British North America in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries attempts to demonstrate that the metropolitan power of the British Empire was of more than secondary importance to America in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The central theme of this volume is the question: to what extent did it make a difference to those living in the colonies that made up British North America in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that they were part of an empire and that the empire in question was British? The contributors, some of the leading scholars in their respective fields, strive to answer this question in various social, political, religious, and historical contexts.