Part I Constitutional History, B French-Canadians and the Constitution, Ch.3 Constitutional Debates in French Canada, 1764–1774

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Morin Michel
Keyword(s):  
American Revolution ◽  
Constitutional Rights ◽  
Constitutional History ◽  
French Canadians ◽  
French Canada ◽  
Royal Authority ◽  
American Colonies ◽  
Source Of Information

After 1760, constitutional debates occurred in French Canada on issues ranging from the contestation of royal authority to the consolidation of constitutional rights or colonial autonomy. In this regard, our main source of information is the bilingual Quebec Gazette, which reported on legal developments in France, England, and the American colonies. Contrary to what is generally assumed, these discussions predated the American Revolution. The Chapter also examines the assimilation of British constitutional principles by the educated members of the Francophone elite. Many of them were eager to obtain an Assembly in which Catholics could sit. They believed that the Capitulation of 1760 protected property and seigneurial rights, as well as inheritance and matrimonial laws. In the end, the request for an Assembly was shelved in order to obtain religious equality. Meanwhile, British officials declared that Canadians had no appetite for an Assembly, creating a lasting and misleading impression.

The Limitations of Enlightened Despotism

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
R. R. Palmer
Keyword(s):  
American Revolution ◽  
Royal Authority ◽  
Joseph Ii

The forces of aristocracy, which in some countries in the 1780s prevailed over democratic movements, prevailed in others over monarchy itself. This chapter takes up a thread left hanging at the close of Chapter IV. It was shown there that, by the middle 1770s, or just before the American Revolution, the kings of France and of Sweden, and the Queen of Hungary and Bohemia, had asserted royal authority and put the constituted bodies of their several realms under restraint. The following fifteen years made clear the limits beyond which enlightened despotism could not go. However held down, the constituted bodies—estates, diets, parlements, and the like—had strong powers of survival and resurgence. This chapter deals mainly with the Hapsburg monarchy under Joseph II and Leopold II, with observations, since not everything can be told, on Prussia, Sweden, and Russia.

Sophistry, Security, and Socio-Political Structures in the American Revolution; or, Why Jamaica did not Rebel

1986 ◽  
Vol 29 (2) ◽  
pp. 319-344 ◽  
Author(s):  
T. R. Clayton
Keyword(s):  
North America ◽  
British Empire ◽  
American Revolution ◽  
North American ◽  
Western Hemisphere ◽  
American Colonies ◽  
Constitutional Principle ◽  
Mother Country ◽  
Political Structures

Britain's most important American colonies did not rebel in 1776. Thirteen provinces did declare their independence; but no fewer than nineteen colonies in the western hemisphere remained loyal to the mother country. Massachusetts and Virginia may have led the American revolution, but they had never been the leading colonies of the British empire. From the imperial standpoint, the significance of any of the thirteen provinces which rebelled was pale in comparison with that of Jamaica or Barbados. In the century before 1763 the recalcitrance of these two colonies had been more notorious than that of any mainland province and had actually inspired many of the imperial policies cited as long-term grievances by North American patriots in 1774. Real Whig ideology, which some historians have seen as the key to understanding the American revolution, was equally understood by Caribbean elites who, like the continental, had often proved extremely sensitive on questions of constitutional principle. Attacks of ‘frenzied rhetoric’ broke out in Jamaica in 1766 and Barbados in 1776. But these had nothing whatsoever to do with the Stamp Act or events in North America.

Resisting Independence

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brad A. Jones
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
New York City ◽  
American Revolution ◽  
Port Cities ◽  
British Atlantic ◽  
American Colonies ◽  
Daunting Task ◽  
Close Study ◽  
New Nation

This book maps the loyal British Atlantic's reaction to the American Revolution. Through close study of four important British Atlantic port cities — New York City; Kingston, Jamaica; Halifax, Nova Scotia; and Glasgow, Scotland — the book argues that the revolution helped trigger a new understanding of loyalty to the Crown and empire. The book reimagines loyalism as a shared transatlantic ideology, no less committed to ideas of liberty and freedom than the American cause and not limited to the inhabitants of the thirteen American colonies. The book reminds readers that the American Revolution was as much a story of loyalty as it was of rebellion. Loyal Britons faced a daunting task — to refute an American Patriot cause that sought to dismantle their nation's claim to a free and prosperous Protestant empire. For the inhabitants of these four cities, rejecting American independence thus required a rethinking of the beliefs and ideals that framed their loyalty to the Crown and previously drew together Britain's vast Atlantic empire. The book describes the formation and spread of this new transatlantic ideology of loyalism. Loyal subjects in North America and across the Atlantic viewed the American Revolution as a dangerous and violent social rebellion and emerged from twenty years of conflict more devoted to a balanced, representative British monarchy and, crucially, more determined to defend their rights as British subjects. In the closing years of the eighteenth century, as their former countrymen struggled to build a new nation, these loyal Britons remained convinced of the strength and resilience of their nation and empire and their place within it.

Presidential Address: The Lierature of the Last Half-century of the Constitutional History of the United States

1957 ◽  
Vol 7 ◽  
pp. 159-182
Author(s):  
H. Hale Bellot
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
American Revolution ◽  
Legal History ◽  
Presidential Address ◽  
The United States ◽  
Constitutional History ◽  
Separate Paper ◽  
Political Ideas ◽  
Political Debates ◽  
History Of

In order to render my subject manageable, I have excluded from it the literature dealing with legal history, with the general history of political ideas, and with the constitutional and political debates that preceded and accompanied the American Revolution. Each of these is a large subject in itself and would, require for its most summary treatment a separate paper. I limit myself to what has been written during the last fifty years or so about the constitutional history of the Union and of the states in their relation to the Union since the year 1783.

Nikita Panin, Russian Diplomacy, and the American Revolution

Slavic Review ◽  
1969 ◽  
Vol 28 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-24 ◽  
Author(s):  
David M. Griffiths
Keyword(s):  
American Revolution ◽  
The Other ◽  
Diplomatic Relations ◽  
Precise Nature ◽  
American Colonies ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
The One

The precise nature of Russian-American diplomatic relations during the War for American Independence has always presented a problem for historians. On the one hand, the Declaration of Armed Neutrality by Catherine II in February 1780 seemed to represent an effort to limit British sovereignty on the seas, and news of its promulgation was greeted with enthusiasm in the struggling American colonies. But on the other hand, the reception by the Russian empress of Francis Dana, the American envoy (1781-83) sent to St. Petersburg in the aftermath of the declaration to obtain Russian aid, was far from hospitable, and was in part responsible for the strained diplomatic relations between the two nations for several years thereafter. This contradiction, more apparent than real, prompted Frank A. Golder, one of America's first historians of Russia, to call for more research in the area of Russian-American relations.

Part 4 Constitutionalism and Separation of Powers, 4.4 Yemen: A Burgeoning Democracy on the Arab Peninsula?

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Glosemeyer Iris ◽  
Shamiri Najib Abdul-Rehman ◽  
Würth Anna
Keyword(s):  
Rule Of Law ◽  
Separation Of Powers ◽  
Constitutional Rights ◽  
Constitutional History ◽  
Checks And Balances ◽  
The Rule Of Law ◽  
Islamic Jurisprudence ◽  
Central Elements

This chapter examines constitutional developments in Yemen. It covers Yemeni constitutional history before unification, the fate of the 1991 Constitution, and the Constitution of 2001. It argues that despite the relative political continuity (in the sense that there have not been successful military coups or significant elite changes in decades), constitutionalism in the country may be characterized as being two-fold. First, numerous constitutional articles are ambiguous and amenable to adverse interpretations because they leave too much of the constitutional rights to be defined by laws, thereby undermining the effectiveness of the said articles. The same applies to ordinary parliamentary laws, for they refer many important details to executive regulations, by-laws, ministerial resolutions, or Islamic jurisprudence. Second, while there has been a tradition of constitutionalist thinking at least since the 1940s, central elements of constitutionalism are missing. Checks and balances are weak, and the rule of law is far from being reality. Separation of powers is not even constitutionally fully guaranteed, much less applied in practice.

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