Thomas Pownall's The Administration of the Colonies: The Six Editions

Abstract

HOMAS POWNALL'S The Administration of the Colonies is remarkable in political literature, not only for the timeliness of its first publication, but for the way in which subsequent editions kept pace with changing events. It was first published as a pamphlet early in I764. New editions came out in I765, I766, I768, and I774, by which time the modest essay had become a substantial treatise in two volumes. As such it was reissued, almost unchanged, in I777. Before this sixth, and last edition, no two were identical; and the successive modifications amount to a running commentary on the imperial problem from the Stamp Act to the Revolution. Pownall had been educated at Trinity College, Cambridge-Isaac Newton's own college-and his writing was permeated by Newtonian thought. Even when he wrote of politics and empire, the principle of gravitation was in his mind. He sought earnestly for the equivalent of such a force in the pattern of empire, and he frequently used the cosmic analogy to illustrate the relationship between Britain and her colonies. He set forth his ideas in A Treatise on Government: being a Review of the Doctrine of an Original Contract, published anonymously in I750, and in Principles of Polity, an version of the same work issued under his own name in I752. Writing at a time when the ideas of Bolingbroke and Hume were in the air, he denounced the false Policy, that calls Factions and Parties, and Checks, and independent Interests, and such Stuff, Constitutional, and he saw a vision of unity and cooperation in almost the medieval sense.' Society should be an enlarged Communion in accord with the divinely or-