The Constitutional Origins of the American Revolution by Jack P. Greene

(Cambridge University Press), 2010

198pp., £15.99, paper, ISBN 978-0-521-13230-5

Jack P. Greene has written a succinct study arguing that the establishment of overseas settlements in America created a problem of constitutional organisation. Central to this issue was how far conflicting understandings of British law paved the path to revolution and, in the prologue, he provides a historiographical analysis of the issue.   He challenges those historians who have assumed that the British had the law on their side during the debates that led to the American Revolution suggesting that the British Empire had long exhibited a high degree of constitutional diversity, with each colony having its own discrete constitution. The failure to resolve the resulting tensions led to the thirteen continental colonies seceding from the empire in 1776. He contends that these constitutions posed a contradiction to the metropolitan British constitution that proved impossible to resolve and 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. This is an incisive and deeply researched account of the constitutional origins of the American Revolution.  This is an important study for teachers who seek to understand the constitutional basis for revolution, the summation of a life spent grappling with these issues.