Welcome to the History of the Americans podcast episode 165.

I'm your host, Jack Heneman, and I am recording this episode on October 6th,

2024 in Austin, Texas.

We are telling the history of the lands now encompassed by the United States

from the beginning without intentional presentism. Once again, my muse has intervened. In writing a

forthcoming episode on the early settlement of New Jersey and in doing some reading on early

South Carolina, it occurred to me that it would be useful to do a mini episode on the various

types of governments that England set up or suffered to exist in 17th century North America.

They were in very rough chronological order, chartered corporations,

proprietaries, and crown or royal colonies, and they were different in ways that would become

ever more important as the 17th century war on. We've touched on much of this in a haphazard way as we've gone along through the timeline,

but I at least felt the need to bring them all together in a nutshell.

Knowing some of this will be especially important in following the governance mess that

would bedevil New Jersey, which from its earliest days was beset

by confusion over the authority of government, tax evasion, internal dissent, and rampant

corruption.

One's tempted to say that some things never change, but that would be implying cause and

effect that's dubious at best. Anyway, we'll get

to all of that in due time. Let's go through the forms of colonial government in order. We'll

put links in the show notes on the website, the history of the Americans.com to as many of the

charter documents as I can find conveniently out there on the web.

Charter governments were self-governing civil corporations.

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