The Constitutional Origins of the American Revolution, by Jack P. Greene

Abstract

The Constitutional Origins of American Revolution, by Jack P. Greene. New Histories of American Law series. New York, Cambridge University Press, 2011. xxiv, 198 pp. $74.09 Cdn (cloth), $21.26 Cdn (paper). Few historians announce historiographical contribution they hope to achieve as clearly and explicitly as Jack P. Greene in his The Constitutional Origins of American Revolution. Greene adopts quite an agenda for this slim volume, proposed to him by editors of New Histories of American Law series at Cambridge University Press. He wants to return constitutionalism and to centre of Revolutionary history, rejuvenate discussion of causes of American Revolution, bring attention to other historians (especially John Phillip Reid) whose work he prizes, and to disseminate updated versions of key chapters of his own now out-of-print book Peripheries and Center (Athens, Georgia, 1986). Although it remains to be seen how much his call for more attention to legal history will be heeded, on every other count he succeeds. Greene argues in volume that the revolution that occurred in North America during last quarter of eighteenth century was unintended consequence of a dispute about law (p. 1). Greene charts how most English authorities believed in one constitution that governed England, all parts of British union, and colonies. Simultaneously, many North American colonists became so used to governing themselves on local matters, sanctioned by royal charters and local representative assemblies, that they developed a more bifurcated sense of constitutionalism. Greene emphasizes that resistance to parliamentary legislation such as Stamp Act was not merely based on a sense of individual rights, but also upon views of British legal and constitutional bounds. Greene wants his book to be an accessible account of constitutional disagreements over meaning of sovereignty and from 1689-1776, focusing most especially on period after imperial crisis began in 1763. The book, while complex, should be comprehensible to advanced undergraduates. Greene's narrative of divergent and changing ideas about British constitution and its colonial jurisdiction is among clearest published in last fifty years; ideas are complex, but Greene boils them down well. Greene also includes many interesting quotations from primary sources that illustrate range of disagreement on constitution. Accessible though it may be, Greene's work surely will be of even greater interest to academic historians or general readers who have steeped themselves in literature on causes and precursors to American Revolution. In his preface, Greene states that he wants to encourage interested scholars to move beyond interpretive orthodoxies we have inherited from last great flowering of historical literature on origins of Revolution (p. xxiii) namely those inherited from historians like Bernard Bailyn and Gordon S. Wood who focused attention on ideological origins of revolutionary conflict. Greene argues persuasively that it was not just fear of power or conspiratorial thinking that led colonists to dispute parliamentary taxes and other direct regulation, but rather more than a hundred years of understanding of British legal tradition, faith in power of royal charters, and a strong belief in consent and local autonomy. …