The Petitions of Mr. Bollan, Agent for the Council of the Province of Massachusetts Bay, Lately Presented to the Two Houses of Parliament; with a Brief Introduction Relating to the Law of Nature, the Authority of Human Rulers, and the Subjects...
- William Bollan (author)
- Jack P. Greene (collection editor)
This work collects the formal petitions that William Bollan — colonial agent for the Massachusetts Council — that were presented to both houses of the British Parliament on behalf of the province, accompanied by a theoretical introduction grounding the colonists' grievances in natural law and the rights of subjects to self-defense. Bollan, who had evolved from an early supporter of Parliamentary supremacy into a defender of Old Whig principles, ultimately argued for limiting all legislatures within the empire — including Parliament itself — to their respective localities. The work also appends the Council’s defense against charges of misdemeanors and includes broader observations on the English Constitution and the nature of European principalities, making it both a practical legal document and a substantive political argument for colonial rights in the lead-up to the American Revolution.
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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.