlapping ends. First, they used them in order to solicit information essentially unknown in the metropolis but deemed useful for making imperial policy. Second, Instructions and queries helped metropolitan authority enforce expectations of good governance to bureaucrats in the colonies. Thus, in issuing Instructions to George Yardley, governor of Virginia in 1626, the Privy Council commanded him to “diligently and particularly enquire by Oath and all other lawfull means” into the affairs of the Virginia Company by answering a set of questions, including those about the status of the “Land, Goods, Servants, Houses” and other property possessed by the Company and “What Arms, Amunicion, Boats, or Shops, Dwelling Houses, & other Buildings” had been constructed by the company.Footnote 53 Similarly in April 1676, the Committee of Trade dispatched a list of twenty-seven questions, referred to as “Heads of Inquiry,” to the Somers Island Company, explaining that, having been entrusted by the Privy Council with “the care and management of things relating to [His Majesty's] plantations,” “wee doe not as yet find ourselves enabled to give His Majesty such account of the state and condition of that Colony as the Royal Service and the dependance thereof upon the Crown does require, Wee have therefore thought of it to send you . . . some Heads of Inquiry here annext, the better to guide you in the method of that state and representation of things which wee expect from you, and doe desire it may be done with all convenient speed.”Footnote 54
These Heads of Inquiry ranged from the administrative—“What Councils, Assemblys, and Courts of Judicature are within your Islands, and of what nature and kind”—to the geographic—“What Rivers, Harbors, and Roads are within your Islands, and of what depths and soundings they are”—to the quantitative “What Rates and Duties are charged and payable upon any goods exported out of your Plantation, whether of your own growth, manufacture, or otherwise, as also upon goods imported.”Footnote 55 The committee made clear that the queries were intended to solicit information for the Privy Council and to “guide” the company administrators on the expectations and proper methods of administration.
When the Board of Trade was established in 1696, it continued using similar methods of gathering knowledge about the colonies, and communicating the crown's expectations of proper governance to colonial officials.Footnote 56 To gain otherwise unknown information about the colonies, the board intermittently sought advice in the form of questionnaires from those it considered as experts on the subject under review. On 6 October 1696, the board received an unsolicited memorial from Edward Randolph, surveyor general of customs and supporter of greater crown control over the empire. Proposing methods for “the improvement of Virginia,” Randolph offered a “Remedy” for what he described as the problematic method by which land was distributed in the colony, putting forward a set of suggestions for its better administration.Footnote 57 In response to Randolph's memorial, the board asked him to answer further “Enquiries concerning the Methods and Practices of that Country” and to propose “Methods” to remedy the situation.Footnote 58 Similarly, in 1697, the board solicited answers to thirty-seven questions on the administration of Virginia from Henry Hartwell, clerk to the colony's council, on issues ranging from the type of “matters” discussed in the colony's council to the kinds of “causes” that came before the colony's General Court.Footnote 59
The board regularly circulated queries to governors in order to ensure that administrative practices in the colonies conformed to its expectations.Footnote 60 On 24 September 1696, the board sent letters to Edmond Andros, governor of Virginia, and Francis Nicholson, governor of Maryland, explaining that “it is his Majesty's Pleasure and Expresse Command that the Governours of all his forreigne Plantations do from time to time give unto Us frequent and full information of the State and condition of their respective Governments and Plantations, as well with regard to the Administration of the Government and Justice in those places, as in relation to the Commerce thereof.” The board instructed the governors to “transmit unto Us yearly accounts of their said Administration,” copies of “the Acts of the Assemblies” passed, and “exact Accounts of all moneys given for public uses”—that is, firsthand observations and knowledge that these governors had been instructed “to observe” in relation to the colony. The board “desire[d]” that Andros and Nicholson answer twenty specific questions on topics ranging from population (including the number of inhabitants in the colony and the relative increase or decrease during the governors’ tenure) to trade (with questions concerning the kinds of commodities produced and exported, and methods used to prevent illegal trade) to relations with indigenous peoples. The board concluded by inviting the governors to add to their answers “whatever else you may in your own prudence think conducive to his Majesties Service to the Interest of England, to the Advantage of what particular Province and to Our Assistance in the Discharge of the Trust reposed in Us.”Footnote 61
Andros replied on 22 April 1697, copying the queries onto one side of a booklet, writing his corresponding answer directly across on the opposite side, and distinguishing the answers from each other with a dash above and below each consecutive response.Footnote 62 For example, asked what “present methods” were being “used to prevent illegall trade & what further methods” would be “adviseable for that purpose,” Andros wrote that the current practice involved stationing “officers of the Customes in the Severall Rivers” to inspect ships, and suggested that a further reform might involve “Appointing particular Places for Loading or unloading of Goods.”Footnote 63
Members of the board responded to Andros's answers by articulating expectations for the proper completion of bureaucratic documents. Although they found his answers to be “Methodical,” the administrators still had “some few things to remark” on both the form and content of Andros's replies. His response to the question on illegal trade was “not distinct,” for he had failed to be clear whether he was describing the current state of it in the colony or prescribing methods for its eradication: “There is no expression in it to signify whether ye. Heads of which it consists are all of them non-practised, or only thought adviseable by you to be practised.” His answers to the number of ships and seamen in Virginia and the quantities of naval stores were also “imperfect” and needed to be “more particular.” Problematic as well was his failure “to send over a Compleat Body” of laws of Virginia “together with your opinion thereupon.” The board reminded him, “It is in your Instructions in those plain words viz.t That it may be better understood which Acts and Laws are in force—You are required with the assistance of the Council to send over a Compleat Body of those that are so, with your opinion” and that “therefore we must positively require from you with all Expedition.” The board concluded their letter with “one word about matter of rule and method, which we desire may be observed for the future”: “It is, that all writings whatsoever to be transmitted from thence have four Margents, capable to receive the Notes which there may be occasion to make upon them; That in the Journals and other Publick Transactions, the Heads of each Matter be minuted and set down in the Margent, by the Officers who transcribe them; and that all Papers whatsoever; even Petitions, Addresses or any thing of y.e like nature, be constantly Dated.” The board concluded, “These little Rules we esteem usefull to be observ'd; And therefore you would accordingly, give orders to all persons respectively, where you understand it to be requisite.”Footnote 64 The board subsequently followed up by sending Andros “a Ream of Paper, ruled in the forme which their Lordships conceive proper for the uses intimated to you” in the letter.Footnote 65
The governor replied by apologizing for “the rude Dress the Laws are put in,” which he blamed on “having neither Towns nor Tradesmen to furnish us with what we want” in the way of paper supplies.Footnote 66 He informed the board that he had “given directions to all Officers of Rules and Methods commanded by your Lordships to be observed in all writings whatsoever to be transmitted to your Lordships.”Footnote 67 When his subsequent replies caused the board to doubt his ability to adhere to these prescribed writing practices, he sought to reassure them of the integrity of Virginia's recordkeeping. For example, in October 1698, he informed the board that a “sudden fire broke out in a house joyned on the Statehouse which in a very short time wholly burnt it,” but “all the Records and Papers” were saved. The documents “being in Confusion” upon their salvaging, Andros continued, he had “by advice in Council order[ed] their being sorted and listed,” and the papers would soon “be kept in a brick house in James Town, where the Court also appointed to sit till further Order.”Footnote 68 Andros had clearly come to appreciate what the board had articulated and reemphasized upon finding his writing of forms wanting: that correct recordkeeping was essential to good governance.
Like the earlier Councils of Trade, the board encoded these expectations for recordkeeping in documents of “Instruction” to governors. In an era when patronage connections rather than expertise often informed decisions about official appointments, Instructions trained bureaucrats in the state's expectations of good conduct.Footnote 69 Previous councils of trade had communicated such expectations to officials by sending legal “acts” to colonies for governors and colonial councils to follow.Footnote 70 The board's Instructions codified and regularized the dispatch of these administrative directions into a single document. In the Instructions, the board detailed its expectations to governors for the conduct of administration in a given colony, distilling the spirit of the imperial constitution into a set of actionable directives.Footnote 71
These expectations included protocols for the production, transmission, and handling of administrative documents. The Instructions codified the board's guidance to governors on the proper writing and return of records. Governors were instructed to send the “Names and Qualities” of members of their council and to “transmit authentick Copies . . . of all Laws, Statutes and Ordinances . . . within Three Months or Sooner of their being Enacted, together with Duplicates thereof . . . upon pains of Our Highest Displeasure, and the forfeiture of that years Salary.” The governor was to “require the Secretary of Our Province or his Deputy . . . to provide Transcripts of all such Acts and Publick Orders, as shall be made from time to time, together with a Coppy of the Journal of the Councill.”Footnote 72 Governors of colonies where the board saw practices as lapsing received special directives to “make inspection” into “the State and Management” of the office and “take all possible care that the Records of the Said Office be well and faithfully kept.”Footnote 73 The board also began to train governors in keeping specific kinds of records, including clauses directing the creation of registers of ships entering colonial ports and examples of how such registers should be written.Footnote 74 The board reiterated these imperatives in the additional Instructions on trade and the enforcement of the Navigation Acts, which it began issuing to governors from 1701.Footnote 75
In 1702, however, the board's concentration of bureaucratic documentation about the empire was undermined by the newly appointed secretary of state, the Earl of Nottingham. Undercutting the board's monopoly on imperial documents, Nottingham instructed governors to correspond with him directly and “from time to time . . . acquaint me with such things as occur in your parts.”Footnote 76 His successor, the Earl of Sunderland, similarly directed the board to send him all papers it wished to submit to the Privy Council.Footnote 77 Under the Earl of Halifax, the situation was temporarily changed through an order in council of 11 March 1752 directing governors to correspond directly with the board and only correspond with the secretaries of state on matters “requiring more immediate Directions.”Footnote 78 However, in 1766, the Earl of Hillsborough again altered the situation by ordering governors to correspond directly with him as secretary of state and send only duplicates of papers to the board.Footnote 79 This turned the Board of Trade's role yet again into one of dependency on the secretary of state's office, a position cemented by Hillsborough's ascension as president of the board in July 1768. Occupying both offices simultaneously, Hillsborough instructed governors that they “need not . . . for the future be at the trouble of transmitting to [the board] duplicates of your dispatches to my office, but confine yourselves to one channel of correspondence” directly with the secretary of state.Footnote 80 Although the secretary of state revived the board's correspondence power in 1780, the exigencies of the American war neutralized its efficacy.Footnote 81
The secretary of state's encroachments upon the Board of Trade's correspondence powers redefined the meaning of its archive. The board could no longer make direct policy suggestions based on these documents, and with the increasing direction of imperial correspondence to the secretary of state from 1703, it no longer controlled the flow of bureaucratic communication within the administrative apparatus of the British state. Thus, the board's role was largely to forward documents from the Americas in response to demands for information from other administrative bodies about the colonies.Footnote 82 The most important bodies to place demands on this archive were the Privy Council, Parliament, and crown lawyers. Responding to an order from the House of Commons in March 1700 requiring the board “to lay before the House an account of their proceedings for improvement of trade,” it reiterated its power “to make constant Enquiries into the Condition of his Majesties Plantations in America, as well with Regard to the Administration of Government, as in relation to Commerce,” to “Correspond with all the … Governours and other Officers in the public Administration,” and, on the basis of this correspondence, to “make Representations . . . of what may Occur to Us upon the Heads and matters aforesaid.”Footnote 83 The board entertained a steady stream of orders in council from the Privy Council directing it to “examine and Report” on a variety of issues related to imperial governance and to communicate and enforce conciliar dictates to governors and colonial assemblies.Footnote 84 It also supplied documents to Parliament upon request and provided the attorney and solicitor generals with copies of old laws for their use in evaluating the constitutionality of current colonial legislation.Footnote 85
As well, the board entertained requests for documents from private individuals. On 8 July 1701, it considered a memorial from Thomas Hodges “desiring leave to peruse the Laws of the Island of Barbadoes, the Commissions and Instructions to all the Governors to that Island, and the Journals of their Courts that have been lately received.” Hodges wanted copies of these documents in order to support a complaint against Lord Grey, the governor, who had imposed a law stating that all appeals of judicial sentences had to be made to the council “within a fortnight after Sentence.” By comparing these documents to the governor's law, Hodges could assess the constitutionality of the governor's policy. As he argued, “Since it is of great Importance to all persons interested in the said Island to know the rules and Laws by which they are to be Governed, being thus interested I humbly desire I may at convenient times have liberty to peruse the Laws of that Island, and the Commissions & Instructions to this and the several preceding Governors, which are Lodged in the Plantation Office.” He continued,
Tho the Commission & Instructions to the Governor that now is, by the present Rule, and may be thought by Some only necessary to be known; yet nothing is more evident then that the knowledge of former Commissions and Instructions is Absolutely Necessary in many Cases for such as have Suites depending in that Island, as I am ready to demonstrate if your Lordships shal think it necessary; but the Laws & Records of all Nations, (as well those Antiquated as others) being open to the Search and perusal of all their Subjects, there is reason to hope that this request may be granted.Footnote 86
In response to Hodges, the board articulated a distinction between “public” and “private” records. While the board was willing to allow him the “perusal” of the Laws “passed and promulgated” in the colonies, it stated that the king's Instructions to governors were “private Rules which are not to be communicated even to the respective Councils but upon particular Occasions, and not to be exposed to public view.”Footnote 87 When the board received a request in October 1701 from one Jeronimy Clifford, “complaining of injuries done him by the Dutch at Surinam” and requesting “leave to inspect the Books in the Office relating to Surinam, and to take Copies of such Papers as he may find Serviceable to him,” the board responded that they did not “think fit to permit the Inspection of all the Books.”Footnote 88
When requests for information came from the Privy Council, the board used the opportunity to solicit conciliar approval for its policy agenda. The most prominent example evolved out of the Privy Council's request for a meeting with the board on 15 July 1720.Footnote 89 The council's immediate motivation for calling the meeting and the topics discussed are unclear, given that the council did not keep a record in its minutes of it or the subsequent meeting with the board.Footnote 90 The board reported the outcome of its discussion with the Privy Council in its own meeting minutes of 19 July 1720: “Upon their return, having taken into consideration the subject matter of their discourse with the Lords Justice,” the board “gave direction to the Secretary for preparing several heads for a representation on the present state of the Government and Trade of His Majesty's several plantations on the continent of America, in order to lay the same with all convenient speed before their Excellencies.”Footnote 91
These “heads of representation” consisted of twenty-one “Queries relating to His Majesty's Plantations” seeking geographic, demographic, commercial and political information, sent by the board to colonial administrators and merchants based in London. They included the former governor of Nova Scotia, Samuel Vetch; Jeremiah Dummer, colonial agent for Massachusetts and Connecticut; Robert Hunter, in his last year as governor of New York and New Jersey; the merchant and writer Joshua Gee, who was closely associated with William Penn, proprietor of Pennsylvania; John Hart, who had been governor of Maryland in the 1710s; Nathaniel Blakiston, former governor of Maryland and in 1720 the agent for Virginia; and Joseph Boone, agent for Carolina. Each of these figures possessed local knowledge of the colonies through prior work as governors, agents, and merchants. The twenty-one queries focused heavily on finance, with many questions on trade (“6. What Trade has the Colony under your Government”; “7. What methods are there used to prevent illegal trade, and are the same Effectual?”) and revenue and budget (“19. What is the Revenue arising within Your Government; and how is it appropriated?”; “20. What are the Ordinary & Extraordinary Expences [sic] of your Government?”), as well as the constitutional structure of government (“1. What is the Situation of ye Colony under your Government?”; “3. What is the Constitution of the Government?”).Footnote 92 Beginning with the receipt of Hunter's reply of 11 August 1720, the board received a steady stream of responses to these queries over the remainder of 1720 through the first half of 1721.Footnote 93
In their replies, respondents described colonial governments as operating both in conformity with and in degrees of divergence from metropolitan expectations.Footnote 94 Several emphasized that their colony's administration was, as Hart wrote of Pennsylvania, “conformable to the Rules laid down” in the charters. They also emphasized the compliance between local practices of administration and those “patterns” laid down in the “Instructions to the Governor,” in the words of Robert Hunter of New Jersey.Footnote 95 But in practice, many of the respondents noted, government in their colonies was insufficiently well established, a situation some attributed to a reason that fit neatly with the board's own interest: insufficient crown control. In answering the question of the “constitution of the government” of the Carolina colony, for example, Joseph Boone, the colony's agent, and John Barnwell, an army officer active in pushing for royal control over the colony, wrote that “it is difficult to describe its Real Constitution under the Proprietaries, for they made so many Alterations & Soe many Fundamental Constitutions, and soe many Rules of Government that it became a heap of Confusion.”Footnote 96 This insufficient establishment of royal sovereignty, the respondents stressed, led to a loss of revenue for the imperial state. As Samuel Vetch wrote for Nova Scotia, “As to Revenues there are as yet none,” for there was no “Assembly and Civil Government to grant the same,” which in turn “can hardly be until the Country be settled with British subjects.”Footnote 97
From late 1720 through mid-1721, the board prepared the report for the Privy Council, documenting its “further progress” in preparing its “representation” in its meeting minutes and dispatched the completed report to the council on 8 September 1721.Footnote 98 Describing the geography, local economy, and government of each colony, the board drew on information from both the answers to the queries and the entry books for each colony.Footnote 99 The board argued for stricter enforcement of the Instructions and tighter royal control over proprietary and charter colonies. While “the Laws & constitutions of your Majesty's Colonies are copied from those of Great Britain,” the report lamented that they “[fell] short of them in many particulars” and had only been “corrected & amended by your Majesty's Instructions to the respective Governors of the different Colonies under your Majesty's immediate government.”Footnote 100 Obedience to these Instructions, the report continued, “might be rendered still more perfect, if your Majesty's Commands met with due obedience in the proprietary & Charter Governments”; “the entire, absolute, & immediate dependency” of all of British America to the crown would be secured if these colonies were “compelled to follow the commands sent them by your Majesty.” At the same time, the board argued for the restoration of its exclusive control over imperial correspondence. It criticized “the present Method of dispatching Business, relating to the Plantations” whereby the colonies’ different strains of communications with the board, secretary of state, and Privy Council meant that “no one Office is thor'ly inform'd of all Matters relating to the Plantations . . . if the Business of the Plantations were wholly confin'd to one Office, these Inconveniencies would be avoided.”Footnote 101
The 1721 report exemplified how the board used administrative paperwork to advance its goals of control over charter and proprietary colonies, and the restoration of the correspondence powers abrogated by Nottingham. The queries provided the board with information to measure the divergence between metropolitan prescription and colonial practice.Footnote 102 In this sense, the queries and the report reinforced the administrative relationship inherent in the British imperial “constitution.” That said, as a matter of policy and legislative action, the board's own recommendation in the report for greater central control over the proprietary colonies was not adopted in any legislative reforms in the immediate instance, due largely to sympathy of the sitting secretary of state for the interests of the proprietary colonies.Footnote 103 Thus, the significance of the board's report lay not in its impact but in the practices of mediation involved in its production, which encapsulated the board's reliance on documents to articulate its view of the proper constitution of imperial government, albeit one whose implementation was thwarted by the office's lack of executive power.
Furthermore, the board's activities institutionalized techniques of governance through documents that were subsequently available to future imperial administrators to deploy in different contexts. Even as the power of the board in imperial governance dwindled over the remainder of the 1720s and 1730s relative to that of the secretary of state and Parliament, the bureaucratic query remained part of the repertoire of tools available to metropolitan administrators seeking information about whether colonial officials were governing according to the Instructions.Footnote 104 Just as the board continued to send queries on occasion to governors, the secretary of state eventually adopted the technique as a way of enforcing the hierarchy of authority built into the imperial constitution. Thus, in 1773, Lord Dartmouth—as both head of the Board of Trade and the secretary of state for the Southern Department—dispatched a circular letter to American governors demanding that they provide “a very full and particular answer” to “the inclosed Heads of Enquiry,” on the grounds that the “Accounts received from His Majesty's Governors in America, of the Condition of their respective Governments have not been so full and explicit with respect to the State and progress of the Commerce, Cultivation and Inhabitancy thereof as they might and ought to have been.”Footnote 105 However, given the scope of the board's archive accumulated over nearly seven decades through the regular circuit of bureaucratic correspondence, there may have been little new information to be gained. As Lord Dunmore, governor of Virginia, advised Dartmouth, the answers to the “Several Articles of inquiry transmitted to me will only be a recapitulation of reports . . . of the ordinary Events of this Government . . . which at different times and on different occasions have been transmitted to the Office of the Department over which your Lordship presides.”Footnote 106 The purpose of the queries was thus less about producing new factual knowledge than about manifesting the imperial constitution, and attendant expectations for the behavior of field administrators, in a tangible form that could travel across vast oceanic distances.
Constitutional Continuities: Queries, Administrative Knowledge, and the Archive after the American Revolution
The Board of Trade's 1773 circular was the last time it sent queries to colonial governors before the American Revolution began. However, while the loss of the thirteen North American colonies and the dissolution of the Board of Trade in 1782 constituted a seismic caesura, older constitutional norms remained intact and active throughout what remained of the British Atlantic.Footnote 107 The immediate fate of the board's archive and the bureaucratic circuit of documents formerly centered upon it reflected these continuities. In a reprisal of its seventeenth-century establishment of temporary investigatory committees over the colonies, the Privy Council formed subcommittees to administer imperial trade. Upon the board's dissolution, the council reiterated the importance of the regular return of documents, ordering the executives of Britain's remaining Atlantic colonies to “transmit” the “papers and accounts which by any Article of Our said General Instructions were heretofore to be transmitted to Our said Commissioners for Trade and Plantations” to a new “Committee of Our Privy Council for Trade and Plantations.”Footnote 108 The duties formerly invested in the clerks of the Board of Trade were now shifted to those of this newly formed committee.Footnote 109 The old Board of Trade's papers remained in the custody of this new committee, with some documents transferred to the State Paper Office in December 1785.Footnote 110 In August 1786, the Privy Council established a new “Committee for all matters relating to Trade and foreign Plantations” and ordered that “that the several papers relating thereto, or any ways concerning Trade and Foreign Plantations which . . . were formerly in the Custody of the Officers of the late Board of Trade” be transferred to the new body's office.Footnote 111 On 25 August 1786, the committee appointed a staff of six clerks, headed by George Chalmers, and ordered that “all said papers Books &c. &c. be delivered into the custody of George Chalmers Esquire, Chief Clerk” of the office.Footnote 112 These papers were then moved to the committee's offices in Whitehall.Footnote 113
At its regular meetings, the committee solicited information on imperial commerce from manufacturers, merchants, and other bureaucrats, favoring in-person interviews over the circulation of forms. Taking a narrower scope than the Board of Trade's inquiries into imperial administration, the committee primarily sought information about commerce from those actively engaged in it.Footnote 114 The kinds of papers that the committee received from the secretary of state shifted exclusively to issues of trade and commerce, and the advice that it provided to the secretary focused specifically on commerce.Footnote 115 The Heads of Inquiry it issued were directed to merchants rather than governors and sought exclusively numerical data.Footnote 116 Even when the secretary of state did send Heads of Inquiry via circular letter to governors, the information sought was far more statistical in nature than in the past.Footnote 117 Yet the constitutional position of the new Privy Council committee mirrored that of the older Board of Trade; it remained an instrument of executive power and a tool for extending administrative norms throughout the empire.Footnote 118
The fate of the archive reflected these constitutional continuities. The committee's chief clerk, George Chalmers, came to the position with an intimate knowledge of the practices of imperial governance through documents. In 1780, he had applied successfully to the secretary of state's office to peruse and make extracts from official documents related Britain's North American territories, which he used to complete a two-volume history of the American colonies.Footnote 119 In the resulting work, Political Annals of the Present United Colonies, From Their Settlement to the Peace of 1763: Compiled chiefly from Records, and authorised by the Insertion of State-Papers, Chalmers wrote that, having found printed information on the history of the colonies unsatisfactory, he had “searched for materials that had either been overlooked or disregarded by former writers.” He thus expressed gratitude that his request to consult the “rich mine of historic materials” in the Board of Trade's archive had been granted.Footnote 120
In his research, Chalmers examined patents, grants, and charters of settlement issued by the crown to the different colonies, and correspondence between colonial administrators and the board, especially the copies of these documents found in the entry books to the different colonial series.Footnote 121 He also consulted the minutes of both the Privy Council and the Board of Trade and its predecessors.Footnote 122 In many cases, he transcribed into his footnotes extensive excerpts from these records and in some instances reproduced entire documents.Footnote 123 He also used these records in writing his Introduction to the History of the Revolt of the Colonies, completed and printed in 1782.Footnote 124
A decade after the publication of his Introduction, Chalmers was working as a government bureaucrat in the Office for Trade, where his treatment of the archive evinced not only the requirements of his new position but also deeper continuities in the institutional approach to the records. Just as the old Board of Trade had used documents and archives to enforce constitutional norms, the new committee treated records as tools to regulate bureaucratic conduct. Although the committee's queries solicited information that seemed more quantitative than the descriptions of colonial circumstances demanded by the board in its questionnaires, the underlying function of the documents remained the enforcement of metropolitan expectations for administration. As a clerk, Chalmers was charged by the committee between 1790 and 1791 with tasks such as preparing “a state of the proportion of the Quantities of the several sorts of Corn permitted to be exported to His Majesty's Sugar Colonies in the West Indies” and drawing up “a comparative state of the Trade of Quebec.”Footnote 125
These imperatives shaped Chalmers's use of the archive in a manner consistent with earlier practices. On 8 May 1792, the Committee of Trade received a request from the treasury for “such Papers and Information as their Office can furnish on the Subject of the Quitrents in American and the West Indies.” The treasury sought this information in order to answer a complaint by the governor of Dominica, John Orde, over the treasury's effort to enforce quit-rent collection on the island, which had lapsed all over the West Indies.Footnote 126 In response, the committee entrusted Chalmers with an order to “collect and state all the Information to be found in this Office relative to the Object” of the request.Footnote 127
Chalmers turned to the old records of the Board of Trade and consulted the governors’ replies to the board's questions. As his notes on these files demonstrate, he used what he labeled the “answers to queries” reported by the governors to compile statistical tables for the purposes of answering the treasury's demand.Footnote 128 The committee considered his report on 11 October 1792. Having examined “what Information there may be in the Books and Papers of the late Board of Trade with regard to His Majesty's Quit-Rents in the British Islands and Plantations in America,” Chalmers summarized governors’ answers to the query about quit-rents from the 1670s onward, using these documents for the information they provided about the history of bureaucratic practice in relation to metropolitan instructions.Footnote 129 His use of the archive was similar to that of his clerical predecessors: comparing incoming information, conveyed through the mechanism of paper, with authoritative bodies of bureaucratic records in an effort to enforce constitutional norms.Footnote 130 Although the committee solicited quantitative rather than narrative responses, it continued to use the archive as a central tool of administrative practice. Despite the transformed political geography of empire, older bureaucratic practices persisted. The “information revolution” in British government—which would gradually see print replace handwriting as the method of producing bureaucratic documents, the introduction of uniform manuals to dictate official conduct, the rise of the science of “statistics” in imperial bureaucracy, and the transformation of state archives from tools of administration to repositories of historical research—was still in its nascent stages.Footnote 131
Conclusion
Eighteenth-century critics of imperial government in British America frequently dismissed the idea that documents could bear constitutional authority. Alexander Hamilton wrote in 1775, “The sacred rights of mankind are not to be rummaged for, among old parchments, or musty records.” Rather, he argued, “they are written, as with a sun beam, in the whole volume of human nature, by the hand of the divinity itself; and can never be erased or obscured by mortal power.”Footnote 132 Similarly, Thomas Paine criticized Edmund Burke's appeal to “musty records and mouldy parchment” in the latter's attack on the revolutionary movements of the late eighteenth century (a paradoxical charge, given Burke's own preference for constitutional spirit over “dead” records).Footnote 133 The radical writer John Oswald criticized the inability of the English to “tell whether they are oppressed or not, without consulting certain musty records, which form the basis of what they call their Constitution.”Footnote 134 Indeed, early articulations of the unique qualities of American political culture emphasized the distinction between a constitution grounded in nature and one rooted in the authority of archives of paper. As Thomas Jefferson wrote with pride, Americans seeking the principles of government “had no occasion to search into musty records, to hunt up royal parchments, or to investigate the laws and institutions of a semi-barbarous ancestry”; they simply needed to look to “nature,” for the foundations of political order were “engraved” not on paper but “in our hearts.”Footnote 135
That the critique of the imperial constitution focused at least in part on divesting bureaucratic documents of their power to bear authority points to the precise reasons why they mattered at all in the early modern British Empire. Through writing and circulating paperwork, imperial administrators rendered sovereignty portable across vast territorial and oceanic expanses. The bureaucratic manifestation of the principles of the imperial constitution involved the constant circulation of paper as a mode of accountability, the formation of institutional archives, and attendant practices of recordkeeping and consultation, from which empire's governors could derive the knowledge they deemed essential to the task of administration. In an imperial world, distance rendered the personal performance of deference to sovereign power at court impractical; instead, paper instruments were the surrogates through which power could be borne across space, manifesting imperial sovereignty not merely in abstract concepts but also in concrete, archivable forms.Footnote 136 Even as the institutional manifestations of this governing order shifted in the aftermath of the American Revolution, paperwork remained the instrument through which bureaucrats gave the imperial constitution its lived expression.Footnote 137
