Propositions and thoughts towards a comparative history of the Americas: Jack Greene's essay

Abstract

By making use of the discussion of the main thoughts forwarded by Jack Greene in his essay "Reformulating Englishness: Cultural Adaptation and Provinciality in the Construction of Corporate Identity in Colonial British America", I focus on comparative history in the Americas. In this article, I analyze the author's main arguments regarding: (a) the Atlantic colonial world and the conceptual difficulties or handicaps that still pervade national histories; (b) the dynamics of the empires - the "ethnification" processes on the way and the building of new polities in the colonies; (c) the enduring of British values deeply rooted in the provincial identities, from the 1760s to independence; and (d) the continuity of the corporatist identities in the old provinces, turned states or republican polities in the national period. The agreement with this last statement will allow us to keep viewing the American Federal State (at least until the development of the seccionalist trends of the 1840s or 1850s) still as a composite of state identities.