Constituting Empire: New York and the Transformation of Constitutionalism in the Atlantic World, 1664-1830 / Edition 1

by Daniel J. Hulsebosch

Overview

According to the traditional understanding of American constitutional law, the Revolution produced a new conception of the constitution as a set of restrictions on the power of the state rather than a mere description of governmental roles. Daniel J. Hulsebosch complicates this viewpoint by arguing that American ideas of constitutions were based on British ones and that, in New York, those ideas evolved over the long eighteenth century as New York moved from the periphery of the British Atlantic empire to the center of a new continental empire.

Hulsebosch explains how colonists and administrators reconfigured British legal sources to suit their needs in an expanding empire. In this story, familiar characters such as Alexander Hamilton and James Kent appear in a new light as among the nation's most important framers, and forgotten loyalists such as Superintendent of Indian Affairs Sir William Johnson and lawyer William Smith Jr. are rightly returned to places of prominence.

In his paradigm-shifting analysis, Hulsebosch captures the essential paradox at the heart of American constitutional history: the Revolution, which brought political independence and substituted the people for the British crown as the source of legitimate authority, also led to the establishment of a newly powerful constitution and a new postcolonial genre of constitutional law that would have been the envy of the British imperial agents who had struggled to govern the colonies before the Revolution.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780807859209
Publisher:	The University of North Carolina Press
Publication date:	09/01/2008
Series:	Studies in Legal History
Edition description:	1
Pages:	496
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.20(d)

About the Author

Daniel J. Hulsebosch is professor of law and history at New York University School of Law.

Table of Contents

Introduction: Constitutions and Empire
Part I: The Imperial Origins of New York
1. Empire and Liberty
2. Time Immemorial: The Foundations of Common-Law Culture in an Imperial Province
Part II: Imperia in Imperio: Property and Sovereignty in a Frontier Province
3. The Multiple Constitutions of Empire in New York, 1750-1777
4. The Search for Imperial Law in the 1760s
Part III: Imperial Civil War and Reconstitution
5. Provincial Resistance and Garrison Government
6. The State Constitution of 1777
Part IV: Postcolonial Constitutionalism and Transatlantic Legal Culture
7. The Imperial Federalist: Ratification and the Creation of Constitutional Law
8. Empire State: Constitutional Politics and the Convention of 1821
9. An Empire of Law
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Acknowledgments
Index

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

A capacious and beautifully written history that sweeps us from the province to the empire, describing how each defined the other through the legal struggles of people on the ground. Hulsebosch provocatively evokes how a cohesive modern constitutionalism—with its complex mediation of the local, the national, and the international—emerges out of that relentless dynamism.—Christine Desan, Harvard Law School

Hulsebosch changes the conventional wisdom about the competing imperial and colonial versions of the constitution in a way that is utterly persuasive. His argument is that there were multiple versions of the constitution both in the colonies and in England and that tensions among these, on both sides of the Atlantic, helped shape the emerging conflict. Hulsebosch's handling of the historical evidence is impeccable, and his writing is crisp and clear.—Larry D. Kramer, Stanford Law School

Constituting Empire persuasively demonstrates how New York's legal history epitomizes the process by which Americans used the English legal tradition and drew from it the sources of a truly creative constitutional achievement. Thanks to Hulsebosch, the legal legacy of the colonial experience will be recognized as integral to any understanding of American constitutional development.—David Thomas Konig, Washington University in St. Louis

Editorial Reviews

Hulsebosch offers superb accounts of constitution-writing in New York. . . . [His] brilliant book will have a profound impact on our understanding of the American Revolution and the early history of state-making in the federal republic.—Law and History Review

A pleasure to read. . . . [Constituting Empire: New York and the Transformation of Constitutionalism in the Atlantic World] is an important book for legal historians, but it should also be an enjoyable book for a much wider audience.—American Historical Review

An interesting and important dimension to the old Progressive historical perspective that explains how a divided people became one.—Journal of the Early Republic

Provocative. . . . Hulsebosch has successfully placed early American constitutional history in two critical contexts: the social history of mobility as well as the intellectual paradigm of empire. The result deserves to be read by both social historians and legal scholars of this period.—William and Mary Quarterly

Hulsebosch brilliantly describes [how] the constitution of the British Empire was rarely settled and almost always hotly contested. There were, Hulsebosch tells us, many constitutions of empire in the eighteenth-century British Atlantic, at least three of which played themselves out in the American Revolution.—Harvard Law Review

A sophisticated and insightful analysis of American constitutional theory and the development of law as the expression of that theory within a conceptual structure rooted in the understanding of empire.—Register of the Kentucky Historical Society

Hulsebosch's volume offers fresh and provocative new insights on the spatial and constitutional workings of North American colonialism over a broad swath of time. . . . [Constituting Empire: New York and the Transformation of Constitutionalism in the Atlantic World, 1664-1830] is a highly successful book that deserves wide reading.—Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History

[An] original and fascinating study. . . . Nothing less than a tour-de-force. Its careful scholarship sustains a powerful and original set of arguments about the imperial framing of American constitutionalism. . . . Hulsebosch's blending of cultural, political, and legal analysis also points the way to understanding the place of the Anglo-Atlantic story within the broader history of constitutions and empires.—Law and Social Inquiry

From the Publisher