Dominik Nagl, No Part of the Mother Country, but Distinct

Dominions - Rechtstransfer, Staatsbildung und Governance in

England, Massachusetts und South Carolina, 1630-1769 (= Studies
in North American History, Politics and Society, Bd. 33), Berlin:
LIT, 2013, 792 S., 69.90 EUR, br., ISBN 978-3-643-11817-2.
No Part of the Mother Country is about colonial state
formation and the making of modern America. Written
from an "Atlantic" perspective, it connects the
historiographical debates on the genesis of statehood in
early modern Europe and colonial North America. The
book has been called a "key German contribution" to
the field of Early American Studies (sehepunkte
14/2014).
The study reconstructs the transfer of political, legal and
administrative structures and institutions from England
to Massachusetts and South Carolina. It examines the
bodies of political decision-making, the legal system,
the mechanisms of law enforcement, poor relief and the
regulation of slavery. No Part of the Mother Country
pronounces
their
colonial
remodeling
and
transformative interrelationship by tracing the process
of modification that brought about fundamental
institutional change. Combining an interpretation of
colonial laws with an examination of a variety of related
manuscript and printed sources, the study shows that all segments of the colonial society
actively participated in creating the examined mechanisms of rule by forms of negotiation and
resistance. The thorough analysis of the most important legal and administrative structures in
early modern England and the comparison with their colonial counterparts explains how local
factors decisively shaped the colonial reception and adaption of English law and institutions.
This generated dissimilar and distinct governance structures in each colony. The study also
shows that law served as an important imperial connective bond, but that this law was anything
but a unified whole. It included much more than the English common law tradition. The study
thus analyzes the relations of the American colonies to their governing mother country as a
complex web of mutual influence and interaction.
No Part of the Mother Country calls into question the application of the notions "center" and
"periphery" in Atlantic history in which the narratives generated out of world systems theory
tried to capture the colonial experience. Moreover, it challenges traditional views of early
modern state formation that were mainly concerned with the growth of centralized monarchical
bureaucracies and conceived state formation as a top-down process. By contrast, No Part of the
Mother Country argues that colonial state formation should rather be understood as a multilevel process driven to a large extent by colonial actors.