Appropriating empire: The British North American vice-admirality judges, 1697-177

This dissertation investigates the careers of British North America's vice-admiralty judges from the time of the courts' creation in 1697 until the outbreak of the American Revolution. An examination of the lives of these men, focusing on how the vice-admiralty judgeship affected their public life, reveals that the judgeship could often be an important component of an ambitious colonial's rise to public prominence. Vice-admiralty courts, which functioned in all major British North American ports during the eighteenth century, had jurisdiction over many components of the maritime trade which was the economic basis for the British Empire. Studying the judges sheds new light on the activities and purpose of these courts, which, contrary to previous scholarship, were not punitive enforcers of the Navigation Acts. Instead the specialized services of the colonial vice-admiralty jurisdiction, which included wartime prize trials and settling maritime labour disputes, were an important, if often unacknowledged and underappreciated, part of British North America's legal system. Because the structure of the colonial vice-admiralty courts made the judge the central and most influential figure in any vice-admiralty deliberations, the postures adopted by the judges helped determine local attitudes towards the maritime trade regulations and practices which underlay the British empire.;The colonial vice-admiralty judges prospered as a group because they provided an important service within the empire. A maritime entity such as Great Britain in the eighteenth century relied upon the smooth functioning of its seaborne connections. This could only be achieved if each of its constituent parts recognized that similar rules would govern such matters as maritime commerce or the legalities and diplomatic niceties of war at sea. Implementing such rules was the responsibility of the disparate group of men who functioned as the colonial vice-admiralty judges. Fortified by their belief that the judgeship would assist them to realize their ambitions, these individuals performed an integral role in the functioning of the early modern British empire by showing how imperial and local needs could intersect.