The English Constitution and the Expanding Empire: Sir Edward Coke's British Jurisprudence

Abstract:     
This article offers a new perspective on an old historiographical chestnut - the status of "the liberties of Englishmen" throughout the first British Empire - by examining the problem in the early seventeenth century, when the Empire and modern ideas of the English constitution originated, rather than retrospectively from the late eighteenth century, when North American colonists revolted in the name of English liberty. The article focuses on Sir Edward Coke's opinion in Calvin's Case to recover whether he, as a "framer" of England's constitution, believed that English rights traveled abroad. The article argues that Coke held a jurisdictional conception of English liberties as limited to England rather than an abstract or jurisprudential conception free of national boundaries. Nonetheless, Coke believed that the core of the English constitution - representative government and common law tenures - should apply to most dominions outside the realm of England. The article concludes that interpretations of Coke's work by colonial lawyers then, and historians now, have made it difficult to comprehend the full complexity of the Empire's legal culture, and that this ahistoricism is itself a postcolonial legacy of that Empire.

Number of Pages in PDF File: 40

working papers series