In "Hybrid Constitutions," Vicki Hsueh contests the idea that early-modern colonial constitutions were part of a uniform process of modernization, conquest, and assimilation. Through detailed analyses of the founding of several seventeenth-century English proprietary colonies in North America, she reveals how diverse constitutional thought and practice were at the time, and how colonial ambitions were advanced through cruelty toward indigenous peoples as well as accommodation of them. Proprietary colonies were governed by individuals (or small groups of individuals) granted colonial charters...

Study of three proprietary colonies--Maryland, Carolina, and Pennsylvania--that emphasizes the uneven, local, and contingent aspects of the development of American constitutionalism.