The Corporation and the Global Seventeenth-Century English Empire: A Tale of Three Cities

Abstract

Though often taken in isolation as particularly local or regional in character, the history of the colonial urban corporation took on a peculiarly global character in the later seventeenth-century Anglophone world. Putting three such experiments in incorporation—Tangier, Madras, and Philadelphia—in a common frame highlights the necessary tensions and contradictions at the heart of any methodology of studying an early modern "English" empire. Examining the municipal corporation as a particular form of imperial institution reveals a common vision of the structure of colonial authority, one that attempted to vest local inhabitants in limited and circumscribed modes of self-governance, only to find that in each case, such constitutional forms did not easily accommodate the demands of governance and jurisdictional power in the extra-European world. The simultaneous history of these relatively failed experiments offers a window into the nature of the "global" British Empire in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, proposing a narrative of colonial expansion that does not privilege chronological, geographical, or demographic divisions but, rather, focuses on a shared history of difference and an institutional and juridical pluralism that informed European governance in the colonial world.