Along with obscure definition and focus, Bailyn argues that, "Politics in the colonial period is a subject peculiarly difficult to locate within the broader dimensions of American history. Just as governmental institutions in pre-Revolutionary America were part of a larger grouping of institutions centering in England, so the pattern of political activity in the colonies was part of a more comprehensive British pattern and cannot be understood in isolation from that larger system."(ix) Thus Bailyn's study involves extensively the sentiments of the peoples of England and their politics before the settlement of the American colonies up through the settlement and eventual Revolution of those colonies. He believes that those ideologies become the basis for the Revolutionary movement in the American colonies.
With the colonies growing by leaps and bounds, its inhabitants were looking for more control over their own lives. Although the colonial governments were growing in power and support, the British statesmen at home refused to evolve with the developing colonies. Few British statesmen and politicians understood what this development meant. Those who did understand were unprepared to accept, as Charles M. Andrews wrote," that the empire was not a single state made up of a mother country and her dependencies, but rather a group of states equal in status, with coordinate legislatures and a common king." Thus the political struggles of the mid-eighteenth century reflect this. At this time England was not willing to accept the maturation of the American colonies, like a parent refusing to acknowledge its child is grown. In the 1760's when the issue was officially introduced the English government insisted formally in constitutional terms on "colonial subordination and dependence in the interest of the trade and commerce of their own kingdom." It was this uncompromising English policy that eventually led to the American Revolution.