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

Preface

Preface This volume brings together a selection of nineteen of the articles, book chapters, and essays I have written during the fifteen years since the University of Virginia Press published four volumes of my essays under various titles between 1992 and 1996.¹ Like those, this volume covers several interrelated subjects in the broad areas of early modern English/British America, the British Empire, and the early United States. Unlike those, which concentrated , respectively, on cultural history, political and constitutional history, the American Revolution, and historiography, this volume is far more multifaceted in focus, containing essays on four broad historical topics: perspectives, governance, identities, and social construction. The title, Creating the British Atlantic: Essays on Transplantation, Adaptation, and Continuity, calls attention to three of the principal themes that I have tried to develop in my earlier writings and that provide some coherence for this volume. Transplantation refers to the often self-conscious efforts to impose Old World institutions, forms, values , and identities upon the New World societies that settlers, traders, colonial enterprisers, and other participants in the colonizing process were creating in America. Adaptation connotes the reconfiguration and reformulation of those transplanted political, constitutional, legal, and social components of Old World culture to meet the specific conditions that participants encountered and created in constructing and articulating new, economically viable, and expansive culture hearths and effective polities in a wide variety of physical and social settings. Continuity calls attention, not only to the many extensions of Old World culture to America through the process of transplantation and 1. Jack P. Greene, Imperatives, Behaviors, and Identities: Essays in Early American Cultural History (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1992); Greene, Negotiated Authorities: Essays in Colonial Political and Constitutional History (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia , 1994); Greene, Understanding the American Revolution: Issues and Actors (Charlottesville : University Press of Virginia, 1995); Greene, Interpreting Early America: Historiographical Essays (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1996). Greene, final pages vii Greene, final pages vii 2/12/13 2:27 PM 2/12/13 2:27 PM viii Preface the incremental adaptation of those extensions, but also to the foundational importance of those adaptations in the construction of formally republican regimes among the revolting colonies after 1776 and in the formation of the new American republic of the United States. I have divided the volume into four sections. The first, “Perspectives,” contains four chapters. Chapter 1, “Hemispheric History and Atlantic History,” proposes a general hemispheric framework as a device for the comparative study of the process of European expansion in the Americas that would focus not just on the commonalities but also on the infinite and incredibly interesting variations in that process. Complementary to an Atlantic history perspective, this framework, I argue, is far less parochial and distorting than what has become known as a continental approach to the study of the early American past which includes only those areas that subsequently became part of the United States. Chapter 2, “Reformulating Englishness: Cultural Adaptation and Provinciality in the Construction of Corporate Identity in Colonial British America,” argues for the continuing relevance of the concept colonial British America as a category of analysis. From the perspective of English/British experience with the transplantation of political, constitutional, legal, social, economic, and cultural values to colonies, the adaptation of those values to local conditions and institutions, and the centrality of those transplanted and modified values in the creation of provincial identities, it also proposes a general framework for the comparative study of those phenomena in settler societies throughout the colonial Americas. Endeavoring to lay out the commonalities and differences among early modern “revolutions” from the Dutch revolt in the late sixteenth century through the English and French uprisings of the seventeenth century, the American, French, and St. Domingue revolutions of the late eighteenth century , and the Latin American wars for independence in the early nineteenth century, chapter 3, “State Formation, Resistance, and the Creation of Revolutionary Traditions in the Early Modern Era,” uses the insights of early modern state-formation studies to put the American Revolution within the broader history of early modern revolutions, to argue for its commonalities with earlier revolutions, and to emphasize the differences between it and the French and later revolutions. Stressing the powerful continuities between colonial and national expansion and state organization in the areas that composed the United States, chapter 4, “Colonial History and National History: Reflections on a Continuing Problem,” uses the findings of state-formation studies about the limitations of central authority in early modern...