Over a century and a half separated the first permanent English settlement in Jamestown and the Declaration of Independence that led to the founding of the United States government. During that period, the British created new colonies on the North American continent, merged some of those colonies with others, episodically rewrote the terms of settlement that determined relations with the home country, and imposed varying regulatory regimes on imperial trade between the American colonies, other colonies, and Britain. In some respects, particularly with regard to trade policy, scholars have identified an overarching system in which the British governed the Atlantic portion of their empire. In other respects, particularly the governance of the individual colonial societies, scholars have often stressed the idiosyncratic nature of the trajectories that brought the 13 colonies to the brink of revolutionary war.

In Agents of Empire, Sean Gailmard has made a worthy attempt to construct a general theory of the individual trajectories of colonial governance, primarily with respect to the political relations between the metropole and the Atlantic colonies. There are three primary actors in this general theory: (1) the crown (composed of the monarch and other imperial officials in the metropole), (2) colonial governors (who were appointed by the crown), and (3) colonial assemblies and councils (selected, in most instances, by the colonists themselves). Relying on a “principle-agent” model of strategic behavior, Gailmard identifies the relation between the crown and the colonial governors as the most important element in this theoretical model. However, the text also recognizes that the crown, a complex assemblage of personalities, offices, and power relations, cannot be assumed to be a unitary actor. This is also true of the colonial assemblies and councils which are assumed, more or less for the sake of simplicity, to represent the cohesive social and economic interests of a commercial-planter elite.

In this game-theoretic analysis, the crown’s goal is to extract revenue from the “output” (Gailmard’s often-repeated term for whatever a colony produces) of a colonial economy. This goal has several somewhat competing characteristics: (1) in the early settlement of a colony, the crown wishes to identify the primary resource that can be exploited (and therefore provides generous terms to those who conduct the “search” for that resource … taxation is relatively low for that reason); (2) after the primary resource is identified (e.g., tobacco in Virginia) and exploitation begins, the crown then alters the terms of governance by strengthening oversight and raising the level of taxation; and (3) the terms of governance and the level of taxation never become so harsh that they might discourage migration to the colonies (migrants, albeit lacking any of the formalities of political power, in effect constitute a silent actor in this model). In sum, the crown wants to maximize its extraction of wealth from the American colonies over the long term within a quasi-developmental perspective.

The goal of the colonists in this analysis was to reduce the crown’s extraction of wealth to a bare minimum (e.g., a level in which the crown was still willing to provide for their defense but little else). The competing interests of the crown and colonists thus put them at loggerheads as they competed for their respective shares of the wealth that the colonies produced. Caught in between the colonists and the crown were the colonial governors who were assigned responsibility for governing the American colonies. On the one hand, these governors were the crown’s “agents” because they were appointed by the metropole government and thus represented the crown’s interests (which, for Gailmard, primarily centered on the extraction of wealth but also political stability). The colonial governors were both legally bound to represent those interests and served at the pleasure of the crown. However, the salary of the governors (along with, secondarily, good fellowship in colonial society) was controlled by the colonial assemblies and councils. While this control can only be seen as a tactical flaw from the crown’s perspective, Gailmard never explains why the crown did not simply pay the salary of these governors. In any event, the governors often buckled under the assemblies’ increasing demands for political autonomy and lower tax regimes because, for one thing, those assemblies could withhold their salaries if they did not respond favorably to their demands. In response, the crown adopted a wide variety of institutional arrangements to compel governors to oppose colonist demands. Almost all of these arrangements failed for one reason or another.

There is a lot to like in this model, in part because Gailmard has managed to summarize over 150 years of colonial history in under 300 pages. However, some of the assumptions underpinning the simplicity of the theoretical framework should be interrogated. For example, Gailmard is probably on safe ground when assuming that the crown wanted to extract wealth from its colonies. This assumption was probably strongest when the British imagined that their newly established colonies might discover, as the Spanish did to the south, rich lodes of gold and silver that could be easily exploited. However, none of the British colonies were so endowed. In fact, the newly established colonies probably ran at a loss from the British perspective, with serious losses in the early years and, perhaps, close to breaking even sometime in the middle of the eighteenth century. There is, then, a serious question as to why the British held on to the colonies if their major purpose was to extract wealth. Gailmard provides several different reasons. For one thing, he adopts the mercantilist perspective on wealth to which the British crown subscribed and thus notes that the Navigation Acts encouraged the construction of commercial ships and created a metropole monopoly on trade between elements of the Atlantic portion of the British Empire. He also includes Jamaica and Barbados in his analysis, colonies that clearly produced a surplus for the British. Both of these addendums allow Gailmard to maintain that extraction of wealth was the principal motive for colonies on the North American mainland even when, taken in isolation, each of these colonies was, from the imperial perspective, a poor investment. Perhaps realizing this, Gailmard also states that these colonies constituted a safety valve for the export of surplus population from the home country and a source of international “prestige” (p. 296) for the crown. However, the latter has little to do with the main thesis revolving around the principle-agent relation between the colonial governors and the crown.

The model has other problems as well. For one thing, the crown often appointed governors as patronage rewards to influential figures in the metropole, and many of these governors were simply not suited for political competition with colonial assemblies and councils. Gailmard also introduces the notion of “weak” and “strong” personalities as an explanation for the varying performance of colonial governors with respect to the crown’s interests. This explanation comes very close to providing an exogenous explanation for any behavior by a colonial governor: those who were “strong” stood up to the colonial assemblies and those who were “weak” caved into their demands. This problem is aggravated by the fact that we have little information about these governors that might underpin their placement in these psychological or dispositional categories. In fact, the sparsity of such information is repeatedly cited by Gailmard as a fundamental problem confronting the crown as it attempted to evaluate the performance of these governors. The general lack of information on the early years of colonial history is an advantage for Gailmard because it allows the author to fill in the gaps with elements drawn from the model itself. As a result, there are few disconfirming cases. However, as he notes, the crown itself often did not try very hard to gather the kind of information that would have (theoretically) driven their relations with the colonial governors. As a description of the crown’s behavior toward the American colonies, Gailmard repeatedly cites the phrase “wise and salutary neglect” (see the Index for a few of those instances). In sum, the crown’s episodic and often uncoordinated interest in colonial affairs does not seem sufficiently substantial for the author’s model. However, even if the model ultimately falls to the floor, Gailmard has made a substantial contribution toward the comparative study of the politics surrounding the crown governance of the individual colonies in British North America and should be warmly applauded for that accomplishment.