A Negotiated Empire: Daniel Gookin’s 1681 Treatise on Agents

Historians of early New England have given much attention to the dramatic events of the 1688-89 Williamite Revolution and the militant overthrow of the Andros regime. Yet the preliminary crisis over whether and how to respond to Charles II's demand for colonial agents marks a crucial and understudied phase of the imperial contest. Daniel Gookin's 1681 Treatise, written in the form of a petition to the Massachusetts Bay General Court's committee on the question of agents, captures the high stakes of this moment. In his impassioned plea, Gookin draws directly on theories of judicial independence, on the nature of the transatlantic political economy, on the Bible, and on the Magna Carta in order to argue for limits on "duty to Superiors." The context for these arguments is both local and transatlantic: similar debates were taking place in Bermuda and within the Corporation of London. Close attention to Gookin's treatise reveals the kinds of hindsight and foresight involved in incremental decisions about local and metropolitan authority, as well as the overlap between legal, economic, and religious categories in this era of negotiated empire.