Preface: Revisiting familiar history from a different angle. This essay was produced in collaboration with ChatGPT.

By the mid-eighteenth century, the North American colonies had already developed relatively mature practices of local self-government.

This self-government was not an abstract ideal but a set of practical governing arrangements that had been operating continuously for decades, and in some regions for more than a century. In the course of Britain’s expansion in North America, the empire did not impose high-intensity, comprehensive daily rule over the colonies. On the one hand, imperial administrative and military resources were long concentrated on European affairs; on the other, as long as the colonies acknowledged royal authority, complied with the overall trade framework, and provided manpower and material support in wartime, London generally acquiesced to local affairs being handled by the colonies themselves.

At the political level, almost all colonies established local representative institutions of varying forms but continuous operation. Examples include the long-standing Virginia Assembly and the highly active town-meeting system of New England. Colonial assemblies did not follow a single template; rather, they were multiple variants formed within a shared British constitutional tradition. Their core functions, however, were highly similar: managing taxation, budgets, and local legislation, and exerting real constraints on gubernatorial power.

In most colonies, assemblies took on a two-tier structure. The upper tier usually consisted of the governor and an advisory council, largely appointed by the Crown. Its members were often large landowners, merchants, or legal elites, representing the extension of imperial authority at the local level. The lower tier was an elected assembly, with members chosen from counties or towns, and it held effective control over finance and legislative initiative. In Virginia, for example, the lower house long controlled appropriations, forcing governors in practice to negotiate with the assembly rather than issue unilateral commands.

In terms of selection, members of the lower house were not hereditary nobles but were chosen through elections, albeit elections with clear restrictions. Voting rights were typically limited to free white men who met property or tax qualifications; women, enslaved people, Indigenous populations, and many property-less white men were excluded. This was not democracy in the modern sense, but within the eighteenth-century Atlantic world it represented a relatively broad form of political participation. The key point was not the breadth of inclusion, but that governance was not purely top-down: it had to pass through the intermediary of local representatives. Assembly members themselves were usually local elites—planters, lawyers, merchants, clergy—who often knew one another personally and held overlapping roles across economic, judicial, and political domains. As a result, colonial assemblies functioned both as formal political institutions and as concentrated expressions of local power networks. Their deliberations were highly pragmatic, focused on concrete matters such as tax rates, roads, militia funding, port management, and court organization, rather than abstract ideological debate.

Through control over taxation and budgets, assemblies gradually established a de facto principle: without the consent of representatives, there was no legitimate taxation. This practice preceded theory and was later summarized as “no taxation without representation.” Consequently, when London attempted to levy taxes directly while bypassing colonial assemblies, the colonial response was often not “we demand democracy,” but “you are destroying a constitutional relationship that has long been in operation.” The significance of colonial assemblies lay less in their democratic character than in their training function: they socialized an entire generation into political participation. People became accustomed to selecting representatives, holding meetings, bargaining, refusing administrative demands, and treating such actions as normal components of governance.

Local policing, road maintenance, church affairs, poor relief, and school management were largely handled by towns, counties, or colonies themselves. New England’s town-meeting system was especially prominent: free white male property holders could directly participate in public discussion and voting. Policing was not a professionalized police system but a community responsibility regime. Towns elected or rotated constables, night watchmen, and justices of the peace to handle patrols, detentions, summonses, and the execution of court orders. Order was maintained not through constant surveillance but through the visibility of a society of acquaintances. Crime was understood as a disruption of community order, and responses emphasized publicity, shaming, fines, and short-term confinement rather than long-term isolation. This made “public order” psychologically a community matter rather than an external force.

Road maintenance followed a model of compulsory public obligation. Town meetings decided repair plans and assigned labor duties by household or landholding size. Residents did not “purchase services” through taxes; they were required to contribute labor directly or pay a substitute fee. This method was inefficient, but it clearly defined infrastructure as a collective responsibility. Church affairs overlapped heavily with local governance in many colonies. In New England in particular, town meetings often decided ministerial appointments, church funding, and disciplinary norms. Churches functioned not only as religious institutions but also as nodes of social governance, responsible for moral supervision, marriage records, relief distribution, and community mediation. Even in more religiously diverse colonies, churches carried out many quasi-public functions.

Poor relief was almost entirely a local responsibility. Towns appointed overseers of the poor to register and assess recipients; aid was provided at a subsistence minimum and accompanied by strict moral scrutiny. This system was harsh, but it reinforced a shared understanding that resource allocation was a local decision rather than a central welfare entitlement. School management followed a similar pattern. Primary schools were typically funded by towns, teachers were locally hired, and curricula reflected local religious and social values. Education was seen as a tool for maintaining community order, not as a universal right. Whether to build a school, how large it should be, and what should be taught were concrete matters for town meetings. All these governing practices relied on the same mechanisms: open meetings, local selection, collective execution, and oversight within a society of acquaintances. Governance was not an abstract system but a repeatedly enacted way of life. People might resent specific burdens, but they generally accepted that these demands came from “ourselves.”

Local magistrates, juries, and lawyers formed a legal world of everyday operation. People were accustomed to resolving disputes over land, debt, inheritance, and commerce through local legal procedures rather than appealing directly to London. The jury system was central. Determinations of fact were entrusted to juries composed of local free white men. From a modern perspective, one might question their “neutrality,” but at the time this embeddedness was precisely what made verdicts feel like community judgments rather than external commands. In practice, juries formed an important check on judges and administrative power. While not everyone in the colonies understood the law, a trained group of lawyers already existed, using British legal textbooks and precedents in argument.

From the late 1760s onward, William Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England circulated rapidly in the colonies, providing a systematic language for legal understanding. In British North America and later in the United States, Blackstone’s influence arguably exceeded that in Britain itself. His work became required reading for colonial lawyers, judges, and political elites, and the legal language, concepts of property, and understandings of procedural justice in early American constitutionalism drew heavily on his framework. To this day, U.S. courts frequently cite Blackstone when interpreting how rights were understood within the common-law tradition.

Blackstone’s distinctions among natural rights, common-law rights, and constitutional limits reinforced colonial notions of legitimacy: power had to operate within established legal structures. Government derived its justification from protecting personal security, individual liberty, and property, not from arbitrarily reshaping them. This legal intuition, alongside Lockean traditions, became a key resource in colonial political language.

At the fiscal and economic level, the colonies long taxed themselves, borrowed on their own credit, and managed trade details to a significant extent. Colonial assemblies controlled local direct taxes and expenditures for policing, courts, roads, militias, and officials’ salaries. Governors seeking funds typically had to obtain assembly approval, structurally anchoring fiscal power at the local level. Colonies also financed wars and infrastructure through bonds, paper money, and borrowing rather than relying on British treasury subsidies. This fiscal autonomy made the colonies resemble quasi-autonomous economic units within a loosely structured empire.

After the Seven Years’ War, Britain’s fiscal pressures surged, and it began tightening this long-standing permissive system: strengthening customs enforcement, expanding the jurisdiction of jury-less admiralty courts, and imposing taxes directly while bypassing colonial assemblies. From London’s perspective, this was a restoration of order; from the colonial perspective, it was a unilateral revision of an existing economic-political compact. For a society accustomed to operating within negotiated rules and flexibilities, this shift was not merely about tax burdens, but about economic life being placed under a power that was neither participatory nor negotiable. This rupture pushed economic friction directly into political confrontation.