To What Extent Did English Legal Custom Influence an Emerging American Identity in the 17th Century?

The Enduring Understanding for this project – that commercial elites in England had divergent understandings of commercial exploitation in the New World – will test or validate the dominant historical narrative of historian David Cressy (Coming Over, 1987) that the Americas were viewed as outliers of England.

Topics for research will implicate the following issues:  land distribution and expectations for colonial profit, redefining a new American identity during the “limbo” of Restoration colonization, and expectations for creating permanent institutions of local governance. 

The geographical implications for this topic are significant – the Restoration period brings about significant changes in English ruling elites, and their habits of colonization are qualitatively different from those of the dominantly Southeastern English migration of the early 17^th Century.