Reviewed by Alexander B. Haskell | Book Review | The William and Mary Quarterly, 62.3

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Reviewed by Alexander B. Haskell | Book Review | The William and Mary Quarterly, 62.3 | The History Cooperative

Reviews of Books

Alexander B. Haskell, Southern Illinois University, Edwardsville

The Transatlantic Constitution: Colonial Legal Culture and the Empire. By Mary Sarah Bilder. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004. 304 pages. $49.95 (cloth).
Surely one consequence of the ever-growing commitment by early Americanists to Atlantic history will be a resurgence of interest in constitutionalism. The topic has attracted little attention in recent decades, though a small group of scholarly articles and books—published mostly from the 1960s to the 1980s and all building to some extent on Charles H. McIlwaine's seminal study, The American Revolution: A Constitutional Interpretation (1923)—have indicated just how central the topic must be to any effort to resituate colonial British American history in an Atlantic context. These works include Bernard Bailyn's and Gordon S. Wood's analyses of revolutionary-era political ideology; important (though often overlooked) legal studies by Barbara A. Black and John Phillip Reid; and Jack P. Greene's several articles on the subject and especially his book-length study, Peripheries and Center.¹ Greene and others demonstrate that a largely unwritten imperial constitution structured relations between England and its seventeenth- and eighteenth-century colonies, setting the terms for political and legal debate within the empire and powerfully influencing the structure of the young United States government. Given its rich capacity for helping scholars to move beyond an anachronistic national framework for understanding early American history and to discern the interconnectedness of the first British Empire, the concept of the imperial constitution would appear tailor-made for the new Atlantic history.	1
Mary Sarah Bilder's The Transatlantic Constitution is an excellent example of the wealth of fresh insights that a focus on constitutionalism still has to offer. A legal scholar by training, Bilder approaches constitutionalism as Reid especially has urged scholars to do: as fundamentally a legal rather than simply political matter. Whereas nonlegal historians have tended to identify constitutional relations between the empire's colonial periphery and metropolitan center as evolving largely as a result of battles over prerogative between colonial legislators and royal officials, Bilder concentrates on a more diverse transatlantic world of legislators, litigants, and lawyers whose concerns often concentrated as much on winning private cases as meeting broader political goals. Focusing on Rhode Island as a case study and applying a sophisticated conception of law as "a legal culture composed of people and practices" (6), Bilder leads readers into an alien world of colonial attorneys, painstakingly assembled law libraries, and legal maneuvers that, she convincingly argues, all had a bearing on colonial constitutional development. That the tour is fascinating and informative rather than bewildering is testimony to the lucidity of Bilder's prose and her ability to explain the labyrinthine complexity of early modern English law in terms that even nonlegal historians can comprehend.	2
According to Bilder a particular principle structured political and legal debate in the empire from the beginning: the idea that a colony's laws could not be repugnant to the laws of England, yet could diverge from them to accommodate local circumstances. Other historians have commented on this so-called repugnancy principle before, in part because it appeared explicitly in many colonial charters. Bilder, however, is the first to emphasize and demonstrate its centrality to colonial and imperial legal culture.	. . .

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