For the political historian the period in North American history between the end of the Seven Years War, or ‘French and Indian War’, and the outbreak of the wars of the French Revolution is divided into two parts by the successful establishment of a new nation—the United States of America. The constitutional historian may concern himself rather less with this break in continuity. The constitutional problem before the American Revolution was that of providing an acceptable framework of common institutions within which the individual colonies could continue to exercise their characteristic inheritance of internal self-government; after it, it became a question of whether the several states into which the colonies had been transmuted could supply themselves with such organs for common action as their new situation in the world seemed to require. The new national government had to find solutions that had eluded the advisers of George III. From this admittedly limited point of view, the story has an underlying unity which it is the object of this chapter to present.

By the middle of the eighteenth century, the thirteen British colonies that were to form the nucleus of the new United States all enjoyed some form of representative institutions, as did indeed eight other island colonies in the western Atlantic and Caribbean sea. Despite the important differences in situation and in the economic and social make-up of the colonies, their institutions had a family likeness. They were indeed the product of two features that distinguished British colonisation in North America from the comparable activity of rival European powers.