ABSTRACT
Through an analysis of the structures and functions of the local governments of Machias and Liverpool, this chapter demonstrates how institutional modifications affected the routine administration of public business and in turn peoples’ attitudes about it. It argues that changes in local government in Nova Scotia, and subsequently throughout post-1783 British North America, helped to solidify the statist turn that imperial governance had taken at the end of the seventeenth century, and reinforced vertical administrative linkages that reached from Whitehall and Westminster to individual settlements in the colonies. The relationship among the provincial government, local leadership, and attitudes about local discretion shaped quite different political geographies in New England and Nova Scotia. The population density necessary to sustain the institutions of local government that provided routine public services through its own constituents, such as towns in New England, was smaller than the population density for institutions that provided more incidental services.
