Creating the British Atlantic: Essays on Transplantation, Adaptation, and Continuity

by Jack P. Greene

Overview

Set mostly within an expansive British imperial and transatlantic framework, this new selection of writings from the renowned historian Jack P. Greene draws on themes he has been developing throughout his distinguished career. In these essays Greene explores the efforts to impose Old World institutions, identities, and values upon the New World societies being created during the colonization process. He shows how transplanted Old World components—political, legal, and social—were adapted to meet the demands of new, economically viable, expansive cultural hearths. Greene argues that these transplantations and adaptations were of fundamental importance in the formation and evolution of the new American republic and the society it represented.

The scope of this work allows Greene to consider in depth numerous subjects, including the dynamics of colonization, the development and character of provincial identities, the relationship between new settler societies in America and the emerging British Empire, and the role of cultural power in social and political formation.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780813933917
Publisher:	University of Virginia Press
Publication date:	04/29/2013
Series:	Early American Histories
Pages:	480
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.20(h) x 1.30(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

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: Historiographical Essays (Virginia).

Table of Contents

Preface vii

Part 1 Perspectives

1 Hemispheric History and Atlantic History 3

2 Reformulating Englishness: Cultural Adaptation and Provinciality in the Construction of Corporate Identity in Colonial British America 19

3 State Formation, Resistance, and the Creation of Revolutionary Traditions in the Early Modern Era 33

4 Colonial History and National History: Reflections on a Continuing Problem 64

Part 2 Governance

5 Transatlantic Colonization and the Redefinition of Empire in the Early Modern Era: The British-American Experience 83

6 Traditions of Consensual Governance in the Construction of State Authority in the Early Modern European Empires in America 101

7 Britain's Overseas Empire before 1780: Overwhelmingly Successful and Bureaucratically Challenged 113

8 "Of Liberty and of the Colonies": A Case Study of Constitutional Conflict in the Mid-Eighteenth-Century British American Empire 140

9 1759: Perils of Success 208

10 An Empire of Freemen? The British Debate over the Status of Overseas Representative Assemblies, 1763?1783 226

Part 3 Identities

11 Empire and Identity from the Elizabethan Era to the American Revolution 253

12 "By Their Laws Shall Ye Know Them": Law and Identity in Colonial British America 278

13 Liberty, Slavery, and the Transformation of British Identity in the Eighteenth-Century West Indies 293

14 Alterity and the Production of Identity in the Early Modern British American Empire and the Early United States 323

15 State Identities and National Identity in the Era of the American Revolution 340

Part 4 Social Construction

16 Social and Cultural Capital in Colonization and State Building in the Early Modern Era: Colonial British America as a Case Study 363

17 Pluribus or Unum? White Ethnicity in the Formation of Colonial American Culture 381

18 The Cultural Dimensions of Political Transfers: An Aspect of the European Occupation of the Americas 401

19 Early Modern Southeastern North America and the Broader Atlantic and American Worlds 426

Index 439

Editorial Reviews

In the fields of early American and Atlantic history, there is no more prolific or provocative essayist than Jack Greene, whose articles as well as books over the past six decades have fundamentally reshaped the landscape of historical study. These essays, no less than earlier offerings by Greene, testify powerfully to the singular prominence that his work has long enjoyed.

A. Roger Ekirch

"In the fields of early American and Atlantic history, there is no more prolific or provocative essayist than Jack Greene, whose articles as well as books over the past six decades have fundamentally reshaped the landscape of historical study. These essays, no less than earlier offerings by Greene, testify powerfully to the singular prominence that his work has long enjoyed. "—A. Roger Ekirch, Virginia Polytechnic Institute, author of At Day’s Close: Night in Times Past

"Greene draws together vast amounts of information and proposes clear, general models... A familiarity with Jack Greene's work is a sine qua non for scholars of the early modern British colonial world. "—author of The Historian

From the Publisher

Greene draws together vast amounts of information and proposes clear, general models... A familiarity with Jack Greene's work is a sine qua non for scholars of the early modern British colonial world.

The Historian