| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 92.1

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 92.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

A Little Parliament: The Virginia General Assembly in the Seventeenth Century. By Warren M. Billings. (Richmond: Library of Virginia, 2004. xxii, 284 pp., $30.00, ISBN 0-88490-202-1.)

This book seeks to answer a seemingly simple question: How did the colonial legislative body of Virginia, the General Assembly, work in the seventeenth century? Since the author has spent more than thirty years exploring the political, legal, and institutional history of early Virginia, he is perfectly suited to provide answers, which he does in this modest-sized, nicely written volume published in part to coincide with the upcoming four hundredth anniversary of the founding of the colony. As he researched the evolution of the Virginia General Assembly and began to sort out how it actually worked, Warren M. Billings came to the conclusion that he and a number of eminent historians had misjudged the developmental trajectory of the oldest legislative body in the Americas. Where historians had previously imagined a chaotic and underdeveloped entity that only came to maturation in the eighteenth century, Billings found a robust and confident bicameral assembly that may have reached its zenith in the 1670s.

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