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1 Review: In the Center of Periphery Studies Author(s): Stephen R. Grossbart Reviewed work(s): Negotiated Authorities: Essays in Colonial Political and Constitutional History by Jack P. Greene Source: Reviews in American History, Vol. 24, No. 1 (Mar., 1996), pp. 1-7 Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press Stable URL: Accessed: 31/07/ :52 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transmission. JSTOR is a not-for-profit organization founded in 1995 to build trusted digital archives for scholarship. We work with the scholarly community to preserve their work and the materials they rely upon, and to build a common research platform that promotes the discovery and use of these resources. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. The Johns Hopkins University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Reviews in American History.

2 IN THE CENTER OF PERIPHERY STUDIES Stephen R. Grossbart Jack P. Greene. Negotiated Authorities: Essays in Colonial Political and Constitutional History. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, xx pp. Figures, tables, notes, and index. $60.00 (cloth); $19.95 (paper). The sixteen essays collected in Negotiated Authorities represent some of Jack Greene's earliest scholarship and attest to the formative role colonial political and constitutional history has played in his understanding of early American history. When Greene began his research in the 1950s constitutional history was a neglected field. Even as political and intellectual history came to dominate, few, besides Greene, were looking at the constitutional developments in the colonies before In this retrospective collection Greene limits his selection of essays to three areas: "the nature of authority in the broad extended polity of the British Empire and within" the colonies; their "political and constitutional development... and the role of metropolitan ideological and cultural imperatives in shaping that development"; and "the nature and changing character of constitutional tensions within the empire and the conflicts" these tensions spawned (p. xvii). Over one-third of the essays originally appeared in the late 1950s or early 1960s when Greene was finishing The Quest for Power: The Lower Houses of Assembly in the Southern Royal Colonies, (1963). Greene spent relatively little time writing constitutional history after Only five of the essays originally appeared between 1969 and In recent years, however, Greene has renewed his attention to developing a "systematic study in colonial constitutional history" (p. xvii). With Peripheries and Center: Constitutional Development in the Extended Polities of the British Empire and the United States, (1986), and four essays published since 1992, Greene brings the analysis of constitutional developments to a new level. Greene also pays special attention to the Caribbean colonies, thus writing an encompassing colonial history. More important, Greene's recent work in the area of constitutional history gives us a new perspective from which to read his earlier work in political history. Of course, Greene's wide-ranging contributions to the field go far beyond the scope of this collection.' Although his breadth is remarkable, Greene's Reviews in American History 24 (1996) 1996 by The Johns Hopkins University Press

3 2 REVIEWS IN AMERICAN HISTORY / MARCH 1996 primary focus throughout his career has always been political history. The essays in Negotiated Authorities are a testament to the tremendous and leading role Jack Greene continues to play in the field of political and constitutional history. In the book's opening essay, "Negotiated Authorities," Greene sets out to explain the relationship between Britain's colonial peripheries and the metropolitan center. Colonization was quite unlike nineteenth-century imperialism, which colored the analysis of an earlier generation of historians. The early modern European state was weak. Monarchs negotiated with aristocrats to supply the state with revenue in exchange for power and privileges to local rulers. Composite states, such as England, lacked the coercive power to consolidate and extend their own national domain, let alone exert such dominance on the New World. Since the state was weak, adventurers with royal charters founded and organized the colonies. Native populations were destroyed, not conquered, and the colonized were primarily emigrants from the mother country. With central authority limited, New World colonization resulted "in the emergence in new colonial peripheries of many new and relatively autonomous centers of European power effectively under local control" (p. 14). Creole bureaucracies soon emerged, and they resented and resisted attempts by their metropolitan counterparts to exert control. In "The Colonial Origins of American Constitutionalism" Greene explores the ambiguities that permitted and required a negotiation process between metropolitan authorities in the center and colonial authorities in the periphery. The English constitution, all agreed, limited "the power of the sovereign" through the "principles of the rule of law and consent.... [A]ll people, including the monarch, were equally subject to and protected by the laws of the realm." Consent entailed "the idea that citizens could not be subjected to any laws or taxes not first approved by themselves through" custom or the House of Commons (p. 26). The conflict between king and Parliament that led to the Glorious Revolution resulted in a curtailment of the king's power. Although sovereignty shifted from the king to the king-in-parliament, the Glorious Revolution did more than increase Parliament's power. It also decreased the monarch's control over "county and local affairs in both civil and religious realms," giving rise to a vibrant gentry and aristocracy in early eighteenth-century Britain (p. 82). Local autonomy increased in the colonies as well. During the eighteenth century, as Parliament assumed more authority, the English country gentry would see its privileges erode. In the American colonies, however, this did not take place. The colonists emerged from the Glorious Revolution with a strong belief that their privileges were an integral part of the British constitution. "[E]ach

4 GROSSBART / In the Center of Periphery Studies 3 colony was... a separate corporate entity, a body politic authorized by the crown, with jurisdiction over a well-defined territory and its own distinctive institutions, laws, customs, and, eventually, history and identity." Most colonists were also "English settlers [who] brought with them English traditions of law and governance, which put a high premium upon individual and local corporate liberties and autonomy" (pp ). Conflict was inevitable once Parliament asserted its authority. The reactions in the colonies were swift when Parliament began to negotiate in bad faith during the 1760s. Greene's interpretation departs most dramatically from Bernard Bailyn's Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (1967), which emphasizes the ideological influence of early eighteenth-century writers. Greene instead focuses on seventeenth-century oppositionist traditions to the Stuart monarchs. These traditions eventually faded in England, but "continued to occupy a prominent place in politics at least until the middle of the eighteenth century" in the colonies. Greene concludes that their survival is owed to "a strong predisposition among the colonists to cultivate idealized English values and to seek to imitate idealized versions of English forms and institutions" (pp ). The American Revolution, Greene convincingly argues, was not a repudiation of the Glorious Revolution's elevation of Parliament's power. Rather it "was necessary to secure for" the colonists "the guarantees of the Glorious Revolution" to local privileges and autonomy "that were seen to be under assault [after 1760] from a British Parliament and an aggressive ministry" (p. 92). Greene's summary of the major constitutional trends in early modem Britain and its colonies sharpens his older argument about the "quest for power" in the colonial assemblies. Because they retained the power of the purse and controlled the salaries of Royal Governors, the colonial assemblies, not only in the thirteen seaboard colonies but throughout the British colonies, "managed through precedent and custom to establish their authority and status as local parliaments" (p. 35). Greene's story of constitutional development in the colonies, and of political conflict between authorities in the center and the periphery, is ultimately the story of a growing self-consciousness and self-assertion of British America's ruling elite, its gentry and its aristocracy. The development of a colonial gentry is one of the most salient features in Greene's analysis of colonial society. As Greene writes, "[flundamentally the quest for power in both royal and proprietary colonies was a struggle for political identity, the manifestation of the political ambitions of the leaders of emerging societies within each colony." The desire for "increased authority, dignity, and prestige" within the lower houses, paralleled "the appearance of economic and social elites produced by the growth in colonial wealth and population" (pp ). As the colonies matured, elites moved to assert the

5 4 REVIEWS IN AMERICAN HISTORY / MARCH 1996 same privileges and liberties enjoyed by the country gentry in England, and one of the most fundamental "of these rights was the privilege of representation" in their lower houses (p. 175). This interpretation was often, but ineffectively, challenged by metropolitan authorities who contended that the assemblies existed at the king's pleasure. It was not until 1763, however, that British authorities explicitly challenged the lower houses and drove colonial leaders "to demand equal rights with Parliament and autonomy in local affairs." Thus, the American Revolution was a relatively conservative affair, "in essence a war for political survival, a conflict involving not only individual rights,... but assembly rights as well" (p. 183). Throughout the eighteenth century, up to the eve of the American Revolution, political stability in each of the British colonies increased. In one of Greene's most empirically driven essays, "Legislative Turnover in Colonial British America 1696 to 1775: A Quantitative Analysis," he analyzes patterns of turnover in twenty-three colonies. This raw data show a remarkably consistent pattern. By mid-century, although not as stable as the British House of Commons, few colonies returned less than 50 percent of their incumbents, and many approached the House of Commons's 70 percent return rate. "The most vivid impression to emerge from [an] inspection of the [twenty-three] graphs" that Greene presents is "the gradual decrease of electoral turnover" that indicates "more settled, coherent, and stable political systems with more continuous, experienced, and secure leadership" (pp ). Colonial societies were converging toward British patterns of social and political behavior. On the eve of the Revolution, the colonies were more like Britain than they had ever been. Greene provides a convincing analysis of this process of Anglicization. By 1760 colonial society was much like English society, and each colony's political institutions mimicked those in Britain. Yet Green often suggests that political culture in America was exceptionally different.2 Although Greene's work largely identifies and defines a colonial gentry whose power was guaranteed by the privileged position they enjoyed, he goes to great lengths to minimize the importance of this social hierarchy. In "Society, Ideology, and Politics," Greene sets out to explain why the Virginian political leadership was of such a "high quality." In the process, he defines a gentry "with a deep commitment to a code of political behavior and political ideology" (p. 259). This gentry consisted of a "cohesive, and self-conscious social group, at the core of which were about forty interrelated families." Although there was some fluidity to this structure, with "room for the ambitious, talented, and successful," it is hard to agree with Greene that social mobility and "assimilation" into the gentry "was quick and easy." They held a disproportionate amount of the colony's wealth, they exerted economic

6 GROSSBART / In the Center of Periphery Studies 5 dominance over dependent smaller farmers, and they filled "almost all posts of responsibility at every level of government." This group defined "the preferred social roles and the dominant values" (pp ). Although the Virginia elite fit most definitions of an aristocracy, Greene is intent on arguing that the gentry, which so ably and aggressively defended its privileges after 1763, did not constitute "a small body of privileged aristocrats." Their power was a result of "deference and respect, not envy and resentment or fear and obsequiousness... Economic inequality does not, however, seem to have resulted in any deep or widespread social or political antagonisms." And, the franchise (even though next to no one voted) was "remarkably wide" (pp ). Instead, Virginians happily agreed "at all levels of society that government should be reserved for and was the responsibility of enlightened and capable men" (p. 267). One must ask, how did this political culture differ from that in Britain? The arguments that Greene developed between 1965 and 1976 seem dated in the light of both the scholarship emerging at that time and more recent work. Rhys Isaac's The Transformation of Virginia: (1982) portrays a very different society, where gentry privilege, both political and social, was real, and consensual harmony far less apparent. Nor does Greene give adequate attention to how slavery united white society in ways that ensured the gentry's political dominance, as Edmund Morgan argued in American Slavery American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia (1975). The consensus Greene finds may well mask significant social hierarchy and conflict between the rulers and the ruled. There was an entirely different set of negotiations occurring between each colony's political leadership and ordinary people. Green plays too little attention to political culture-that is-the process by which these two groups negotiated political space and practices.3 Greene's views stand in sharp contrast to the analysis of the colonial aristocracy given in Gordon Wood's recent The Radicalism of the American Revolution (1992). Wood emphasizes the nature of dependence and patronage that permeated colonial society. This political culture kept participation at a low level and, like the British society it emulated, ensured that only disinterested men, who by definition were the gentry, would play a leading role in civic affairs. Greene, however, offers different explanations for colonial political culture. He is far too sophisticated a historian to suggest that colonial society was a participatory democracy, yet he often measures political behavior against a modern democratic society. He acknowledges that all the colonies "were... exclusivist in their assumptions and operation... [F]ull rights of participa- tion were denied most of the inhabitants" (p. 134). This was a British tradition, and the colonists did not challenge these political assumptions. Even so, Greene's consensus and deference could well be indifference: "Unless a vital

7 6 REVIEWS IN AMERICAN HISTORY / MARCH 1996 public interest was involved, voters simply did not turn out to the polls in large numbers" (p. 157). Greene attributes "acquiescence" to "the acceptance of the legitimacy and good policy of a more and more elitist leadership structure" (p. 158), rather than attributing it to the British cultural patterns. This is all the more surprising given his emphasis on Anglicization. For Greene, early modern colonists displayed some very modern and liberal tendencies. As he suggests in the opening essay of his The American Revolution: Its Character and Limits (1987), colonists were too busy pursuing happiness to vote. Low participation and deference may have far more to do with the structure and culture of British society than Greene acknowledges. It would take a revolution, one that was fought for assembly rights, but not for assemblymen, to transform American politics and begin a process of democratization. Greene does not address the breakdown of early modern political culture in this volume. Yet curiously, Greene provides a glimpse of evidence to suggest just how transforming the Revolution may have been. In his quantitative analysis of the lower houses, his graphs depict turnover patterns through 1780, although Greene only discusses the evidence through the year In the rebelling colonies there is another unmistakable trend that Greene ignores: a steady increase in legislative turnover during the Revolution. Greene does not follow up with questions about the social and political transformations that began with the Revolution and are indicated in his empirical evidence. In other work Greene has consistently denied that the Revolution was either democratic or transforming, even criticizing the modest transformation described by Bailyn.4 Privileged men in the assemblies may have waged a rebellion against an imperial threat but the stability within the lower houses ended with the Revolution, as new men-not entitled to serve during the colonial era--entered politics on a grand scale.5 What Greene has done in his richly detailed study of constitutional and political history is provide us with a context for understanding how America could, despite its rebellion's conservative beginnings, launch a radical and democratic revolution in In many ways, Greene's work on colonial society confirms what R. R. Palmer argued in The Age of the Democratic Revolution (1959):"Without the rise of... a colonial aristocracy there could have been no successful movement against England" (p. 195).6 The lower houses, if anything, were constituted bodies, much like those in Europe. What Greene has done so brilliantly in this collection is show us how that gentry formed, the political world in which they moved, and why the imperial conflict could transform itself into a far ranging revolution that ultimately destroyed the gentry's authority and privileges.7

8 GROSSBART / In the Center of Periphery Studies 7 Stephen R. Grossbart, Department of History, University of Florida, is the author of The Revolutionary Transformation: Politics, Religion, and Economy in Connecticut, For Greene's contributions to social, economic, and cultural history, see Pursuits of Happiness: The Social Development of Early Modern British Colonies and the Formation ofamerican Culture (1988); and Imperatives, Behaviors, and Identities: Essays in Early American Culture History (1992). 2. For Greene's use of the term exceptionalism, see The Intellectual Construction of America: Exceptionalism and Identity from 1492 to 1800 (1993). 3. The arguments of E. P. Thompson can, and have, been used by American historians to explain the give and take between plebeians and patricians. See "Patrician Society, Plebeian Culture," Journal of Social History 7 (1974): ; and "Eighteenth-Century English Society: Class Struggle Without Class?" Social History 3 (1978): Greene, "All Men are Created Equal: Some Reflections on the Character of the American Revolution," in Imperatives, Behaviors, and Identities, pp Jackson Turner Main, "Government by the People: The American Revolution and the Democratization of the Legislatures," William and Mary Quarterly 3d ser., 23 (1966): Greene largely dismisses the importance of Palmer's work for understanding the American Revolution. For example, see "The Reappraisal of the American Revolution in Recent Historical Literature," in Greene, ed., The Reinterpretation of the American Revolution, (1968), p. 58; and "All Men are Created Equal," p This process is analyzed by Gary J. Kornblith and John M. Murrin, "The Making and Unmaking of an American Ruling Class," in Alfred F. Young, ed., Beyond the American Revolution: Explorations in the History of American Radicalism (1993), pp