Perpetuating Settler Ascendancy

Abstract This essay may be considered as an epilogue to a larger project with the working title of “Settler Ascendancies: Voice and Authority in the Construction, Operation, Extension, and Separation of the British American Empire before 1776.” Building on my earlier books and essays emphasizing the agency of settlers in the construction and rationalizing the many societies and polities founded in the English or, after 1707, British American Empire before 1776, it assesses how the secession of thirteen colonies from the British Empire between 1776 and 1783 affected traditional British practices, patterns, conventions, and objectives of imperial expansion and governance within both the diminished empire and the tenuous national union in North America.