ABSTRACT
The policy of the home government, as suggested by the instruction and that to Jamaica in 1681, had operated in conjunction with the rapid constitutional development in the islands to bring the agencies of all the larger colonies in the West Indies to similar positions by the close of the century. The dismissal of Gorges gave opportunity for the growth of agencies for which the employment of Joseph Jory had provided precedent, but which differed from this in that they concerned one island only. The last thirty years of the seventeenth century saw the establishment of agencies in all three of the larger West Indian colonies. By the opening of this period the most significant of the acts of settlement had been accomplished. Nevertheless in the Leeward Islands, as in Barbados, the period between the constitutional settlement of 1660–1670 and the early years of the French war had seen the gradual development of the agency.
