Massachusetts Bay Company (1629)

Chartered settler-colonial joint-stock company: the Massachusetts Bay Company received its royal charter from Charles I in 1629 and was initially organized on the standard Mercantile-JSC model (London shareholders, elected governor, deputy governor, Court of Assistants). The decisive break from the EIC/HBC template occurred at the Cambridge Agreement (August 1629): the leading Puritan investors — Winthrop, Dudley, Johnson, Saltonstall — agreed to emigrate only if the charter and its governance apparatus physically moved to New England. This transferred legal sovereignty from the metropolitan shareholder body to the colonists themselves, converting a trade-monopoly instrument into a self-governing settler polity. The Winthrop fleet sailed in 1630 (eleven ships, ~700 persons; Arbella sermon: "city upon a hill"). By 1630-34 the Court of Assistants expanded into a bicameral General Court (governor + assistants + deputies from the towns), the proto-legislature. Franchise was restricted to church members (freemen) — fusing Puritan covenantal theology with civil governance in a way the class card does not encode. Key MM-instance-specific events: Antinomian Controversy 1636-38 (Anne Hutchinson trial; banishment — the machine's internal discipline mechanism); Halfway Covenant 1662 (relaxed church-membership terms, signaling covenant-polity strain); King Philip's War 1675-78 (existential stress; 600 colonial dead, fiscal and demographic shock). Charles II initiated quo-warranto proceedings 1683; charter revoked 1684; Dominion of New England 1686-89; Glorious Revolution 1688-89 → Dominion collapsed; 1691 royal charter as Province of Massachusetts Bay (royal governor appointed; franchise widened from church-members to property-holders). DISSOLUTION vs. SUBSTRATE PERSISTENCE: the machine (JSC-as-government with church-member franchise) dissolves in 1684/1691. Its substrate persists: the General Court continues as the Massachusetts legislature; the township governance pattern becomes the foundational unit of New England democracy; the covenant-as-social-contract logic seeds Locke-influenced colonial constitutionalism and eventually US-Constitutional-Convention-1787. VARIANT AXIS (C2): settler-colonial JSC — charter-moves-to-colony pattern; government power vested in colonists rather than metropolitan shareholders; Puritan covenantal theology as legitimation; settlement rather than extraction as primary output.