With meticulous detail, noted colonial historian Sydney V. James relates the story of the way in which Rhode Island's founders created, and then rationalized, the institutions that shaped their lives at both the local and provincial levels. He follows the tortuous and uneven path Rhode Islanders took as they developed town and colony governments, churches and private corporations, and courts and land companies that eventually gave a semblance of form and order to a fractious society. The Colonial Metamorphoses in Rhode Island brings to light new ways of looking at an often neglected period stretching from the founding to the revolutionary era. And as a study of institution building in Rhode Island, it brings a colony always viewed as "exceptional" into the mainstream of colonial history. This, James's final book, left unpublished at the time of his death in 1993, is now brought to publication by Sheila L. Skemp and Bruce C. Daniels, two leading students of the Rhode Island colony.