Proprietary colonies were privately supervised colonies with powers normally reserved for the government. They were granted to proprietors who could govern the land, levy taxes, make laws, and organize militias. However, the model invested people with too much power, leading nations to abandon it. Some early colonies in the Americas were proprietary colonies, but there are no such colonies today.
A proprietary colony is a privately supervised colony vested with the same powers normally reserved for the government. England used this system in particular for some of its colonies established in the 1600s and the French also followed suit with several colonies of its own during the same time period. However, there were a number of drawbacks with the proprietary colony model that led nations to abandon it in favor of systems that would more effectively centralize power. There are no such colonies today.
In a proprietary colony, the government granted a charter to one or more proprietors, sometimes called Lords Proprietors. These individuals received not only land grants but also the right to govern the land. They could collect rents, levy taxes, make laws, create settlements, and organize militias to protect their lands. From the government’s point of view, the goal was to get a well-established and prosperous colony under the supervision of authorities who would have an interest in seeing it succeed. People who might have hesitated to settle could see the obvious appeal in essentially running their own sovereign nations and were willing to take the plunge to establish a proprietary colony.
The major flaw of the colony ownership model was that it invested the people with enormous amounts of power. While officially colonies of the parent nation, such colonies developed highly independent attitudes. As a result, the home nation began asking the Lord Proprietors to hand over some of the rights granted to them by the government. While there was resistance to this, the government eventually got its way.
Several early colonies in the Americas were proprietary colonies including Maryland, Virginia, Nova Scotia, North Carolina, and Barbados. In what later became the United States, some of these colonies were among the founding states of the nascent nation. Today, the original charters under which these states were founded can be seen in archival facilities and are studied by historians interested in colonialism, the history of the United States, and the various models that were used for colonization.
Governments have long struggled with the balance between providing colonies with enough independence to thrive and keeping their colonies in check. As seen in the series of independence wars that rocked colonies around the world, many colonies later began to resent their home governments and resisted any form of outside rule, sometimes quite violently .
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