Dominion of New England formed (centralized British control)

In 1686, James II created the Dominion of New England and placed Massachusetts, Plymouth, New Hampshire, and later Rhode Island and Connecticut under a single royal administration headquartered in Boston. Joseph Dudley first served as president, and Edmund Andros arrived in December 1686 as royal governor of the enlarged Dominion. Andros ruled without a representative assembly and used appointed councils and imperial officers to enforce royal policy across New England.

The Dominion intensified a constitutional struggle over whether New England's charter governments could survive a more centralized imperial system after the Restoration. James II and Andros sought stricter enforcement of the Navigation Acts, tighter control over land titles, and limits on the town meeting tradition that had anchored local government in Massachusetts and Connecticut. New England ministers, magistrates, and merchants saw the Dominion as an attack on chartered self-government, Puritan political culture, and the legal autonomy of their colonial institutions.

The Dominion of New England lasted only until the Boston uprising of April 1689, when colonists arrested Andros after the Glorious Revolution. Its collapse led directly to the 1691 Massachusetts charter and left a lasting colonial suspicion of centralized imperial rule without representative assemblies.