Jack P. Greene

Liberty, slavery, and the transformation of British identity in the eighteenth‐century West Indies

The earliest stages of English overseas expansion occurred during the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods, the very era when English opinion leaders were elaborating an identity for the emerging English nation. Protestantism, social openness, intellectual and scientific achievement, and prosperity and trade were all-important components of that identity, but liberty, as fostered and defined by the unique English system of law and government, had long been and continued to be its principal foundation. As early as the late fifteenth century, contemporary English and many foreign observers agreed that the English peoples distinctive system of law and liberty was what principally distinguished them from all other people on the face of the globe. The proud boast of the English was that through a variety of conquests and upheavals they, in marked contrast to most other political societies in Europe, had been able to retain their identity as a free people who had secured their liberty through their dedication to the supremacy of law. As a preliminary effort to analyse how this identity transferred to the slave regimes of the American colonies and how the presence of slavery affected this process through the middle decades of the eighteenth century, this article will examine the extensive formal political literature produced by settler political leaders in the British West Indies, particularly in Barbados and Jamaica, from the 1680s to the late 1770s.

A companion to the American revolution

List Of Maps And Map Acknowledgements. List Of Contributors. Introduction. Part I: Context. Part II: Themes And Events, To 1776. Part III: Themes And Events, From 1776. Part IV: External Effects Of The Revolution. Part V: Internal Developments After The Revolution. Part VI: Concepts. Chronology: Compiled By Steven Sarson. Consolidated Bibliography. Index

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

English law was integral to the foundation of the new polities created in the several colonies of British America. The influence, however, was not simply formal. The English legal inheritance was a principal component in the very identities of the settlers. As such, it was an important factor in everything that they did, from clearing the wilderness to declaring independence.

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

Looking broadly at the cultural dimensions of political transfers from one European power to another in the early modern Americas from the 1640s to the 1850s, this article attempts to categorize those transfers and to tease out a framework for examining why some established cultures were more resistant to change than others, why some were more open to reformulation or hybridization, and why some superimposed cultures were more or less invasive than others.

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

HISTORIANS OF NEITHER THE INDIGENOUS INHABITANTS OF THE MAINLAND of southeastern North America nor the colonies Europeans established there after 1560 have ever been comfortable working with the framework of the history of the South. The very idea of the South as a distinctive entity characterized by slavery, large numbers of people of African descent, large plantations producing staple crops for export, low investment in education and other social amenities, and deep religiosity makes sense only in the American national context that took shape during the fifty years following the American Revolution and the subsequent creation of a new federal state that by the 1820s had, however tenuously, drawn all the inhabitants of southeastern North America into a national union. Only as a consequence of their experiences within that union did the people of these discrete political societies come to understand, first, that they had a common interest in relation to other segments of the union and, over time, that they had a common identity and composed a distinctive region within it. To be sure, the political societies that evolved out of these early colonies all subsequently became parts of the South and, to one degree or another, shared in the defining of its attributes. Indeed, as the South became a self-conscious entity in the years after the Missouri Compromise, residents of those old societies, especially Virginians and South Carolinians, often acted as leaders in the construction of a southern regional consciousness. If historians of the South have been content to search the pasts of the colonies for the rudiments of the later South, and if some students of the southern colonies have been complicitous in such projects, most colonialists have found the anachronism and decontextualization inherent in such undertakings discomforting and have suspected that they would lead to distorted interpretations. For more than a century, the urge to avoid such disfigurement has driven historians of the early modern Southeast to seek frameworks that did not treat their areas of study as anterooms to the histories of the United States and its subset, the South. The historians involved in this endeavor have been remarkably successful. They have represented the early modern southeastern colonies as outposts or extensions of the European empires to which they were attached and, further, as products of early modern European expansion, populated by European and African immigrants and culturally fused with indigenous peoples. Historians have used the perspectives of empire and of expansion to highlight the significance and changing character of European attachments, the concept of diaspora to focus attention on the extent and depth of the African connection, and the idea of encounter to investigate the impact of both upon the indigenous populations who inhabited the Southeast in considerable numbers before and after the arrival of Europeans and Africans. Two additional and complementary perspectives, the Atlantic and the panhemispheric, offer still other routes by which historians of the early modern Southeast may escape the pitfalls of anachronism and set their area of study in an even broader contemporary context. (1) Historical investigation over the past century has revealed that the early modern Southeast was, by any measure, a place of extraordinary diversity. Its indigenous inhabitants were descendants of urband-welling and mound-building Mississippian peoples who had reached their zenith in the thirteenth century. At the time of their encounter with Europeans in the sixteenth century, they spoke a variety of languages and were divided into several large chiefdoms and confederacies and several hundred smaller nations. Many of these people were sedentary and agricultural, a few were sedentary and subsisted on marine resources, and others supplemented their part-time agriculture with hunting and gathering or were non-agricultural and seasonally nomadic. …

Comparing Early Modern American Worlds: Some Reflections On The Promise Of A Hemispheric Perspective

This article explores the tensions between the fashionable Atlantic history and multicultural history paradigms, in particular between the broad-ranging tendencies of the former and the national state-centered orientation of the latter. It proposes an American hemispheric perspective as a way of supplementing both these paradigms, while at the same time enriching understanding of the variations in the operation of the colonial impulse in the early modern Americas and avoiding the anachronism implicit in a multicultural approach that interests itself only in those areas that subsequently became part of the United States.

Selling a New World : two Colonial South Carolina promotional pamphlets

A letter from South Carolina / Thomas Nairne -- Profitable advice for rich an poor / John Norris.

The Sixty-Fourth Annual Meeting of the Organization of American Historians

THE sixty-fourth annual meeting of the Organization of American Historians was held at the Jung Hotel in New Orleans, April 14, 15, 16, and 17, 1971. Two hundred twenty-eight individuals representing one hundred twenty-six institutions participated in forty-nine sessions, two on Wednesday evening, April 14, ten each on Thursday morning and Thursday afternoon, April 15, and on Friday morning and Friday afternoon, April 16, and seven on Saturday morning, April 17.1 There was no general theme for the meeting. Instead, the program committee sought to develop a comprehensive program that would employ a variety of formats to illustrate the rich ferment in American historical studies and to convey some impression of the range and thrust of the attention of American historians at the beginning of the nineteen seventies. The committee was especially concerned to organize sessions that would explore some of the problems that had most

The nature of colony constitutions : two pamphlets on the Wilkes fund controversy in South Carolina

Considerations on certain political transactions of the province of South Carolina, by E. Leigh.--Answer to Considerations on certain political transactions of the province of South Carolina, by A. Lee.