About the Author
Jack P. Greene is Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the Humanities Emeritus at Johns Hopkins University, where he founded the Program in Atlantic History and Culture. He is coeditor, with Philip D. Morgan, of Atlantic History: A Critical Reappraisal and the author of Interpreting Early America: show more Historiographical Essays (Virginia). show less
Works by Jack P. Greene
Pursuits of Happiness: The Social Development of Early Modern British Colonies and the Formation of American Culture (1988) 207 copies
Colonial British America: Essays in the New History of the Early Modern Era (1983) — Editor — 108 copies
The Intellectual Construction of America: Exceptionalism and Identity From 1492 to 1800 (1993) 50 copies
Peripheries and Center: Constitutional Development in the Extended Polities of the British Empire and the United… (1899) 50 copies
The Quest for Power: The Lower Houses of Assembly in the Southern Royal Colonies, 1689–1776 (1963) 44 copies
The Constitutional Origins of the American Revolution (New Histories of American Law) (2010) 36 copies
Encyclopedia of American Political History : Studies of the Principal Movements and Ideas (3 volumes) (1984) 22 copies
Landon Carter: An Inquiry into the Personal Values and Social Imperatives of the Eighteenth-Century (1965) 17 copies
Exploring the Bounds of Liberty: Political Writings of Colonial British America from the Glorious Revolution to the… (2018) 13 copies
Creating the British Atlantic : essays on transplantation, adaptation, and continuity (2013) 10 copies
Money, Trade, and Power : The Evolution of Colonial South Carolina's Plantation Society (2001) 9 copies
Society, freedom, and conscience : the American Revolution in Virginia, Massachusetts, and New York (1977) 7 copies
The South's Role in the Creation of the Bill of Rights: Essays (Chancellor's Symposium Series) (1991) 7 copies
The American Colonies in the Eighteenth Century, 1689-1763 (Goldentree Bibliographies in American History) (1969) 6 copies
Commemoration ceremony in honor of the two hundredth anniversary of the First Continental Congress in the United… (1975) 5 copies
The nature of colony constitutions; two pamphlets on the Wilkes fund controversy in South Carolina (1970) 4 copies
All men are created equal : some reflections on the character of the American revolution : an inaugural lecture (1976) 2 copies
The Diary of Colonel Landon Carter of Sabine Hall 1752–1778 — Editor — 1 copy
The Atlantic World in the Early Modern Era: Selected Essays of Professor Jack Greene in History 1 copy
Selling a New World — Editor — 1 copy
Associated Works
Negotiated Empires: Centers and Peripheries in the New World, 1500-1820 (2002) — Introduction; Contributor — 36 copies
An Uncivil War: The Southern Backcountry During the American Revolution (Perspectives on the American Revolution) (1985) — Contributor — 17 copies
Tagged
Common Knowledge
- Legal name
- Greene, Jack Philip
- Birthdate
- 1931-08-12
- Gender
- male
- Nationality
- USA
- Birthplace
- Lafayette, Indiana, USA
- Education
- Duke University (Ph.D|1956)
Indiana University (MA|1952)
University of North Carolina (BA|1951) - Occupations
- professor
historian - Organizations
- Johns Hopkins University
University of California, Irvine - Awards and honors
- American Historical Association Award for Scholarly Distinction (2007)
Fellow, American Philosophical Society (1992)
Fellow, American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2006) - Short biography
- Jack P. Greene (1931-)
Jack was born in 1931 in Lafayette, Indiana, and received his PhD from Duke University in 1956. He was at the University of Michigan in 1965 and joined the Department of History in the Krieger School of Arts and Sciences in 1966.
Greene spent most his career as Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the Humanities at Johns Hopkins University’s history department. In 1990-92, he was a Professor at the University of California, Irvine, and he has been a visiting professor at the College of William and Mary, Oxford University, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, the Ecole des Haute Etudes en Science Sociale, University of Richmond, Michigan State University, and the Freie Universitat de Berlin, and has held fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the Institute for Advanced Study, the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, the National Humanities Center, and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, among others.
He received his first fellowship award at the National Humanities center during 1987-1988.
During his career, Greene, whose focus is early American history, published 16 books and trained more than 75 graduate students. He was honored in 2000 with a three-day scholarly conference of former students from his more than 35 years at Hopkins.
Greene retired in 2005 and is currently an Invited Research Scholar at the John Carter Brown Library and became the 'Andrew W. Mellon' Professor Emeritus in the Humanities in the Department of History at Johns Hopkins University.
In May 2009 he was once again honored by National Humanities Center and selected as one of 33 fellows for the 2009-2010 academic year.
Greene's project st this time was titled The British Debate on American Colonial Resistance, 1760-1783. He is credited with being one of the seminal figures in the field of Atlantic history, the study of the continents and islands surrounding the Atlantic basin during the early modern period and the demographic, economic, and political exchanges among them, exchanges that resulted in the formation of new societies in the Americas, the emergence of Europe as a transoceanic imperial center, the development of the transatlantic slave trade, and the colonization of parts of Africa.
Books
Pursuits of Happiness: The Social Development of Early Modern British Colonies and the Formation of American Culture (October 30, 1988)
The Constitutional Origins of the American Revolution (New Histories of American Law) (October 25, 2010)
The Intellectual Construction of America: Exceptionalism and Identity From 1492 to 1800 (February 26, 1997)
The Quest For Power: The Lower Houses of Assembly in the Southern Royal Colonies, 1689-1776 (January 17, 1972)
Peripheries and Center: Constitutional Development in the Extended Polities of the British Empire and the United States,... (August 1, 2008)
Understanding the American Revolution: Issues and Actors (October 22, 1995)
Imperatives, Behaviors, and Identities: Essays in Early American Cultural History (November 22, 1992)
Negotiated Authorities: Essays in Colonial Political and Constitutional History (August 22, 1994)
Political Life in Eighteenth-Century Virginia (The Foundations of America) (January 1, 1987)
Interpreting Early America: Historiographical Essays (April 22, 1996)
American Colonies in the Eighteenth Century 1689-1763 (June 1, 1969)
Great Britain and the American colonies, 1606-1763 (January 1, 1970)
Preachers & politicians: Two essays on the origins of the American Revolution (January 1, 1977)
Members
Reviews
The Intellectual Construction of America: E… by Jack P. Greene
12/16/21
In their introduction, Philip D. Morang and Jack P. Greene write, “Atlantic history is an analytic construct and an explicit category of historical analysis that historians have devised to help them organize the study of some of the most important developments of the early modern era: the emergence in the fifteenth century and the subsequent growth of the Atlantic basin as a site for demographic, economic, social, cultural, and other forms of exchange among and within the four continents surrounding the Atlantic Ocean – Europe, Africa, South America, and North America – and all the islands adjacent to those continents and in that ocean” (pg. 3). They continue, “Pan-Atlantic webs of association linked people, objects, and beliefs across and within the region. Though always fragmented, the early modern Atlantic world came to be increasingly united through a density and variety of connections” (pg. 8). Furthermore, “borderland areas, transfrontier regions, places where natives and newcomers collided and often none ruled, formed another vector of Atlantic history. Such places gave rise to entangled histories” (pg. 13).
Joyce E. Chaplin writes, “The history of the Atlantic’s contemporary meanings occurred in three stages. In the first, Europeans thought of the Atlantic as a geographic space to get across, a rather belated idea that contradicted an ancient suspicion that the ocean was not a real space at all. In the second stage, the peoples in the post-Columbian countries that faced the Atlantic thought of that ocean as a space in which to make or imagine physical connections, both among different places and among different natural forces. In the last stage, people emphasized the Atlantic’s value as a route elsewhere, especially when the Pacific became a new destination for them” (pg. 36).
Trevor Burnard writes, “Greater British and Atlantic history developed together at roughly the same time (the early 1970s) and at least partly for the same reasons, including a desire to move away from what was perceived as the increasingly narrow parochialism of studies of small British or American towns and parishes, and a concomitant insistence that British history had been distinct from European history because of the particular importance of imperial expansion in British history and in British self-definition” (pg. 115). He argues, “Perhaps the single most important advance attributable to the Atlantic perspective has been its encouragement of the incorporation of Africans and Native Americans into the making of colonial British America” (pg. 121). An additional advantage of this study “is that it redresses American and British exceptionalism. To study the British Atlantic without recognizing that British actions were shaped and constrained by the actions of other imperial polities, notably the Spanish and French empires, is no longer intellectually sustainable” (pg. 124).
Amy Turner Bushnell writes, “The areas of neo-European mastery in the Americas were small and slow-growing: until the late nineteenth century more than half of the habitable hemisphere (defined as everything this side of the permanent frost line) remained under indigenous control. Meanwhile, between the island-like settler enclaves and the Indian nations’ vast territories, closed to outsiders, lay the frontiers, where neo-European and Indian societies met on relatively even terms, neither side having a monopoly of violence and each side trying to change the other for the better” (pg. 191). She argues, “Indigenous peoples shaped the course of Atlantic history in the Americas by subordination, interaction, or opposition. From the perspective of colonial history, they can be divided into three categories. In the first group were the incorporated peoples inside of empire, occupying niches in colonial encounters and peripheries. In the second group were the peoples on the frontiers of empire, reconciled or contested, the difference being that on a reconciled frontier, pacified natives interacted with pacified missionaries, traders, and soldiers, both sides achieving their ends without resorting to violence, whereas on a contested ground, negotiation was apt to give way to armed conflict” (pg. 194). Finally, “The third group consisted of the autonomous peoples outside of empire, opposing the neo-Europeans with their own weapons” (pg. 194).
Philip D. Morgan argues, “A voluntary partnership best captures the relationship between African traders and rulers and European merchants and ship captains. Africans called the tune in many aspects of this relationship, even if overall Europeans benefited the most from their exchanges” (pg. 225). He continues, “the volume of Atlantic trade, no matter how rapidly it was growing, was not large enough to have transformed Africa’s economy, although arguably the social and political effects of Atlantic integration were more dramatic than the economic – and more negative than positive. But even so, much of the continent’s development continued along lines dictated by its own traditions and imperatives” (pg. 232). Morgan concludes, “Africa was a full partner in the merging Atlantic world, but much of the continent was unaffected by Atlantic influences and, indeed, was oriented in other directions. In the early modern era, Africans were more important to the Atlantic world than the Atlantic world was to Africans” (pg. 241).
Carla Rahn Phillips argues, “Although the concept of an Atlantic world remains useful for understanding the nineteenth century and beyond, it was a far different Atlantic world from the one bracketed at one end by the fifteenth-century voyages of exploration and at the other end by the era of the Atlantic revolutions” (pg. 250). Jack P. Greene writes, “While the emergence of the Atlantic perspective has served to undermine traditional national frameworks, the multicultural turn has thus largely functioned to reinforce them” (pg. 301). He continues, “The new interest in the non-English colonial histories of areas in the United States points logically in the direction of the desirability of a broad hemispheric perspective that, by promoting broad comparative analysis across both the South and North American hemispheres and their adjacent islands, might actually enhance the prospects for transcending national frameworks. Moreover, a hemispheric perspective also seems to offer better prospects for achieving one of the unfulfilled promises of the Atlantic perspective, the possibility of drawing conclusions” (pg. 301). He cautions, “the primary obstacle to the development of a hemispheric perspective is, of course, the dense historiographies that, especially in recent decades, have emerged in the study of all areas of the Americas, historiographies that require enormous time and energy to master” (pg. 301).… (more)
Joyce E. Chaplin writes, “The history of the Atlantic’s contemporary meanings occurred in three stages. In the first, Europeans thought of the Atlantic as a geographic space to get across, a rather belated idea that contradicted an ancient suspicion that the ocean was not a real space at all. In the second stage, the peoples in the post-Columbian countries that faced the Atlantic thought of that ocean as a space in which to make or imagine physical connections, both among different places and among different natural forces. In the last stage, people emphasized the Atlantic’s value as a route elsewhere, especially when the Pacific became a new destination for them” (pg. 36).
Trevor Burnard writes, “Greater British and Atlantic history developed together at roughly the same time (the early 1970s) and at least partly for the same reasons, including a desire to move away from what was perceived as the increasingly narrow parochialism of studies of small British or American towns and parishes, and a concomitant insistence that British history had been distinct from European history because of the particular importance of imperial expansion in British history and in British self-definition” (pg. 115). He argues, “Perhaps the single most important advance attributable to the Atlantic perspective has been its encouragement of the incorporation of Africans and Native Americans into the making of colonial British America” (pg. 121). An additional advantage of this study “is that it redresses American and British exceptionalism. To study the British Atlantic without recognizing that British actions were shaped and constrained by the actions of other imperial polities, notably the Spanish and French empires, is no longer intellectually sustainable” (pg. 124).
Amy Turner Bushnell writes, “The areas of neo-European mastery in the Americas were small and slow-growing: until the late nineteenth century more than half of the habitable hemisphere (defined as everything this side of the permanent frost line) remained under indigenous control. Meanwhile, between the island-like settler enclaves and the Indian nations’ vast territories, closed to outsiders, lay the frontiers, where neo-European and Indian societies met on relatively even terms, neither side having a monopoly of violence and each side trying to change the other for the better” (pg. 191). She argues, “Indigenous peoples shaped the course of Atlantic history in the Americas by subordination, interaction, or opposition. From the perspective of colonial history, they can be divided into three categories. In the first group were the incorporated peoples inside of empire, occupying niches in colonial encounters and peripheries. In the second group were the peoples on the frontiers of empire, reconciled or contested, the difference being that on a reconciled frontier, pacified natives interacted with pacified missionaries, traders, and soldiers, both sides achieving their ends without resorting to violence, whereas on a contested ground, negotiation was apt to give way to armed conflict” (pg. 194). Finally, “The third group consisted of the autonomous peoples outside of empire, opposing the neo-Europeans with their own weapons” (pg. 194).
Philip D. Morgan argues, “A voluntary partnership best captures the relationship between African traders and rulers and European merchants and ship captains. Africans called the tune in many aspects of this relationship, even if overall Europeans benefited the most from their exchanges” (pg. 225). He continues, “the volume of Atlantic trade, no matter how rapidly it was growing, was not large enough to have transformed Africa’s economy, although arguably the social and political effects of Atlantic integration were more dramatic than the economic – and more negative than positive. But even so, much of the continent’s development continued along lines dictated by its own traditions and imperatives” (pg. 232). Morgan concludes, “Africa was a full partner in the merging Atlantic world, but much of the continent was unaffected by Atlantic influences and, indeed, was oriented in other directions. In the early modern era, Africans were more important to the Atlantic world than the Atlantic world was to Africans” (pg. 241).
Carla Rahn Phillips argues, “Although the concept of an Atlantic world remains useful for understanding the nineteenth century and beyond, it was a far different Atlantic world from the one bracketed at one end by the fifteenth-century voyages of exploration and at the other end by the era of the Atlantic revolutions” (pg. 250). Jack P. Greene writes, “While the emergence of the Atlantic perspective has served to undermine traditional national frameworks, the multicultural turn has thus largely functioned to reinforce them” (pg. 301). He continues, “The new interest in the non-English colonial histories of areas in the United States points logically in the direction of the desirability of a broad hemispheric perspective that, by promoting broad comparative analysis across both the South and North American hemispheres and their adjacent islands, might actually enhance the prospects for transcending national frameworks. Moreover, a hemispheric perspective also seems to offer better prospects for achieving one of the unfulfilled promises of the Atlantic perspective, the possibility of drawing conclusions” (pg. 301). He cautions, “the primary obstacle to the development of a hemispheric perspective is, of course, the dense historiographies that, especially in recent decades, have emerged in the study of all areas of the Americas, historiographies that require enormous time and energy to master” (pg. 301).… (more)
Time for a segment of "A moment in obscure history." This time, we're looking at the constitutional dispute that resulted in the American Revolution.
Since sometime in 2009, the Tea Party movement has lead a revival of interest in the US Constitution. Senator Mike Lee summed up why the increased interest of late during the release of his new book, "The Freedom Agenda: Why a Balanced Budget Amendment is Necessary to Restore Constitutional Government": many of our problems today stem from when the "federal government started ignoring those Constitutional boundaries about what Congress is supposed to be doing."
Suddenly, propelled by Glenn Beck, books like The 5000 Year Leap , a right-wing conservative's guide to the making of the federal constitution, "leaped" to the Amazon best seller list (it's now listed at 2,615 overall and the top 100 under "Politics"). While it provides only a simple, somewhat white-washed, and superficial vision of the US Constitution, no amount of increased attention in our federal constitution is too little.
"Where does the Constitution," goes the rallying cry, "give the President and Congress the authority for the laws they are passing?"
Neither the revival, however, nor questioning the constitutionality of the federal laws, is unique in history. In fact, it was a dispute over the constitutionality of a central government's actions that lead to another major event in our country's history: the American Revolution.
"The fruit of half a century of research and reflection, Greene's masterly book restores legal pluralism and constitutional controversy to their proper place among the causes, course, and consequences of the American Revolution." - David Armitage, Harvard University
In his short, and dense, review of the century and a half leading up to the American Revolution, "The Constitutional Origins of the American Revolution," Jack P. Greene postulates and examines that evidence that the American revolution did not erupt purely as a simple dispute over "taxation without representation," but rather that such rallying cries emerged after decades of disagreement on who justly had the right to legislate for the American colonies
"Whether the king-in-Parliament, the ultimate source of statute law in Great Britain, could legislate for British colonies overseas was the ostensible question in dispute, but many other related and even deeper legal issues involving the nature of the constitution of the empire and the location of sovereignty within the empire emerged from and were thoroughly canvassed during the debate."
(From Constitutional Origins, p. 1)
It was only after the conflicting opinions of metropolitan Britain and that of the colonists failed to be reconciled that open warfare broke out in 1775, and it was why the decision to broach the topic of and ultimately pursue independence from Great Britain was so cautiously and tentatively pursued. The colonists considered themselves British subjects, citizens, not vassals and secession was not a choice they relished.
They saw themselves as part and partial of the British Empire. Indeed, as one Virginia lawyer at the time phrased it, they might be "subordinate to the Authority of Parliament," but only "in Degree" and "not absolutely so." (p.78). As free men and
"As free-born Britons, the colonists assumed, they could not be subjected to any but what Bland referred to as "a constitutional Subordination" to the parent state."
(From Constitutional Origins p. 78)
The nature of this "constitutional Subordination" was such that the colonists readily accepted the authority of Parliament in certain areas, but balked at the idea of taxation, seeing it as beyond Parliament's authority. "Indeed, considerable evidence suggests that the colonists' strong initial impulse was to exclude Parliament from all jurisdiction over the domestic affairs of the colonies." (p.79) Like our modern idea of the federal government, the states concern themselves with their domestic activities while the federal government's most basic responsibility is national security.
Interestingly, from a historical perspective, we start to see the first signs of federalism in the disputes between the colonies and the home country.
Further,
"[s]o long as Parliament confined its regulations to "restrictions on navigation, commerce, or other external regulations," they reasoned, the '"legislatures of the colonies" would be "left entire"and "the internal government, powers of taxing for its support, and exemption from being taxed without consent, and [all] other immunities which legally belong[ed] to the subjects of each colony agreeable to their own particular constitutions" would thereby, according to the "general principles of the British constitution," remain "secure and untouched.""
Sound familiar? If you hear the foreshadowing of the federalism that would be later inscribed into the US Constitution, there's a reason. It was rooted in the relationship between Great Britain and its far-flung colonies.
If, during the last couple years, you've found yourself at all more interested in the federal constitution and the limitations it places on the federal government, I urge you to look at the role constitutions, and constitutional disputes, played in leading to our own American constitution.
It's a great read, if a bit scholarly, and evidence that whether a law is constitutional is not a new question, but actually may be at the very root of the American experiment and its origins in the American revolution. The American revolution was not, nor is it today, an obscure moment in history, but rooted in obscure legal disputes between the colonies and mother country, long predating the Stamp Acts and the Boston Massacre. It began as a constitutional dispute between the central government in London and the British colonies in America.
Understanding why the colonist went to war, how they got there, and the legal battles that preceded the battlefields can be useful in understanding why the Founders drafted what they did--into the Declaration of Independence and into the federal constitution--and what those words mean to us now, even in the midst of our own constitutional disputes.
Pick up The Constitutional Origins of the American Revolution by Jack P. Greene from Cambridge University Press, 2011.
(h/t Patrick Charles, who introduced the book to me)… (more)
Since sometime in 2009, the Tea Party movement has lead a revival of interest in the US Constitution. Senator Mike Lee summed up why the increased interest of late during the release of his new book, "The Freedom Agenda: Why a Balanced Budget Amendment is Necessary to Restore Constitutional Government": many of our problems today stem from when the "federal government started ignoring those Constitutional boundaries about what Congress is supposed to be doing."
Suddenly, propelled by Glenn Beck, books like The 5000 Year Leap , a right-wing conservative's guide to the making of the federal constitution, "leaped" to the Amazon best seller list (it's now listed at 2,615 overall and the top 100 under "Politics"). While it provides only a simple, somewhat white-washed, and superficial vision of the US Constitution, no amount of increased attention in our federal constitution is too little.
"Where does the Constitution," goes the rallying cry, "give the President and Congress the authority for the laws they are passing?"
Neither the revival, however, nor questioning the constitutionality of the federal laws, is unique in history. In fact, it was a dispute over the constitutionality of a central government's actions that lead to another major event in our country's history: the American Revolution.
"The fruit of half a century of research and reflection, Greene's masterly book restores legal pluralism and constitutional controversy to their proper place among the causes, course, and consequences of the American Revolution." - David Armitage, Harvard University
In his short, and dense, review of the century and a half leading up to the American Revolution, "The Constitutional Origins of the American Revolution," Jack P. Greene postulates and examines that evidence that the American revolution did not erupt purely as a simple dispute over "taxation without representation," but rather that such rallying cries emerged after decades of disagreement on who justly had the right to legislate for the American colonies
"Whether the king-in-Parliament, the ultimate source of statute law in Great Britain, could legislate for British colonies overseas was the ostensible question in dispute, but many other related and even deeper legal issues involving the nature of the constitution of the empire and the location of sovereignty within the empire emerged from and were thoroughly canvassed during the debate."
(From Constitutional Origins, p. 1)
It was only after the conflicting opinions of metropolitan Britain and that of the colonists failed to be reconciled that open warfare broke out in 1775, and it was why the decision to broach the topic of and ultimately pursue independence from Great Britain was so cautiously and tentatively pursued. The colonists considered themselves British subjects, citizens, not vassals and secession was not a choice they relished.
They saw themselves as part and partial of the British Empire. Indeed, as one Virginia lawyer at the time phrased it, they might be "subordinate to the Authority of Parliament," but only "in Degree" and "not absolutely so." (p.78). As free men and
"As free-born Britons, the colonists assumed, they could not be subjected to any but what Bland referred to as "a constitutional Subordination" to the parent state."
(From Constitutional Origins p. 78)
The nature of this "constitutional Subordination" was such that the colonists readily accepted the authority of Parliament in certain areas, but balked at the idea of taxation, seeing it as beyond Parliament's authority. "Indeed, considerable evidence suggests that the colonists' strong initial impulse was to exclude Parliament from all jurisdiction over the domestic affairs of the colonies." (p.79) Like our modern idea of the federal government, the states concern themselves with their domestic activities while the federal government's most basic responsibility is national security.
Interestingly, from a historical perspective, we start to see the first signs of federalism in the disputes between the colonies and the home country.
Further,
"[s]o long as Parliament confined its regulations to "restrictions on navigation, commerce, or other external regulations," they reasoned, the '"legislatures of the colonies" would be "left entire"and "the internal government, powers of taxing for its support, and exemption from being taxed without consent, and [all] other immunities which legally belong[ed] to the subjects of each colony agreeable to their own particular constitutions" would thereby, according to the "general principles of the British constitution," remain "secure and untouched.""
Sound familiar? If you hear the foreshadowing of the federalism that would be later inscribed into the US Constitution, there's a reason. It was rooted in the relationship between Great Britain and its far-flung colonies.
If, during the last couple years, you've found yourself at all more interested in the federal constitution and the limitations it places on the federal government, I urge you to look at the role constitutions, and constitutional disputes, played in leading to our own American constitution.
It's a great read, if a bit scholarly, and evidence that whether a law is constitutional is not a new question, but actually may be at the very root of the American experiment and its origins in the American revolution. The American revolution was not, nor is it today, an obscure moment in history, but rooted in obscure legal disputes between the colonies and mother country, long predating the Stamp Acts and the Boston Massacre. It began as a constitutional dispute between the central government in London and the British colonies in America.
Understanding why the colonist went to war, how they got there, and the legal battles that preceded the battlefields can be useful in understanding why the Founders drafted what they did--into the Declaration of Independence and into the federal constitution--and what those words mean to us now, even in the midst of our own constitutional disputes.
Pick up The Constitutional Origins of the American Revolution by Jack P. Greene from Cambridge University Press, 2011.
(h/t Patrick Charles, who introduced the book to me)… (more)
Preface
In order to make his point about the primacy of economic pursuits in shaping American society, Greene sets up the straw man of New England declension model. As some reviewers pointed out, by the time of this book's publication few seriously held to that approach, as Greene's own conclusions in Chapter 8 reveal (see esp. Kettner in AHR). This work is valuable, it would seem, as a work of synthetic social history more than as a way to dispel the myth of New England.
Greene takes a regional approach to the social history of Colonial British America, dividing the world into four regions: New England, the Chesapeake, Britain and Ireland, The Middle Colonies and the Lower South, and The Atlantic and the Caribbean Islands. He treats the development of each region in a separate section covering the roughly 100 year period from 1660-1760. In his conclusion, he discusses the changes that drew the regions together to form the nation. The foundation of that nation was primarily an economic one for Greene. Though he doesn't rule out the importance of religion, he is anxious to exert the primacy of convergence in economic trends throughout the three regions as the 18th C progresses.
Prologue
Greene makes the interesting point that the American South is viewed as being "backward" in the 19th and 20th centuries, that it portrayed itself in the antebellum years as being above the money-grubbing of the north and that it lagged behind the north in economic development during most of the 20th century. We should not be distracted by this later period from the fact that the south was highly commercial in outlook from the founding. Maybe New England historians like George Bancroft tied all of American development back to Plymouth colony, but few today would doubt that the line of development runs equally back to Jamestown. Seeing America as a place where they could pursue their own material happiness, colonials in Jamestown was in the mainstream of American life of the time and the pursuit of economic happiness in Chesapeake is more the norm for the rest of colonial British America throughout the 18th C than theologically oriented New England. It was not until the 19th C that the South would try to distance itself from the crass commercialism of the North.
Chapter 1: Two Models of English Colonization, 1600-1660
Sets up the New England model in opposition to the Chesapeake model of economic and social development in the 17th C. Starting with the Spanish experience of conquest in America, Greene puts the Virginia Company in the context of the world of early 17th C empires. The objective of the Virginia Company was conquest and trade, not colonization and settlement. As the Spaniards in Mesoamerica, so too the British in Jamestown (1607). They were at first commercial conquerors and only later did they build societies. When they did set up agricultural endeavors, it was around tobacco culture with its intensive labor requirements. Early on the colony attracted indentured servants, single white males with few prospects in Europe. Though they may have set out with high ideals about spreading the Word of God, this was a profoundly commercial society. "Virginia was a highly exploitative society in which a few of the people who survived the high mortality had become rich and the vast majority worked in harsh conditions as servants, hoping to live long enough to work out their terms and become independent, landowning producers." (p. 12) After experiencing boom years in the 1630s and 40s, the economy stabilized and a more hierarchical society developed in the later part of the 40s and into the 50s. Moving out of the deadly estuarine zone, health improved and mortality declined as more stable families formed around a more equitable sex ratio. Greene refers to a gradual "thickening of social networks" (p. 17) By 1660, Virginia had become a more stable and stratified society, with concentrations of wealth in the hands of fewer planters.
Greene sets up New England as the foil to the Chesapeake. Plymouth (1620) was settled by families of the middling sort who were inspired by a desire to create a religious community in the New World as opposed to making a fortune. The New English came as families, not as single white male indentured servants. The sex ration was thus more equal, and population increased more as the result of native growth than immigration. New England focused initially on community building, hence the stability of the New England town in contrast to the unsettled life on the Chesapeake. Dissenters notwithstanding, New England society was remarkably homogenous in the 17th C, and the power of kinship networks was great. Throughout the first generation of settlement, patriarchal family authority preserved peace and order. New England society was intensely literate, founding colleges to educate ministers (Harvard and Yale) and producing a print culture which David Hall can mine for evidence of the World of Wonders common to elite and common society. Dedicated to a slow and organic pattern of growth, the New England world was far less differentiated in economic terms up to 1660. This was not the get rich quick society that prospered in Virginia.
Chapter 2: Reconsiderations
Based upon a consideration of scholarship in the 70s and 80s on Early Modern England, Greene contests the idea that New England was the most British of the colonies. The earlier picture of stable English villages isolated from the market has given way to the picture of Early Modern England as a far more stratified society, given over to market relations instead of sturdy yeomen farmers working to meet subsistence needs. The professions also provided avenues of mobility upward through the social classes, formerly thought to be far less permeable. British society was far less rooted than historians have often assumed. Paternalistic authority too was far less well established than once thought. Beset by low fertility rates and oriented toward the pursuit of materialistic gain in the agrarian marketplace. If all this is true, then the Chesapeake represents the mainstream of British social development instead of an aberration. In this context, New England seems reactionary and utopian, harkening back to a yeoman society that certainly didn't exist in the England they left if it ever did. What the New Englanders were trying to establish was not something that existed in the Old World. The society the puritans established was economically and socially very different from the one they left behind.
Greene then turns to Ireland, Bermuda and the West Indies. Here he finds much more to recommend similarities with Chesapeake developments in the 17th C than New England ones. The English landlords in Ireland sought to wring profits from the land, settling disbanded soldiers there to work the lands. Yet they never found the profitable staple crop to make their fortunes like the tobacco of Virginia or the Sugar of the Caribbean Islands. The lethal disease environment in Ireland killed settlers at a high rate as in Virginia and English dominated Ireland failed to develop a stable society in the 17th C. Though settled by Puritans initially, Bermuda rapidly developed a commercial orientation. Pursuing wealth through the growth of tobacco market, the Bermuda experience of high mortality rates and slow social formation was again similar to the Chesapeake. Barbados too exhibited this early commercial orientation. High mortality, sex imbalance, slow social formation and - above all - the pursuit of happiness through material acquisition in the agricultural marketplace marked the 17th C experience of Barbados. Treating white indentured callously and exploitatively, the importation of slaves to increase profits in sugar cultivation was a natural next step. As Richard Dunn has pointed out, the thriving sugar trade started in the 1650s made Barbados a prosperous commercial society by 1670.
Turning next to the social conditions of the Middle Colonies, Greene points out that despite the Quaker influence and the greater social stability brought by the settlement of PA by families, Penn himself had powerful economic goals. Unable to achieve the cohesion of New England, however, the society of Quaker yeomen farmers was far less ordered than New England. The settlement of substantial Dutch and Scandinavian populations in the colonies of New York, Delaware and the Jersies insured a diversity that was not conducive to New England-like development. This diversity only grew as immigrants from Whales, Scotland, Ireland and Germany entered the middle colonies. Socially oriented toward nuclear families, social organization proceeded more slowly in the Middle Colonies proceeded more slowly than in New England. The rise of large estates in the middle colonies worked by immigrant tenants, aided by the rise of port cities of New York and Philadelphia, secured the commercial orientation of the middle colonies.
Patterns in the Lower South in the 17th C were more like those of the Chesapeake as well. The southern part of this area, South Carolina in particular, was more of an extension of the Caribbean world than of the Chesapeake, with the materialistic and commercial motive even more prominent than in early Virginia society -- functioning as an adjunct to the West Indies for much of its early development. Searching for a profitable agricultural staple for export, South Carolinians experimented with tobacco and indigo before landing on rice cultivation in the 1690s, importing massive numbers of slaves (blacks outnumbered whites by 2 to 1 in 1720). South Carolina society was highly individualistic, competitive and socially fragmented.
Chapter 8: Convergence: Development of an American Society, 1720-1780
After recounting the different patterns of social development in the four major regions, Greene concludes by emphasizing the ways in which this social development was tending towards a more homogeneous environment for all the colonies. New England became less exceptional in the late 18th C, as health declined and along with it birth rates and the authority of the patriarchal system.
As the historians of gender in this period note, the puritan authorities were less likely to regulate male sexuality in this period and even Jonathan Edwards was caught short when he tried to discipline the sons of prominent families in the "bad books" episode of the 1740s in Northampton. The double standard was emerging over pre-marital sex. As Cornelia Dayton has explained in the Grosvenor-Sessions abortion case in Pomfret, CT, women were increasingly held of a higher standard of sexual purity as men worried more about respectability in secular society.
At the same time as New England was "declining" from its earlier position of exceptionalism, Chesapeake society was "rising", becoming more cohesive, settled, and racially united against blacks (see Edmund S. Morgan's American Slavery, American Freedom). All of the other areas in this study were also moving toward greater "order, coherence, differentiation and complexity" in this period (p. 172). Greene posits a model of centripetal vs. centrifugal forces (p. 8.1) While the society of New England was becoming more centrifugal in nature, the rest of British colonial possessions were experiencing a centripetal pull.
Greene locates the source of this convergence in experience and inheritance. The experience of growth and differentiation combined with a growing Anglicization, as the influence of the metropolis on its colonies grew. Colonists participated in this growing pride at the thought of being British. In this light it is most probable that the revolutionary flame was fed by the slights of the metropolis felt by a highly sensitive colonial elite. The growth of the colonies was primarily through natural increase, rather than immigration between 1720 and 1760. After decimating the native populations and "widowing the land" in the 17th Century, the "Creole" populations of European colonies took off toward the "frontiers." There was a corresponding boom in gross economic productivity. As Menard and McCusker point out, "the gross national product (GNP) multiplied about twenty-five times between 1650 and 1770 ... sufficient to 'double income' over the period." (p. 182). The colonies were very prosperous at the time of the Revolution. Again Menard and McCusker point out that the colonies had developed a substantial degree of economic independence before the Revolution, largely freeing themselves from reliance upon foreign capital investment. While frontier expansion meant that fewer people lived in towns, urbanization also took off in this period as trading centers developed along the coast in the provincial capitols. In these trading centers, merchant elites increased in power in an increasingly socially differentiated and complex world. Yet the path to progress seems to have remained open, and there was no permanent underclass. Much more typical of this period was the middling sort of yeomen farmers, artisans, small traders and lesser professionals.
Briefly discussing the state of indentured servitude, one which he points out was not a happy estate in any section but which often proved to be temporary, he turns to the situation with slavery in the regions. Here he relies heavily on the work of Ira Berlin. Contrasting the Virginia tobacco culture with the rice culture of the lower south in the Carolinas, Berlin has shown the heavy hand of white paternalism as the guiding force in slavery's evolution in VA and the growth of black autonomy in S. Carolina as the major force in that area. Slaves in the Carolinas were able to take part in the agricultural market as they were in the Caribbean and they were able to maintain their African culture in the New World to the greatest extent of the three slave systems in North America. Slavery in the north was most commonly on small farms and in the urban environment, where slaves worked in shops, warehouses and on docks. No American colony opposed slavery at the time of the Revolution. It was in integral part of the exploitative economic system in all four regions.
The pursuit of personal economic prosperity was at the heart of the ideology of the "moral personality" in colonial America.
In this emerging secular and commercial culture, the central orientation of people in the littoral became the achievement of personal independence, a state which a man and his family and broader dependents could live 'at ease' rather than in anxiety, in contentment rather than in want, in respectability rather than meanness, and, perhaps most important, in freedom fro the will and control of other men. (p. 195)
For the colonial population this did not mean a solitary individual pursuit of gain, as prosperity was closely tied to the success of the family. This didn't mean that people didn't care about religion, or were caring less about it even. Pointing to Bonomi, Greene talks about the growing spread of churches and institutional church life in the 18th C. Commercial and religious were not separate spheres. Perhaps it was the commercial element that brought the new nation to think of itself as having a special mission. American exceptionalism has secular as well as religious roots.
Epilogue
Reemphasizes the centrality of the south to the colonial American world. Wonders how it was that southern development became peculiar in the 19th C...… (more)
In order to make his point about the primacy of economic pursuits in shaping American society, Greene sets up the straw man of New England declension model. As some reviewers pointed out, by the time of this book's publication few seriously held to that approach, as Greene's own conclusions in Chapter 8 reveal (see esp. Kettner in AHR). This work is valuable, it would seem, as a work of synthetic social history more than as a way to dispel the myth of New England.
Greene takes a regional approach to the social history of Colonial British America, dividing the world into four regions: New England, the Chesapeake, Britain and Ireland, The Middle Colonies and the Lower South, and The Atlantic and the Caribbean Islands. He treats the development of each region in a separate section covering the roughly 100 year period from 1660-1760. In his conclusion, he discusses the changes that drew the regions together to form the nation. The foundation of that nation was primarily an economic one for Greene. Though he doesn't rule out the importance of religion, he is anxious to exert the primacy of convergence in economic trends throughout the three regions as the 18th C progresses.
Prologue
Greene makes the interesting point that the American South is viewed as being "backward" in the 19th and 20th centuries, that it portrayed itself in the antebellum years as being above the money-grubbing of the north and that it lagged behind the north in economic development during most of the 20th century. We should not be distracted by this later period from the fact that the south was highly commercial in outlook from the founding. Maybe New England historians like George Bancroft tied all of American development back to Plymouth colony, but few today would doubt that the line of development runs equally back to Jamestown. Seeing America as a place where they could pursue their own material happiness, colonials in Jamestown was in the mainstream of American life of the time and the pursuit of economic happiness in Chesapeake is more the norm for the rest of colonial British America throughout the 18th C than theologically oriented New England. It was not until the 19th C that the South would try to distance itself from the crass commercialism of the North.
Chapter 1: Two Models of English Colonization, 1600-1660
Sets up the New England model in opposition to the Chesapeake model of economic and social development in the 17th C. Starting with the Spanish experience of conquest in America, Greene puts the Virginia Company in the context of the world of early 17th C empires. The objective of the Virginia Company was conquest and trade, not colonization and settlement. As the Spaniards in Mesoamerica, so too the British in Jamestown (1607). They were at first commercial conquerors and only later did they build societies. When they did set up agricultural endeavors, it was around tobacco culture with its intensive labor requirements. Early on the colony attracted indentured servants, single white males with few prospects in Europe. Though they may have set out with high ideals about spreading the Word of God, this was a profoundly commercial society. "Virginia was a highly exploitative society in which a few of the people who survived the high mortality had become rich and the vast majority worked in harsh conditions as servants, hoping to live long enough to work out their terms and become independent, landowning producers." (p. 12) After experiencing boom years in the 1630s and 40s, the economy stabilized and a more hierarchical society developed in the later part of the 40s and into the 50s. Moving out of the deadly estuarine zone, health improved and mortality declined as more stable families formed around a more equitable sex ratio. Greene refers to a gradual "thickening of social networks" (p. 17) By 1660, Virginia had become a more stable and stratified society, with concentrations of wealth in the hands of fewer planters.
Greene sets up New England as the foil to the Chesapeake. Plymouth (1620) was settled by families of the middling sort who were inspired by a desire to create a religious community in the New World as opposed to making a fortune. The New English came as families, not as single white male indentured servants. The sex ration was thus more equal, and population increased more as the result of native growth than immigration. New England focused initially on community building, hence the stability of the New England town in contrast to the unsettled life on the Chesapeake. Dissenters notwithstanding, New England society was remarkably homogenous in the 17th C, and the power of kinship networks was great. Throughout the first generation of settlement, patriarchal family authority preserved peace and order. New England society was intensely literate, founding colleges to educate ministers (Harvard and Yale) and producing a print culture which David Hall can mine for evidence of the World of Wonders common to elite and common society. Dedicated to a slow and organic pattern of growth, the New England world was far less differentiated in economic terms up to 1660. This was not the get rich quick society that prospered in Virginia.
Chapter 2: Reconsiderations
Based upon a consideration of scholarship in the 70s and 80s on Early Modern England, Greene contests the idea that New England was the most British of the colonies. The earlier picture of stable English villages isolated from the market has given way to the picture of Early Modern England as a far more stratified society, given over to market relations instead of sturdy yeomen farmers working to meet subsistence needs. The professions also provided avenues of mobility upward through the social classes, formerly thought to be far less permeable. British society was far less rooted than historians have often assumed. Paternalistic authority too was far less well established than once thought. Beset by low fertility rates and oriented toward the pursuit of materialistic gain in the agrarian marketplace. If all this is true, then the Chesapeake represents the mainstream of British social development instead of an aberration. In this context, New England seems reactionary and utopian, harkening back to a yeoman society that certainly didn't exist in the England they left if it ever did. What the New Englanders were trying to establish was not something that existed in the Old World. The society the puritans established was economically and socially very different from the one they left behind.
Greene then turns to Ireland, Bermuda and the West Indies. Here he finds much more to recommend similarities with Chesapeake developments in the 17th C than New England ones. The English landlords in Ireland sought to wring profits from the land, settling disbanded soldiers there to work the lands. Yet they never found the profitable staple crop to make their fortunes like the tobacco of Virginia or the Sugar of the Caribbean Islands. The lethal disease environment in Ireland killed settlers at a high rate as in Virginia and English dominated Ireland failed to develop a stable society in the 17th C. Though settled by Puritans initially, Bermuda rapidly developed a commercial orientation. Pursuing wealth through the growth of tobacco market, the Bermuda experience of high mortality rates and slow social formation was again similar to the Chesapeake. Barbados too exhibited this early commercial orientation. High mortality, sex imbalance, slow social formation and - above all - the pursuit of happiness through material acquisition in the agricultural marketplace marked the 17th C experience of Barbados. Treating white indentured callously and exploitatively, the importation of slaves to increase profits in sugar cultivation was a natural next step. As Richard Dunn has pointed out, the thriving sugar trade started in the 1650s made Barbados a prosperous commercial society by 1670.
Turning next to the social conditions of the Middle Colonies, Greene points out that despite the Quaker influence and the greater social stability brought by the settlement of PA by families, Penn himself had powerful economic goals. Unable to achieve the cohesion of New England, however, the society of Quaker yeomen farmers was far less ordered than New England. The settlement of substantial Dutch and Scandinavian populations in the colonies of New York, Delaware and the Jersies insured a diversity that was not conducive to New England-like development. This diversity only grew as immigrants from Whales, Scotland, Ireland and Germany entered the middle colonies. Socially oriented toward nuclear families, social organization proceeded more slowly in the Middle Colonies proceeded more slowly than in New England. The rise of large estates in the middle colonies worked by immigrant tenants, aided by the rise of port cities of New York and Philadelphia, secured the commercial orientation of the middle colonies.
Patterns in the Lower South in the 17th C were more like those of the Chesapeake as well. The southern part of this area, South Carolina in particular, was more of an extension of the Caribbean world than of the Chesapeake, with the materialistic and commercial motive even more prominent than in early Virginia society -- functioning as an adjunct to the West Indies for much of its early development. Searching for a profitable agricultural staple for export, South Carolinians experimented with tobacco and indigo before landing on rice cultivation in the 1690s, importing massive numbers of slaves (blacks outnumbered whites by 2 to 1 in 1720). South Carolina society was highly individualistic, competitive and socially fragmented.
Chapter 8: Convergence: Development of an American Society, 1720-1780
After recounting the different patterns of social development in the four major regions, Greene concludes by emphasizing the ways in which this social development was tending towards a more homogeneous environment for all the colonies. New England became less exceptional in the late 18th C, as health declined and along with it birth rates and the authority of the patriarchal system.
As the historians of gender in this period note, the puritan authorities were less likely to regulate male sexuality in this period and even Jonathan Edwards was caught short when he tried to discipline the sons of prominent families in the "bad books" episode of the 1740s in Northampton. The double standard was emerging over pre-marital sex. As Cornelia Dayton has explained in the Grosvenor-Sessions abortion case in Pomfret, CT, women were increasingly held of a higher standard of sexual purity as men worried more about respectability in secular society.
At the same time as New England was "declining" from its earlier position of exceptionalism, Chesapeake society was "rising", becoming more cohesive, settled, and racially united against blacks (see Edmund S. Morgan's American Slavery, American Freedom). All of the other areas in this study were also moving toward greater "order, coherence, differentiation and complexity" in this period (p. 172). Greene posits a model of centripetal vs. centrifugal forces (p. 8.1) While the society of New England was becoming more centrifugal in nature, the rest of British colonial possessions were experiencing a centripetal pull.
Greene locates the source of this convergence in experience and inheritance. The experience of growth and differentiation combined with a growing Anglicization, as the influence of the metropolis on its colonies grew. Colonists participated in this growing pride at the thought of being British. In this light it is most probable that the revolutionary flame was fed by the slights of the metropolis felt by a highly sensitive colonial elite. The growth of the colonies was primarily through natural increase, rather than immigration between 1720 and 1760. After decimating the native populations and "widowing the land" in the 17th Century, the "Creole" populations of European colonies took off toward the "frontiers." There was a corresponding boom in gross economic productivity. As Menard and McCusker point out, "the gross national product (GNP) multiplied about twenty-five times between 1650 and 1770 ... sufficient to 'double income' over the period." (p. 182). The colonies were very prosperous at the time of the Revolution. Again Menard and McCusker point out that the colonies had developed a substantial degree of economic independence before the Revolution, largely freeing themselves from reliance upon foreign capital investment. While frontier expansion meant that fewer people lived in towns, urbanization also took off in this period as trading centers developed along the coast in the provincial capitols. In these trading centers, merchant elites increased in power in an increasingly socially differentiated and complex world. Yet the path to progress seems to have remained open, and there was no permanent underclass. Much more typical of this period was the middling sort of yeomen farmers, artisans, small traders and lesser professionals.
Briefly discussing the state of indentured servitude, one which he points out was not a happy estate in any section but which often proved to be temporary, he turns to the situation with slavery in the regions. Here he relies heavily on the work of Ira Berlin. Contrasting the Virginia tobacco culture with the rice culture of the lower south in the Carolinas, Berlin has shown the heavy hand of white paternalism as the guiding force in slavery's evolution in VA and the growth of black autonomy in S. Carolina as the major force in that area. Slaves in the Carolinas were able to take part in the agricultural market as they were in the Caribbean and they were able to maintain their African culture in the New World to the greatest extent of the three slave systems in North America. Slavery in the north was most commonly on small farms and in the urban environment, where slaves worked in shops, warehouses and on docks. No American colony opposed slavery at the time of the Revolution. It was in integral part of the exploitative economic system in all four regions.
The pursuit of personal economic prosperity was at the heart of the ideology of the "moral personality" in colonial America.
In this emerging secular and commercial culture, the central orientation of people in the littoral became the achievement of personal independence, a state which a man and his family and broader dependents could live 'at ease' rather than in anxiety, in contentment rather than in want, in respectability rather than meanness, and, perhaps most important, in freedom fro the will and control of other men. (p. 195)
For the colonial population this did not mean a solitary individual pursuit of gain, as prosperity was closely tied to the success of the family. This didn't mean that people didn't care about religion, or were caring less about it even. Pointing to Bonomi, Greene talks about the growing spread of churches and institutional church life in the 18th C. Commercial and religious were not separate spheres. Perhaps it was the commercial element that brought the new nation to think of itself as having a special mission. American exceptionalism has secular as well as religious roots.
Epilogue
Reemphasizes the centrality of the south to the colonial American world. Wonders how it was that southern development became peculiar in the 19th C...… (more)
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