Using the British Empire as a case study, this succinct study argues that the establishment of overseas settlements in America created a problem of constitutional organization. The failure to resolve the resulting tensions led to the thirteen continental colonies seceding from the empire in 1776. Challenging those historians who have assumed that the British had the law on their side during the debates that led to the American Revolution, this volume argues that the empire had long exhibited a high degree of constitutional multiplicity, with each colony having its own discrete constitution. Contending that these constitutions cannot be conflated with the metropolitan British constitution, it argues that British refusal to accept the legitimacy of colonial understandings of the sanctity of the many colonial constitutions and the imperial constitution was the critical element leading to the American Revolution.

Jack P. Greene was born in 1931 in Lafayette, Indiana, and received his PhD from Duke University in 1956. Greene spent most his career as Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the Humanities at Johns Hopkins University’s history department. In 1990-92, 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 Haute Etudes en Science Sociale, University of Richmond, Michigan State University, and the Freie Universitat de 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. Greene retired in 2005 and is currently an Invited Research Scholar at the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University.