In this remarkable revisionist study, Stephen Saunders Webb shows that from its Tudor beginnings English imperial policy was shaped by a powerful militaristic, autocratic tradition — a tradition that openly defined English empire as the imposition of state control on dependent people by force. This imperial model has long been overshadowed in Anglo-American scholarship by the English mercantile and parliamentary tradition, which held that England's imperial government emphasized commercial rather than political domination of colonies, and that the prevailing spirit if English commonwealth and whig ideology fostered the growth of liberal colonial political institutions. Now Webb brings to light an entire military interest that found political expression in the command of garrisoned cities in England, Scotland, and Ireland, in the English regiments in France and the Netherlands, and ultimately in the palisaded plantations and fortified towns of English America.

This first volume of a projected multi-volume work uncovers the foundations of an empire based on territorial conquest, political coercion, and metropolitan centralization, and concludes with the full constitutional definition of the militarized executive, the governor-general, in America and the West Indies. The governors-general, 206 of whom are discussed by Webb, were the most influential creators of the imperial attitudes they embodied, as well as the core personnel of the imperial executive they personified, By 1681 they had established the pattern that would dominate Anglo-American affairs, with short interruptions, until 1783.

The Governors-General radically shifts most of the familiar perspectives on the colonial period. Under its influence historians will find themselves looking anew at dozens of hitherto unquestioned assumptions about Anglo-American politics, economics, and society, Written with a sweeping eloquence that is equal to the grand scope of the subject matter, Webb's book is a landmark of modern historical scholarship.