@ the University of Texas. From their website (and see also their forthcoming conference on decolonisation and Mexican independence):
February 25-26, 2010
The focus of the conference is the British Empire during its “decade of crisis” between the end of the Seven Years’ War in 1763 and the passage of the Tea Act ten years later. Over the course of this decade, Britons drastically transformed the way they viewed themselves and their empire. For the first time, British imperial policy extended to the governance of the French Catholic inhabitants of Canada, the Native people of the trans-Appalachian interior of North America, Africans in the new colony of Senegambia, and the twenty million inhabitants of Bengal subject to the authority of the East India Company. In Britain itself, the governance of this vastly extended empire engendered an enormous amount of bitter debate and anxious discussion in the halls of power as well as in the popular press. Among historians of each of the different parts of the British World, this decade has long been seen as one of crucial importance. However, while invaluable work has been done to examine British and indigenous relations and exchanges in specific colonial contexts, as well as to examine connections between the metropolis and specific colonial regions, there has been as yet few attempts to interrogate the links across and between the colonial regions and to set developments in particular regions into the context of the transformation of the British Empire as a whole. We aim to address this need by bringing scholars working on various aspects of the British World into dialogue and debate over the causes and character of the imperial transformation of the 1760s and early 1770s.
The conference will be organized around the discussion of pre-circulated papers. Accepted papers must be submitted for circulation to participants no later than February 1, 2010.
Filed under: Call for papers, Canada, United States | Closed
I was made aware of the following book by a post at the Legal History blog. According to Susan Reynolds in her new book, the legal technique of acquiring land from certain individuals for the common good, from the Medieval period to around 1800, is one that is fruitfully compared across Europe and settler North America.
In this concise history of expropriation of land for the common good in Europe and North America from medieval times to 1800, Susan Reynolds contextualizes the history of an important legal doctrine regarding the relationship between government and the institution of private property.
Before Eminent Domain concentrates on western Europe and the English colonies in America. As Reynolds argues, expropriation was a common legal practice in many societies in which individuals had rights to land. It was generally accepted that land could be taken from them, with compensation, when the community, however defined, needed it. She cites examples of the practice since the early Middle Ages in England, France, Germany, Italy, and Spain, and from the seventeenth century in America.
Reynolds concludes with a discussion of past and present ideas and assumptions about community, individual rights, and individual property that underlie the practice of expropriation but have been largely ignored by historians of both political and legal thought.
Filed under: Scholarship and insights | Closed
As part of the Macquarie Bicentenary Commemorations, the Forbes Society are presenting Brent Salter to speak on colonial law at the Common Room, NSW Bar Association, 174 Phillip Street Sydney, at 5pm on Monday 10 March. Salter, a wealth of knowledge on colonial law and co-editor of the Kercher Reports, will undoubtedly provide an interesting address regarding the rule of law in NSW during the convict era.
See here for more details.
Filed under: Australia, public lecture | Closed
Following on from the Fifth Galway Conference on Colonialism (dedicated to settler colonialism), this conference is concerned with education. From their website:
Continuing in the tradition of Colonialism Conferences at NUI Galway, we are delighted to announce that the sixth conference in the series – Education and Empire – will take place in Galway from 24th to 26th June 2010.
The aim of this interdisciplinary conference is to explore the role of education in shaping, promoting, and challenging imperial and colonial ideologies, institutions and processes throughout the modern world. We invite papers from every discipline and suggested topics may be found in the Call for Papers.
Since this conference is being in part funded through a grant provided by the Irish Research Council for the Humanities and Social Sciences to an inter-university group to explore the relationship between empire and higher education in Ireland, a strand of the conference will explore the particularity of Irish institutions of higher education in shaping the above processes, and of the role of higher education in shaping Ireland’s ambiguous coloniality.
Filed under: Call for papers, Empire | Closed
This conference looks set to take place at Maynooth, County Kildare, in August. From their website:
Short Abstract
This panel will explore cross-cultural experiences of crisis in the course of colonial encounters. We invite papers that focus on the colonized, and/or on the colonizers and their practices and concepts. Colonial is understood broadly, including both imperial and internal colonialism
Long Abstract
Colonial encounters have often been marked by moments of crisis. This might for example refer to the nefarious consequences of colonial regimes upon the indigenous cultures, or to the varied modes of autochthonous resistance that followed colonial domination. Yet, ‘crisis’ also appears in relation to the internal condition of many colonial regimes. Colonizers very often had to deal with shortage of capital and personnel; insufficient knowledge production about the ‘Other’; slippages into immorality and ‘savagery’; or, still, with metropolitan expectations hard to accomplish in the periphery. This panel seeks to explore from the perspective of historical anthropology the varied indigenous and colonial experiences of, and strategies for dealing with, crises resulting from colonial encounters. ‘Colonial crisis’ will be approached not simply as a negative and destructive notion, but also as a cross-cultural juncture for the reconfiguration of social relationships. As such, we invite papers that explore the cross-cultural significance of colonial events of crisis, engaging with empirical material. How, and why, are certain colonial encounters and events experienced and represented as ‘crisis’, for example in archives? Which specific processes are triggered by these experiences and representations, and how does this reconfigure the social, cultural, and political forms mediating between colonizers and colonized? What strategies are used to deal with colonial crisis, within both the colonizing and indigenous communities? Can processes of crisis be understood as productive moments of the reinvention of the social, rather than mere negative aspects of colonialism? ‘Colonial’ will here be taken broadly, including both imperial expansionism and internal colonialism and state-building in Europe, Asia, Africa, Oceania, or America. Areas of inquiry might refer to (but are not limited to) topics such as state-minorities relations, regimes of colonial administration, medicine, archives, governmentality, ritual and religion, commerce, or conquest.
Filed under: Call for papers, Empire | Closed
From H-Net:
The Peter Lang Publishing Group is launching a new series entitled Nationalisms across the Globe. One of these volumes will focus on Native American nationalism. The volume’s editors welcome scholarly submissions from academics and researchers in the field. If interested, please consult the list of topics below and submit a query including a 500-word abstract of your proposed paper, as well as sources consulted/cited and a brief biography of 200 words or less detailing your professional and academic qualifications in the area. If your proposal is accepted for publication, you will be requested to submit a complete essay, which should comply with the Peter Lang standards of copy-editing and must be delivered within one month of your proposal’s approval. Please submit your proposal with all relevant details (abstract, draft bibliography and a short bio) by 1 March, 2010.
I. Treaties and Legal Status
– historical changes in the legal status of Native Americans from the colonial times to today’s Canada and the US
– the use of terms/concepts of nation, band, tribe by colonial/Canadian & US lawmakers to Native American ethnic groups and the political and social implications for the latter
– the use / rejection / thinking /reactions of Native Americans to the concepts of nation, band, tribe, as imposed from outside by colonial / Canadian & US administrationsII. The Development of Native American National / Ethnic Movements
– general overview
– case studies
– land rights movement (division of Canada’s Northern Territories)
– Retainment, loss, revival, political and social (un)importance of Native American languages
– Residential School Experience in Canada and the USAIII. Comparisons
– with non-state ethnic/national movements in Latin America
– with non-state ethnic/national movements in Australasia and Oceania
– with non-state ethnic/national movements in Africa
– with non-state ethnic/national movements in Europe
Filed under: Call for papers, Canada, United States | Closed
This conference takes place on March 2011 at the University of California, Riverside. From their website:
Ethnic studies scholarship has laid the crucial foundation for analyzing the intersections of racism, colonialism, immigration, and slavery within the United States context. Yet it has become clear that ethnic studies paradigms have become entrapped within, and sometimes indistinguishable from, the discourse and mandate of liberal multiculturalism, which relies on a politics of identity representation diluted and domesticated by nation-building and capitalist imperatives. Interrogating the strictures in which ethnic studies finds itself today, this conference calls for the development of critical ethnic studies. Far from advocating the peremptory dismissal of identity, this conference seeks to structure inquiry around the logics of white supremacy, settler colonialism, capitalism, and heteropatriarchy in order to expand the scope of ethnic studies. An interdisciplinary or even un-disciplinary formation, critical ethnic studies engages with the logics that structure society in its entirety.
As ethnic studies has become more legitimized within the academy, it has frequently done so by distancing itself from the very social movements that helped to launch ethnic studies in the first place. Irrefutable as the evidence is of the university’s enmeshment with governmental and corporate structures, the trend in ethnic studies has been to neutralize the university rather than to interrogate it as a site that transforms ideas into ideology. While this conference does not propose to romanticize these movements or to prescribe a specific relationship that academics should have with them, we seek to call into question the emphasis on professionalization within ethnic studies and the concomitant refusal to interrogate the politics of the academic industrial complex or to engage with larger movements for social transformation.
Filed under: Call for papers | Closed
After We have sold out Land We in a little time have nothing to Shew for it; but it is not so with You, Your Grandchildren will get something from it as long as the World stands; our Grandchildren will have no advantage from it; They will say We were Fools for selling so much Land for so small a matter, and curse Us.
Filed under: Quote | Closed
I have been following this website for the last year or so, and it has certainly come a long way. Established by the Pakistani po-co Masood Raja, this website includes a forum, some scanned resources, and links to publications and journals.
Filed under: Website | Closed
This month has seen the release of Lisa Ford’s long anticipated monograph, entitled Settler Sovereignty: Jurisdiction and Indigenous People in America and Australia, 1788-1836. When settlers assert sovereignty, argues Ford, the extension of their criminal jurisdiction to encompass the natives they colonised is just as important – perhaps more important – than any act of European paperwork or obscure doctrine of conquest or cession.
From the Harvard University Press website:
In a brilliant comparative study of law and imperialism, Lisa Ford argues that modern settler sovereignty emerged when settlers in North America and Australia defined indigenous theft and violence as crime.
This occurred, not at the moment of settlement or federation, but in the second quarter of the nineteenth century when notions of statehood, sovereignty, empire, and civilization were in rapid, global flux. Ford traces the emergence of modern settler sovereignty in everyday contests between settlers and indigenous people in early national Georgia and the colony of New South Wales. In both places before 1820, most settlers and indigenous people understood their conflicts as war, resolved disputes with diplomacy, and relied on shared notions like reciprocity and retaliation to address frontier theft and violence. This legal pluralism, however, was under stress as new, global statecraft linked sovereignty to the exercise of perfect territorial jurisdiction. In Georgia, New South Wales, and elsewhere, settler sovereignty emerged when, at the same time in history, settlers rejected legal pluralism and moved to control or remove indigenous peoples.
Filed under: Australia, Scholarship and insights, Sovereignty, United States | Closed
