Between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, the linked processes of statebuilding and overseas colonization in the Atlantic world drew upon and helped transform inherited citizenship practices. This conference explores, in comparative perspective, the ways that communities, municipalities, organizations, and states in early modern Europe and the Americas identified their members, regulated participation, and adjusted burdens and opportunities. Colonial political and legal systems established forms of community and relations of domination unknown in Europe and confronted unprecedented racial and ethnic diversity. An array of statuses, including a variety of kinds of citizenship, helped define the political, civil, and economic rights of settlers, of European foreigners and religious and ethnic minorities, of indigenous populations, of Africans, and of “mixed race” peoples. Colonists and imperial administrators adjusted these statuses in order to attract or exclude settlers, manage dependent and forced laborers, and calibrate privileges in heavily regulated transatlantic trade systems.

The conference has two main intellectual ambitions beyond further integrating the domestic and imperial perspectives on early modern citizenship. First, by encouraging a comparative perspective, it hopes to enrich, and test, claims about the nature and causes of citizenship regimes made from within one national historiography. Second, the conference hopes to attract work inspired by recent efforts to move away from the traditional treatment of citizenship as a “category” or “status” defined by the state and extended at its discretion to particular classes of people. Historians and social scientists are increasingly thinking of citizenship rights as claims that, while grounded in law or social convention, were only made operative, reshaped, or denied through contingent negotiations in local institutions and communities. On this view, law served as a resource. It provided a repertoire of ill-defined, incomplete, sometimes contradictory rules and precedents that labeled the issues and values at stake in a dispute and could be mobilized to support a wide variety of positions. Yet the limits of the repertoire and the dissimilar appeal of its constituent elements worked to constrain and predispose negotiations about citizenship claims in local settings.

Panel 1: The Ideology of Citizenship: Strategic Identities

“Ties Unbound: Membership and Community during the Wars of Independence: The Thirteen North-American Colonies (1776-1783) and New Spain (1808-1821)”
Erika Pani, CIDE

“Becoming an Absolute Citizen: The Counter-Experience of France”
Peter Sahlins, University of California-Berkeley

“ ‘Political Culture’ and the Concept of Law as an Aspect of Early Modern Citizenship: Britain and Germany”
Mark Weiner, Rutgers University-Newark

Commentator 1: Amalia Kessler, Stanford University
Commentator 2: Rogers Smith, University of Pennsylvania
Chair: Bruce Smith, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Author-Meets-Readers Session

Tamar Herzog, Defining Nations: Immigrants and Citizens in Early Modern Spain and Spanish America (New Haven, 2003)

Reader 1: Sarah Chambers, University of Minnesota
Reader 2: Clare Crowston, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Reader 3: Kunal Parker, Cleveland State University
Reader 4: A. Gregg Roeber, Pennsylvania State University
Response: Tamar Herzog, Stanford University

Chair: Claire Priest, Northwestern University

Panel 2: Liberties and Loyalties in Transatlantic Context

“Treacherous Places: Atlantic Riverine Regions and the Law of Treason”
Lauren Benton, New York University

“A Tale of Two Unions: Nationhood and Citizenship in the Dutch Revolt and the American Revolution”
Douglas Bradburn, State University of New York-Binghamton

“Slaves, Strangers, and the Limits of Revolutionary Citizenship: The Jacobin Structure of Colonial Rule”
Miranda Spieler, University of Arizona

Commentator 1: Max Edelson, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Commentator 2: Rebecca Scott, University of Michigan
Chair: Richard Ross, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Panel 3: The Limits of Citizenship: Troublesome Peoples (Free Blacks, Jews, and Dependent Laborers)

“Colonial Manumission and the Citizenship Revolution in Saint-Domingue and British North America.”
Malick Ghachem, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

“Navigating Nationhoods: The Jewish Moment in the British Atlantic World, 1654-1831”
Holly Snyder, Brown University

“Citizens, Servants and The Great In-Between: Migration and Membership in Early Anglo-America”
Christopher Tomlins, American Bar Foundation

Commentator 1: William Forbath, University of Texas
Commentator 2: Margaret Somers, University of Michigan
Chair: Dana Rabin, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

There has been much scholarship in the last generation on the intertwined use of law and religion in early modern Europe to “discipline” populations. Discipline in this context does not mean “social control” so much as an ambition to cultivate virtue, godliness, industry, and civility. The mechanisms of legal-religious discipline varied among countries, regions, and social groups and the effectiveness and novelty of these efforts have been debated. Curiosity about the nature and effects of early modern legal-religious discipline have animated studies of the English “reformation of manners and morals,” of Calvinist consistories and Scottish kirks, and of Continental and Irish “confessionalization.” Many of these works, particularly those under the rubric of confessionalization, have proceeded comparatively and inquired into the similarities and differences among the methods and implications of Calvinist, Lutheran, and post-Tridentine Catholic programs. On this view, criminal justice and police regulations, church courts and consistories, poor relief, censorship and confessional propaganda, manuals teaching proper behavior and private devotions, catechizing, the Inquisition, and ecclesiastical visitations served as techniques deployed, variously, by Calvinists, Lutherans, and Catholics pursuing parallel disciplinary agendas.

This work on early modern Europe suggests a valuable way to look at New World colonization, which presents a particularly rich site for the comparative study of linked legal-religious discipline. Comparisons might be made less among confessions than among empires. England, Spain, and France each worried about encouraging piety, industry, morality, and order among settlers whom they viewed as unruly, quick to violence, overly greedy, liable to cultural degeneration, and too ready to elevate short-term personal advantage over long-term communal and imperial goals. With varying degrees of commitment, each sought to Christianize, order, pacify, and “civilize” indigenous peoples and slaves. A comparative study of New World legal-religious disciplinary efforts opens up a host of questions. To what extent did the English, French, and Spanish empires see themselves as facing similar or different disciplinary challenges and to what extent did they employ similar or different techniques? Can one understand the seemingly disparate disciplinary institutions and practices of the English, French, and Spanish empires as functional substitutes? How did disciplinary techniques familiar from Europe require adaptation given colonial conditions-in particular, given the exigencies of territorial expansion, the existence of unprecedented racial and ethnic diversity, and the presence of forms of community and relations of domination unknown in Europe? In what ways did religious syncretism and notions of religious freedom coexist with, or flow out of, disciplinary efforts? What tensions emerged between the virtues that disciplinary programs were designed to encourage-for instance, between Christianization and civilization, or between piety and industry? How does the adoption of a comparative perspective alter inherited understandings of patterns of cooperation and rivalry among legal and religious authorities in the British, French, and Spanish empires? To what extent were disciplinary strategies developed in the colonies imported back into European metropoles? In what ways was the British empire a special case given its significant number of multi-confessional jurisdictions, for instance, New York, Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Ireland, which set it apart from the confessional monopoly obtaining in the French and Spanish empires?

By encouraging a comparative perspective, the conference hopes to enrich, and test, claims about the nature, causes, and implications of legal-religious discipline made from within one national historiography. Contrasting multiple empires could reveal common sequences and dynamics or could highlight the unique and distinguishing features of a particular system liable to be overlooked if examined in isolation.

Panel 1: The Uses of Law and Religion in Justifying and Shaping Colonial Settlement

“Biblical vs. Legal Traditions of Colonial Territorial Possession in the New World”
Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, University of Texas at Austin

“Instilling Virtue in Early Modern English Populations”
Karen Kupperman, New York University

“From Ireland to North America? The Theory and Practice of Legal-Religious Discipline in a Comparative Perspective”
Ute Lotz-Heumann, Humboldt University, Germany

Commentator 1: Richard Kagan, Johns Hopkins University 
Commentator 2: Charles Cohen, University of Wisconsin, Madison 
Chair: Richard Ross, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Panel 2: Christianity and the Problem of “Civilizing” Africans in the New World

“The Paradox of Christian Orthodoxy: Discipline, Customs and Social Memory among New Spain’s Mulatos”
Herman Bennett, Rutgers University

“Rewriting God’s Law: Christianity and Slavery in the Protestant Americas”
Jon Sensbach, University of Florida

Commentator: Sarah Pearsall, Northwestern University 
Chair: Daniel Hamilton, Chicago-Kent College of Law

Panel 3: Calvinist Discipline: A Distinctive Tradition?

“Reform, Renewal, Religion and Social Discipline: Reflections of a Medievalist”
Charles Donahue, Jr., Harvard Law School

“Puritan Jurisprudence in Comparative Perspective: The Sources of ‘Intensity’”
Richard Ross, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

“Enforcement Mechanisms in Reformed Consistory Courts: Why the Scots Win the Prize in the Calvinist Disciplinary Campaign”
Margo Todd, University of Pennsylvania

Commentator 1: Philip Gorski, Yale University 
Commentator 2: Karl Shoemaker, University of Wisconsin- Madison 
Chair: Claire Priest, Northwestern University

Panel 4: Poor Relief and Marriage: Two Case Studies in Comparative Social and Religious Discipline

“Searching for the English Origins and Puritan Roots of New England’s Practice of Warning Out Strangers”
Cornelia Dayton, University of Connecticut, and Sharon Salinger, University of California, Irvine

“‘Hopes for Better Spouses?’ Pietists and Marriage: Revisiting the ‘Official’ Legal and Devotional History in the Early Modern Atlantic World”
Gregg Roeber, Pennsylvania State University

Commentator 1: Robert Kingdon, University of Wisconsin, Madison 
Commentator 2: Richard Helmholz, University of Chicago 
Chair: Bruce Smith, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Author-Meets Readers Session 1

Andrea McKenzie, Tyburn’s Martyrs: Execution in England, 1675-1775, (Hambledon, 2007)

Reader 1: Randall McGowen, University of Oregon
Reader 2: Michael Meranze, University of California, Los Angeles
Response: Andrea McKenzie, University of Victoria

Panel I: Capital Punishment in Eighteenth-Century England and America

“Recasting the Theatre of Execution: The Abolition of the Tyburn Ritual”
Simon Devereaux, University of Victoria

“Class and Capital Punishment in Early Urban America”
Gabriele Gottlieb, Grand Valley State University

Panel II: Adversary Criminal Trial and Its Alternatives

“Why Not Defence Counsel?”
Tom Gallanis, University of Minnesota

“Explaining Summary Jurisdiction”
Bruce Smith, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Author-Meets-Readers Session 2

Donald Fyson, Magistrates, Police, and People: Everyday Criminal Justice in Quebec and Lower Canada, 1764-1837 (University of Toronto Press, 2006)
 
Reader 1: Paul Craven, York University
Reader 2: Greg Smith, University of Manitoba
Response: Donald Fyson, Université Laval

Of the various changes associated with Europe’s post-1492 expansion, few were more important than the pan-European development of what came to be known as the law of nations. Aware of this significance, Atlantic historians have increasingly asked about the role of the law of nations in the transatlantic suppression of piracy, in the enslavement of non-Europeans in Africa and America, and in the dispossession of Indian land. There is also growing interest among scholars of early modern Europe and the Atlantic world in exactly what Europeans understood the law of nations to be and in how such conceptions fluctuated according to time and place. The status of the law of nations became particularly complicated at the often-permeable boundary between international and municipal bodies of law, and in European encounters with other legalities, whether within Europe, as in the English suppression of Brehon law in Gaelic Ireland or outside Europe, as in the Americas and on the fringes of the Islamic world in Africa and the Mediterranean.

The goal of this conference is to see where scholarship on the law of nations in the early modern Atlantic currently stands, and to highlight points of connection and dissonance within what is, by its nature, a dispersed and fragmented subject. As part of this objective, the conference will consider several broad themes. We will explore the internal European structure of the law of nations, examining its intellectual roots in Roman law, the law of Oleron, and — though rarely acknowledged by European and colonial American jurists — Islam. Because the law of nations was itself part of the legal pluralism that characterized all of Europe’s maritime empires, this part of the discussion will include the law’s often fraught relationship to municipal legalities such as England’s common law. We will also examine the paradox — inherent to all international legal regimes — of a body of law whose precepts depended on nothing more than a culturally specific disposition to obey them: what Blackstone called “universal consent among the civilized inhabitants of the world.” Another theme is the growing importance of the state and the corresponding loss of status by groups who could not claim the benefits of statehood, in Europe no less than in the outer world. And we will consider the law’s complex relationship to the settler revolutions that destroyed the Atlantic empires of Britain and Spain.

The law of nations guided European interaction with foreign laws and customs, many of which European jurists regarded as barbaric and uncivilized. Because the law of nations depended on a shared culture of civility, Europeans in the outer Atlantic viewed respect for the law’s precepts as part of the civilizing process that distinguished their own societies from those of the “lawless” peoples whom they sought to conquer or displace. Yet as the conference will discuss, Europeans and non-Europeans alike were also adept at manipulating the law of nations to accommodate non-European legal and cultural forms. In the case of slavery, both European and American jurists traced the legitimacy of chattel servitude in the western Atlantic to the customs of Africa’s slave factories; conversely, Europeans often had no choice but to observe indigenous customs in treaties with groups like Native Americans and West Indian maroons. One of the conference’s larger goals will be to assess the various ways in which the Atlantic world’s “many legalities” signaled the limits of European hegemony, as well as to think about ways in which the law of nations’ inherent legal pluralism was simultaneously a bulwark of imperial power.

Panel 1: The Law of Nations and European Conquest Ideology in the Americas

“Roman Law and Inter-Imperial Legalities: Constructing Claims in the South Atlantic World”
Lauren Benton, New York University

“The Idea of Conquest in the English Atlantic World”
Ken Macmillan, University of Calgary

“The Legalities of English Colonizing: Discourses of Intrusion on the North American Mainland, 1450-1640”
Chris Tomlins, American Bar Foundation

Commentator 1: Jovita Baber, Illinois at Urbana-Champaign 
Commentator 2: Richard Helmholz, University of Chicago 
Chair: Christopher Warren, University of Chicago

Panel 2: The Law of Nations and State Formation

“Connecticut, the Crown and the Mohegans: Native Rights and Settler Authority in the Eighteenth-Century British Atlantic”
Craig Yirush, University of California, Los Angeles

“‘On an Equal Footing’: Constitution-Making and the Law of Nations in Early America”
David Golove, New York University and Daniel Hulsebosch, New York University

Commentator 1: Alison LaCroix, University of Chicago 
Commentator 2: Eric Slauter, University of Chicago

Panel 3: The Problematic Nature of the Law of Nations Outside the European Atlantic: The Cases of Africa and the Islamic Maghrib

“Politics in Africa: Limits of the ‘Law of Nations’”
Joseph Miller, University of Virginia

“Sultans, Monarchs, Pirates: Early Modern Muslim-Christian Negotiations”
John Voll, Georgetown University

Commentator 1: Max Edelson, Illinois at Urbana-Champaign History
Commentator 2: Claire Priest, Northwestern University

Panel 4: The Law of Nations, Humanitarianism, and “Universalism”

“On the Margins of Europe: The Law of Nations in the Western Atlantic, circa 1755”
Eliga Gould, University of New Hampshire

“‘A New Vattel’: Jeremy Bentham and the Law of Nations”
David Armitage, Harvard University

“Antislavery Courts and the Dawn of International Human Rights Law”
Jenny Martinez, Stanford University

Commentator 1: Theodore Christov, Northwestern University
Commentator 2: Daniel Hamilton, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign 
Chair: Richard Ross, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Colonialism enhanced legal pluralism. European, African, Asian, and American polities relied on layered and multi-centric systems of law, and their encounters generated new and often repeating patterns of jurisdictional politics. This widespread legal pluralism at times contributed to regional integration by making substantively different legal systems intelligible to travelers and merchants. It also posed challenges to imperial administration as subordinate authorities sought to establish, expand, or protect prerogatives to act independently of metropolitan sovereigns and courts. With recent scholarship establishing clearly the benefits of framing colonial law as jurisdictionally complex and unstable, opportunities are now in sight to push this perspective further in a number of directions.

One interesting set of problems involves questions about how conflicts over the prerogatives of delegated legal authorities to discipline and control subordinate or dependent populations related to the changing contours of imperial constitutions or ideologies of rule. Conference participants may explore the ways in which such figures as garrison commanders, plantation owners, ship captains, Company officials, missionaries, and others with some measure of legal authority positioned themselves in relation to both metropolitan and colonial law. Did they make innovative legal claims or exert influence on regional patterns? We invite investigations of the conditions under which such actors deferred to imperial authority, the sources they drew upon to defend their legal prerogatives, and the nature of their interactions with various courts. Other studies might consider the degree to which the politics of making and defending claims to semi-autonomous legal authority informed broader, even regional, political processes. As we bring such connections into sight, it may be possible to refine comparisons of the politics of legal pluralism in different parts of a colonial regime, or between the Atlantic, Mediterranean, and Indian Ocean worlds.

A related theme focuses on the legal strategies of subordinate groups. Taking into account a framework of legal pluralism, scholars can move beyond the study of “resistance” to ask questions about the legal participation of formally subordinate groups—even some that were seemingly powerless before the law. Forum shopping, petitions for mercy, violence against magistrates, new genres of legal writing, maneuvers to escape indebtedness—these and other strategies had immediate and sometimes far-reaching institutional effects. In addition to tracing such connections, we might probe the formative influences on legal strategies. How did knowledge about law circulate? To what extent did information or stories about of the effectiveness of particular legal strategies carry across social strata, imperial divides, and oceans? How did legal actors imagine and describe plural legal orders? With attention to these and other, related topics, the conference seeks to open the study of legal pluralism to new approaches and insights.

Panel 1: Varieties of Legal Pluralism: The Ottoman Empire, Spanish America, and British India

“Ottoman Imperial Management of Diversity: The Costs and Benefits of Legal Pluralism”
Karen Barkey, Columbia University

“Multiplicity of Meanings: Legal Pluralism and the Layer Legality of Land in the Sixteenth-Century Andes”
Jovita Baber, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

“The Marital Patchwork of Colonial South Asia: Forum Shopping from Britain to Baroda”
Mitra Sharafi, University of Wisconsin-Madison

Commentator 1: Tom Ginsburg, University of Chicago
Commentator 2: Kristen Stilt, Northwestern University
Chair: Iza Hussin, University of Massachusetts at Amherst

Panel 2: Legal Pluralism and Slavery

“‘Slave Trading is Not a Piratical Offense’: Legal Pluralism and Abolition in the British Empire”
Lauren Benton, New York University

“Fugitive Slaves and the Challenges of Imperial Jurisdiction in the Early Modern Caribbean”
Linda Rupert, University of North Carolina at Greensboro

“The Destruction of Liberty and the Remaking of Legal Space in French Guiana, 1789-1830”
Miranda Spieler, University of Arizona

Commentator 1: Theodore Christov, Northwestern University
Commentator 2 and Chair: Dan Hamilton, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Panel 3: Jurisdictional Tensions and Forum Shopping: Household Government and Land Ownership

“Marriage and Anglo-Imperial Jurisdictional Politics”
Kirsten Sword, Indiana University

“The Shifting Legal Frontier: The Southwest from 1598 to 1821”
Allison Tirres, DePaul University

Commentator 1: Richard Helmholz, University of Chicago
Commentator 2 and Chair: Gregg Roeber, Pennsylvania State University

Panel 4: The Development of Legal Pluralism in the British Empire from the Seventeenth- through Nineteenth-Centuries

“Bundles of Hyphens: Corporations as Legal Communities in the Early Modern British Empire”
Philip Stern, Duke University

“Albion’s Sceptre: ‘Explosive Colonization’ and the Legalism of the British Empire–New Zealand in the 1830s”
P. G. McHugh, University of Cambridge

Commentator and chair: Richard Ross, Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

The struggle to possess and control land, both as property and as jurisdictional territory, was central to the formation of early modern European societies as well as their colonial domains. This conference will look at how Europeans and indigenous peoples defined the right to land. We will examine how so-called European expansion influenced the conceptualization of property and territorial jurisdiction and the relationship between them. Conference participants may explore how notions of property and territoriality changed over time; and how colonial needs and the encounter with new cultures reshaped these notions. In what ways did “international competition” and the emergence of an “international law” (to use an anachronism) modify property and jurisdiction? How did economic, social, and political developments influence new ideas and experiences regarding the land? In what ways did these ideas and experiences shape practical strategies for claiming land and asserting rights to govern it and profit from it? We are particularly eager to know whether these encounters encouraged, consciously or not, borrowing between different European legal systems as well as between settlers and indigenous peoples. How was the movement and refashioning of legal knowledge bound up with the movement of peoples and refashioning of modes of control over land? We would like to encourage an interdisciplinary conversation among lawyers, historians, sociologists, geographers, and literary scholars.

Panel 1: Religion, Civility, and Debates over Property Regimes

“How the Indios Lost Their Land: Spanish Debates and Practices of Dispossession”
Tamar Herzog, Stanford University

“Conversion and French Imperialism: A New Hypothesis on Territorial Expansion in Early Modern France and New France”
Dominique Deslandres, University of Montreal

“The Nation as Lord: The French Revolution and the Creation of National Feudal Dues”
Rafe Blaufarb, Florida State University

Commentator 1: Frederick Hoxie, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Commentator 2: R. H. Helmholz, University of Chicago
Chair: James Palmitessa, Western Michigan University

Panel 2: Strategies for Claiming Land

“What Territory Is Made of: On Property, Jurisdiction, and Their Reciprocal Relationship in Italy, 15th to 18th Centuries”
Antonio Stopani, University of Turin, Italy

“Lawlessness and Land Grants: Gold Prospecting, Runaway Slave Communities, and the Acquisition of Private Property on a Brazilian Frontier”
Hal Langfur, SUNY Buffalo

“Remaking Americans: Louisiana, Upper Canada, and Texas”
Alan Taylor, University of California, Davis

Commentator 1: Emilio Kourí, University of Chicago
Commentator 2 and Chair: Bianca Premo, Florida International

Author-Meets-Reader Session

Christopher Tomlins, Freedom Bound: Law, Labor, and Civic Identity in Colonozing English America, 1580-1865 (Cambridge, 2010)

Reader 1: Julia Adams, Yale University
Reader 2: Stuart Banner, University of California, Los Angeles
Reader 3: Paul Eiss, Carnegie Mellon University
Reader 4: Tamar Herzog, Stanford University, and Richard Ross, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Reader 5: Richard White, Stanford University
Response: Christopher Tomlins, University of California, Irvine

Panel 3: Property as a Foundation of Political Order and Political Economy

“Peasant Property Rights and the Public Order in the Early Modern World: The Holy Roman, Ottoman, and Qing Empires Compared”
Govind Sreenivasan, Brandeis University

“Property Formation and State Formation: New Spain, New France, New England”
Allan Greer, McGill University

“Creating an American Property Law”
Claire Priest, Yale University

Commentator 1 and Chair: Daniel Hamilton, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Commentator 2: Alison LaCroix, University of Chicago

The French Atlantic has not yet received the sustained attention given to the British and Spanish Atlantic, particularly where the topic of law is concerned. This conference will explore the legal dimension (broadly conceived) of the French Atlantic empire in the early modern period. The variegated and rapidly evolving juridical order of ancien régime France was deeply implicated in the expansion of overseas commerce, the founding of colonies, and the creation of imperial administrations.

Participants may explore topics such as: legal discourse and imperial ideologies; the establishment of colonial jurisdictions in Canada, Louisiana, and the French West Indies; the regulation of slavery; indigenous peoples and the law; the emergence of colonial land tenures; and the legal framework for trade and business enterprise. The organizers wish particularly to encourage comparative approaches that consider more than one French colony and that examine contrasts and convergences with the British, Spanish and Portuguese empires. In according due attention to the distinctive features of French law and the French New World empire, we hope to enrich understandings of Atlantic history generally.

Conference Schedule

9 am: Welcome

Allan Greer, McGill, History 
Richard J. Ross, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

9:05-10:35 am: Panel 1: The Legal Foundations of the French Atlantic Empire

The Army, the Navy, the Governor, and the Colony: Frameworks of Public Law in the French Atlantic

Alexandre Dubé, Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture 

“Governed by the Same Laws, without Distinction or Difference”: Legal Pluralism and the Construction of Empire in the Early Modern French Atlantic
Brett Rushforth, College of William and Mary, History

Slaves and the Old Regime: The View from Paris
Miranda Spieler, University of Arizona, History

Commentator: David Bell, Princeton University, History

Chair: Richard J. Ross, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

10:35-10:50 am: Refreshment Break

10:50 am to 12:20 pm: Panel 2: Economy and Empire

A Feudal Empire?  Land Tenure in the French Atlantic
Allan Greer, McGill University

Company Logic Meets Legal Accountability: The Question of Liability of Chartered Enterprises in the Mid-Seventeenth-Century French Atlantic
Helen Dewar, University of Toronto, History

Payback for Default:  Legalities of Counterfeit in the French Atlantic
Catherine Desbarats, McGill University, History

Chair and commentator: Paul Cheney, University of Chicago, History

12:20 to 1:40 pm: Lunch

Participants are invited to try the restaurants in the neighborhood around the Newberry 

1:40 to 3:10 pm: Panel 3: Slavery and the Code Noir

Beyond the Codes Noirs: The Making of Slave Law(s) in the Early Modern French Atlantic
Guillaume Aubert, College of William and Mary, History

The Afterlife of the Law of Slavery: The Code Noir and the Language of Rights in the Era of the Haitian Revolution
Malick Ghachem, University of Maine, Law

Commentator #1: Jean Hébrard, Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales; and University of Michigan, History

Commentator #2 and Chair: Lea Vandervelde, University of Iowa, Law

3:10 to 3:25 pm: Refreshment Break

3:25 to 4:55 pm: Panel 4: The Seven Years’ War and After

Indians Out of the Shadows and into the Plot: Tracing Indigenous Voices in Building a French Atlantic Case for Just War
Christian Crouch, Bard College, History

The Reactions of the “New” Subjects of Quebec to British Justice for Private Law Matters, 1760-1774
Michel Morin, Université de Montréal, Law

From French to British: Remonstrance, Representation, and Remediation between Empires
Hannah Weiss Muller, Harvard University, History and Literature

Commentator #1: Shannon Lee Dawdy, University of Chicago, Anthropology

Commentator #2 and Chair: Robert Morrissey, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, History