The Politics of Constitutional Change

We saw in chapter 2 how the routine, day-by-day practices of governance in mid-eighteenth-century America depended to some significant degree on the existence of an established Anglo-American constitutional structure that colonials could neither alter nor control. In this chapter, we shall examine how, after the end in 1763 of the Seven Years’ War, known in America as the French and Indian War, that structure became unhinged. The war transformed the imperial structure in two profound respects. For the first six decades of the eighteenth century, French control of Canada, the Great Lakes, and the entire Mississippi basin had placed the