"The Last Days of Massachusetts Bay Company, Revisited"

Who cares about the loss of the Massachusetts Bay Company Charter, much less the quaint common-law legal writ known as quo warranto? This paper argues that we historians should. The protracted legal struggle that led to the creation of the much-detested Dominion of New England articulated important questions about the nature and basis of political power. The struggle between the Crown and the Massachusetts Bay Company started out almost exclusively to be about which English men had a right to claim ownership of the Native lands of New England. It ended up almost exclusively to be about which English men had the right to govern the settler-colonists of the region. That conceptual mutation was of no small importance for understanding the evolution of the English Empire during the Restoration Era.

Daniel K. Richter is Roy F. and Jeannette P. Nichols Professor of American History and the Richard S. Dunn Director of the McNeil Center for Early American Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. He is currently holds a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship and is the Robert C. Ritchie Distinguished Fellow in Early American History at the Huntington Library.

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