ABSTRACT
The English Empire in North America formed in a rather haphazard fashion, the product of diverse initiatives and multiple improvisations rather than centralized and careful design. In the latter decades of the seventeenth and the early decades of the eighteenth centuries, the pressures of war, commerce, and government finance pushed figures on both sides of the Atlantic to try and define more clearly the relationships among the different parts of the empire. New Englanders had chafed under the Dominion of New England. News of the Glorious Revolution in England gave them an opportunity to translate their discontent into action. News of the Glorious Revolution also triggered unrest in the much more ethnically diverse colony of New York. The tumult lasted for two years, and the tensions causing and caused by it continued for decades more. The anonymous 1698 letter that follows presents one interpretation of events.
