Jack P. Greene

Jack Philip Greene (born August 12, 1931) is an American historian, specializing in Colonial American history and Atlantic history.

Greene was born in Lafayette, Indiana and received his PhD from Duke University in 1956. He spent most of his career as Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the Humanities at Johns Hopkins University’s history department. In 1990-1999 he was a Distinguished Professor at the University of California, Irvine, and he has been a visiting professor at the College of William and Mary, Oxford University, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, University of Richmond, Michigan State University, and the Freie Universitat of Berlin, and has held fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the Institute for Advanced Study, the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, the National Humanities Center, and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, among others. In 1975-1976 Greene was the Harold Vyvyan Harmsworth Professor of American History at Oxford University. He was a member of both the American Philosophical Society and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Greene retired in 2005 and is currently an Invited Research Scholar at the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University.

Greene first studied the broad area of imperial and colonial governance, in particular the ongoing process of polity formation in the British Empire between the Glorious Revolution and the American Revolution, a subject that he would continue to explore throughout his career and with which he is still closely associated.

His first book The Quest for Power (1963) was a study in the transfer of political and constitutional traditions, values, institutions, and practices from England to America. Focusing on the development of institutions in four British North American colonies (Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia), the book stresses the growing sophistication and authority of those bodies as they expanded the scope of legislative jurisdiction over their domestic affairs throughout the late seventeenth- and eighteenth centuries.

The Quest for Power served as the foundation for Greene's subsequent elaboration of a theory of early modern imperial development that has altered the way many scholars think about the nature of the early modern British Empire and has influenced students of other European empires. Greene went on to underscore (particularly in Peripheries and Center (1986) and Negotiated Authorities (1994)) the extent to which the British Empire was not a polity in which authority flowed from the center to the peripheries, but was the product of a continuous process of negotiation in which the weakness of central coercive and fiscal resources dictated that the peripheries should exert authority over local affairs and that dominant settler groups should enjoy enormous agency in the construction of both the colonies in which they lived and the larger empire of which they were part of.

In Peripheries and Center (1986) Greene re-examined the long debate between Britain and the colonies over how far the British Parliament’s authority extended in the colonies. The book made a case for the proposition that the dispute was primarily a legal and constitutional one over the nature of the imperial constitution, similar to legal historians writing at the same time, especially John P. Reid. Greene stressed the legitimacy of the colonial constitutional position and argued for the importance of the legal and constitutional dimensions of American Revolutionary thought, underlining the continuity between the colonial and Revolutionary eras. Showing that the empire functioned as an implicit federal state, with the internal affairs of the colonies coming under the jurisdiction of colonial governments in each colony, and external affairs such as trade regulation, diplomacy, and war falling under the authority of the central government in Britain, Peripheries and Center also explored the extent to which the post-1787 American federal government marked a re-institution of the imperial system. In The Constitutional Origins of the American Revolution (2010) Greene revisited the same issues with an emphasis on the late eighteenth century

In his work, Greene has emphasized the continuities between the colonial era and the revolutionary and early national eras and thereby challenged interpretations of the American Revolution that highlight its transformative and socially and politically radical character. Greene suggests that many of the changes associated with the Revolution (such as in social values, in state organization, in geographical expansion, and in legal systems) were the results of a social trajectory that was deeply rooted in the colonial past and would have occurred with or without the break with Britain; he also proposes that until the middle of the twentieth century the United States continued to be a truly federal polity, in which the political power remained in the states and the citizens’ experience with governance was primarily provincial and local, rather than national.