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.
[5] In the same vein Greene conceived and edited with J. R. Pole Colonial British America (1984), a collection of essays that assessed the state of the field in the early 1980s and set the agenda for further study.
In a series of papers, many of which appeared in a four-volume collection of essays,[6] Greene treated a number of themes in early American cultural, social, political and constitutional history.
Of particular note, he underlined in these essays the extent to which the libertarian regimes created by colonists throughout the British Empire were highly exclusionary, calling attention to the fact that the settler liberty so much celebrated by contemporaries was often dependent upon, and defined by, the systematic denial of civic space to groups who often constituted the majority of the population: aborigines, imported slaves, unpropertied whites, women, and non-Protestants.
Employing a broad regional framework and using the concept of social development as its principal analytic device, Pursuits of Happiness focused on the creation and subsequent histories of colonial regions as defined by the socioeconomic structures and cultural constructs devised and amended by settlers and their descendants to enable them to exploit the economic potentials of their new environments and to express the larger purposes of the societies they were creating.
Pursuits of Happiness suggested that the product of this convergence served as a critical precondition for the American Revolution by intensifying demands among colonists for metropolitan recognition of their essential Britishness and thus providing the foundation for the loose political confederation that, after 1775, evolved into the United States.
Greene argued that New England (particularly orthodox Massachusetts and Connecticut) was anomalous in its idea of colonists as a chosen people, its intense religiosity, and its culture that developed in pursuit of a holy society.
Greene explained the inclination to emphasize New England mostly as an unconscious effort to minimize the extent to which the success of Colonial British America and the early United States was rooted in slave labor.