The Administration of the British Colonies. Part the Second. Wherein a Line of Government between the Supreme Jurisdiction of Great Britain, and the Rights of the Colonies Is Drawn, and a Plan of Pacification Is Suggested. To Which Is Added...
- Thomas Pownall (author)
- Jack P. Greene (collection editor)
This essay is a political pamphlet — part of the broader pamphlet debate over British colonial policy in the years leading up to the American Revolution — in which Pownall attempts to draw a principled constitutional line between Parliament’s supreme authority over the empire and the established rights of the American colonies.
A former royal governor with firsthand experience in North America, Pownall argued that colonists were entitled to the same rights of representative government as subjects in Britain itself, while also acknowledging colonial obligations to help bear the costs of imperial defense. Rather than simply asserting one side over the other, the work proposes a practical “plan of pacification” aimed at resolving the deepening tensions through negotiated constitutional settlement — making it one of the more thoughtful and conciliatory British voices in the pre-Revolutionary debate.
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The text of these 18th century pamphlets has been converted by machine from scanned PDFs of the original microfilm copies. While the text has been machine-proofed, transcription errors may still remain. For example, the 18th-century long S, ſ , may be rendered as “f,” some words may be incorrectly transcribed, and there may be repeated words or phrases.