3. Colonial Government

About this Lecture

Lecture

In this module, we turn to explore how colonial governments functioned. The British colonies maintained three types of colonial charter: (i) Royal; (ii) Propriety; and (iii) Charter. This resulted in varying degrees of freedom from the British Parliament. However, all colonies maintained bicameral systems of government that maintained the right to tax their citizens.

Course

In this course, Dr Jonathan Barth (Arizona State University) examines how and why the movement of a variety of people and ideas across the Atlantic contributed to the development of American culture in the period 1607-1754. In the first module, we explore how the population of the British colonies changed over time. After this, we take a closer look at how the British colonies developed economically and socially. We then turn to explore how colonial governments functioned. In the final two modules, we see how the Great Awakening and Enlightenment set the colonies up for the revolutionary period.

Lecturer

Jonathan Barth is assistant professor of history at Arizona State University. He specialises in the history of money and banking in the early modern period, with corollary interests in early modern politics, empire, culture, and ideas. His first book, The Currency of Empire: Money and Power in Seventeenth-Century English America, explores the intersection of money and imperial politics in the first hundred years of English Atlantic colonisation.