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In the essay featured here, Eric Nelson argues that in the early 1770s patriots dropped their previous insistence that Parliament was sovereign over the colonies but simply lacked authority to impose internal taxes, and instead adopted the dominion theory, returning to the constitutional position of the Stuart monarchs James I and Charles I. Examining this remarkable turn toward royal power demonstrates the true drama of the republican turn in 1776 and highlights the persistent allure of prerogative powers in the formative period of American constitutionalism. Gordon S. Wood, Pauline Maier, and Daniel J. Hulsebosch assess Nelson’s thesis, and then Nelson replies to their critiques.

In the essay featured here, Eric Nelson argues that in the early 1770s patriots dropped their previous insistence that Parliament was sovereign over the colonies but simply lacked authority to impose internal taxes, and instead adopted the dominion theory, returning to the constitutional position of the Stuart monarchs James I and Charles I. Examining this remarkable turn toward royal power demonstrates the true drama of the republican turn in 1776 and highlights the persistent allure of prerogative powers in the formative period of American constitutionalism. Gordon S. Wood, Pauline Maier, and Daniel J. Hulsebosch assess Nelson’s thesis, and then Nelson replies to their critiques.

In the essay featured here, Eric Nelson argues that in the early 1770s patriots dropped their previous insistence that Parliament was sovereign over the colonies but simply lacked authority to impose internal taxes, and instead adopted the dominion theory, returning to the constitutional position of the Stuart monarchs James I and Charles I. Examining this remarkable turn toward royal power demonstrates the true drama of the republican turn in 1776 and highlights the persistent allure of prerogative powers in the formative period of American constitutionalism. Gordon S. Wood, Pauline Maier, and Daniel J. Hulsebosch assess Nelson’s thesis, and then Nelson replies to their critiques.

In the essay featured here, Eric Nelson argues that in the early 1770s patriots dropped their previous insistence that Parliament was sovereign over the colonies but simply lacked authority to impose internal taxes, and instead adopted the dominion theory, returning to the constitutional position of the Stuart monarchs James I and Charles I. Examining this remarkable turn toward royal power demonstrates the true drama of the republican turn in 1776 and highlights the persistent allure of prerogative powers in the formative period of American constitutionalism. Gordon S. Wood, Pauline Maier, and Daniel J. Hulsebosch assess Nelson’s thesis, and then Nelson replies to their critiques.

“Patriot Royalism” makes the case that American patriots of the early 1770s became the last Atlantic defenders of the early Stuart monarchs. Their constitutional argument—that America was “outside of the realm” of Great Britain and therefore to be governed not by Parliament but by the royal prerogative—had famously been made by James I and Charles I in their acrimonious disputes with Parliament over colonial affairs in the 1620s. Most patriot writers were fully aware of the provenance of this new position and enthusiastically embraced its ideological implications. In the process they developed a radical, revisionist account of seventeenth-century English history. A proper reckoning with the story of patriot Royalism should allow us to appreciate the true drama of the republican turn in 1776, as well as to understand the persistent allure of prerogative powers in the formative period of American constitutionalism.