The Province of Maryland was founded on an ambitious plan to transplant a landed hierarchy to North America. Its settlers resisted that design, secured individual landholding and an assembly, and helped bring an end to Lord Baltimore’s political privileges when the colony became a Crown colony in 1691. The episode forms part of the book’s broader argument that institutions depended not only on their designers’ authority but also on the incentives and choices available to those expected to live under them.

Foundation and Proprietary Design

In 1632, Charles I granted ten million acres on the upper Chesapeake Bay to Cecilius Calvert, Lord Baltimore. The charter gave Baltimore broad authority to make laws and govern the province, leaving him considerable freedom to shape its institutions.

Baltimore’s plan was to create a manorial society modeled on an idealized version of rural England. The land would be divided into estates of thousands of acres under lords, who would recruit tenants to work the land and pay rent to the landed elite. Rather than distributing political and economic power widely, this system concentrated control in the hands of its proprietors and lords.

Settlers Challenge the Hierarchy

The plan proved difficult to impose. Settlers insisted on obtaining land of their own, challenging the arrangement in which they would work large estates as tenants and pay rents to privileged landholders. Their demands reflected the practical limits on elite authority in the New World: settlers had alternatives, and a rigid hierarchy could not simply compel them to remain within it.

The pressure led Baltimore to create an assembly. This was a consequential change in the colony’s political structure: settlers gained a representative institution through which they could press their claims, rather than remaining solely under the proprietor’s authority.

Crown Rule and Colonial Consequences

In 1691, Maryland’s assembly induced the king to make the province a Crown colony. The change removed Baltimore’s political privileges and those of the great lords, marking the defeat of the proprietary political arrangement. Maryland’s struggle was prolonged, but its outcome resembled the broader pattern in the colonies: attempts to preserve a narrowly controlled, hierarchical order gave way when settlers demanded both land and political rights.

By the 1720s, Maryland was among the thirteen colonies with a governor and an assembly elected on a franchise limited to male property holders. These governments were not democratic: women, enslaved people, and people without property could not vote. Yet their political rights were comparatively broad relative to many contemporary societies, and colonial assemblies later became the institutions whose leaders joined the First Continental Congress in 1774. Their claims to control their own membership and taxation brought them into conflict with the English colonial government.

Significance

Maryland’s history illustrates the book’s distinction between designing institutions and making them durable. Baltimore possessed a charter granting extensive governing powers, but formal authority did not secure the manorial society he envisioned. Settlers’ ability to seek land and demand representation changed the political settlement, eventually transferring the province from proprietary to Crown rule.

The comparison with later efforts to restrict economic and political rights in the colonies gives Maryland’s experience wider significance. The book argues that those schemes repeatedly broke down because settlers had too many alternatives to be forced into a rigid hierarchy. Institutions that offered incentives to work and invest, alongside expanding demands for economic freedom and political rights, proved more viable than the proprietary design.