A key component of regulatory imperialism was controlling the colonial government. While the crown accepted colonial assemblies as independent bodies, it attempted to regulate the laws they passed. In particular, imperial officials in London asserted the power to review all colonial legislation and declare acts void if they violated English law or imperial policy. This chapter examines royal legislative review from a strategic perspective as an auditing system. It shows that legislative review worked in part by inducing royal governors to exercise stricter scrutiny over colonial legislation before it ever reached London. At the same time, the analysis shows that legislative review was inherently imperfect. The cost of review to imperial officials ensured that colonial assemblies could pass laws that imperial officials opposed. As a result, legislative review was unable to eliminate the autonomy of colonial assemblies.

This introductory chapter lays out the historical background of English New World colonization and sketches the argument of the book. It explains the English crown’s formal authority over colonization and introduces the principal–agent perspective as a framework to analyze the crown’s use of that authority. The chapter lays out the concept of contractual imperialism, or the early crown’s policy of early colonization embedded in letters patent to private colonizers, and of regulatory imperialism, or the later crown’s policy of regulating colonial political economies.

This chapter explores the terms of letters patent for early colonies, particularly in their economic dimensions. It shows the textual basis for colonial autonomy in these patents as grants from the crown. In particular, patents granted long-term control of colonies to private actors, protected their control over colonial economic operations, and obliged minimal sharing of their economic output with the crown. The chapter presents the theory of contractual imperialism to explain why these contract terms solved an important incentive problem: To induce colonial agents to identify profitable resource endowments, despite great cost and risk, and to exploit them fully.

Chapter 1 introduces the geopolitical and scientific–colonial context of eighteenth-century Mauritius, primarily from the perspective of its governance. Mauritius was a French colony, and a very expensive one to run. It was managed by the Compagnie des Indes (CIO) until 1763 and then, in the aftermath of the Seven Years War (and dissolution of the CIO), was purchased by the French crown. By setting out the hidden dynamics of empire, this chapter provides a detailed discussion that explains why Mauritius was primarily a stopping-off point in the period under review rather than an island of commerce. A key finding concerns the internal divisions within the island over its management and policy, which is an important revision to prevailing assumptions in the historiography that such interests would be divided between policymakers in the metropole and those in the colony, where each has been assumed to represent a unified view. Hence, it examines the various experiments in colonial autonomy undertaken on Mauritius between the 1760s and the 1780s, including the complex alternatives relating to the agents who tried to build networks through alliances with local actors and Indigenous populations in the Indo-Pacific region. Lastly, this chapter spotlights the use of enslaved people in various projects in the island.

Chapter 6 reveals that the ICI joined forces with the League of Nations‘ Permanent Mandate Commission (PMC) in 1919 to shift the debate about decolonization from sovereignty to representivity. That focus on representivity enabled the ICI to claim that no group really represented the allegedly fragmented colonized population. On these grounds, ICI members who had joined the League of Nations also delegitimized the complaints that Africans and Asian had sent to the League’s PMC. The ICI members dismissed those “abusive petitions” to the League as forgeries by a riotous and unrepresentative minority. The PMC and the ICI strategically kept the debate about representation going, and it never ended. In the interwar period, this debate served to dismiss nationalist voices as unrepresentative and to defend forced labor against the ILO’s initiative to ban it from the colonial world in the 1930s. While styling itself as the representative of colonial authenticity, the ICI had to appease the emancipatory movements. To do so, members of the ICI designed representative councils in the colonies, such as the Volksraad in Indonesia and invited some of their protégés to represent their colonies at international organizations. Restricted representation for moderate elites delegitimized allegedly alienated Westernized anti-colonialists.