Abstract
We have seen throughout this book that many English Atlantic issues came to the attention of the early Stuart Crown—the king, Privy Council, and associated bodies—which was required to determine policies, procedures, petitions, and proclamations in order to protect the full range of its sovereignty, the liberties of the subjects who were entitled to its protection, and the present needs of the state. This was not a straightforward process; the newness of many of these activities, despite learning much in Ireland over the previous several generations, required that the Crown learn from a period of trial and error.1 Some of its actions with regard to the Atlantic were impetuous and contradictory and appear to the modern eye—especially through the lens of subsequent imperial oversight—to indicate either an unwillingness or an incapacity to provide central oversight over the colonial peripheries. As demonstrated in various chapters, the Crown vacillated back and forth as it determined how best to administer an empire across the seas, while also seeking to sustain, in contrast to the royal colonial empires of France and Spain, the preferred weak-state model of government, which permitted colonial autonomy in situations of little interest to the central authorities.2 The Crown sometimes found it necessary to retract and revise charter privileges when it realized that they were inconsistent with the needs of the state, which changed according to various circumstances, or derogated from the king’s sovereignty in ways that could not have been foreseen when the charters were first issued.
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Notes
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© 2011 Ken MacMillan
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MacMillan, K. (2011). Conclusion. In: The Atlantic Imperial Constitution. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230339675_8
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