How did colonies develop under contractual imperialism? This chapter reviews three important cases – Virginia, Massachusetts Bay, and Barbados – and argues that contractual imperialism had important successes. Under contractual imperialism, colonizers did search vigorously for resource endowments, and made and re-made their economies at significant cost to exploit them. Patent terms for balanced colonial polities did restrain some of the excesses of colonial government under their founding elites. At the same time, experience revealed important problems with contractual imperialism: It was not effective at coordinating an empire of multiple colonies, and it provided such strong incentives that it generated significant factional disputes within colonies. Nevertheless, under contractual imperialism, English colonies established successful cash-crop economies.

Orthodox Eurocentric accounts of constitutionalism and constitutional law see the birth of modern constitutions as the product of processes internal to Europe, whereupon an increasingly enlightened civil society broke with the shackles of feudalism, absolutism and their attendant legal forms. Foreground the material context of ‘modern’ liberal constitutionalism and constitutions, this chapter argues instead these were born out of the blood and violence of empire and that they continue to be implicated in the reproduction of imperialism or, to be more precise, of capitalist imperialism defined as a global, Western-led, gendered and racialised system of domination and exploitation inherent to capitalism. To illustrate some of the connections between constitutionalism, constitutional law and capitalist imperialism, the chapter draws on select examples from British and French imperialism and pays particular attention to the ways in which racialisation structured their relationship at different stages of (imperial) capitalist development.