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Co-sponsored by the University of Illinois College of Law and the Newberry Library, Chicago
Friday, October 14, 2005
Location: Newberry Library, Chicago
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.
The conference on citizenship will be the inaugural offering of the Symposium on Comparative Early Modern Legal History, organized by Prof. Richard Ross of the University of Illinois (Urbana-Champaign) College of Law and History Department. The Symposium will gather yearly under the auspices of the Center for Renaissance Studies at the Newberry Library in Chicago in order to explore a particular topic in the comparative legal history of the Atlantic world in the period c.1492-1815. Primary funding has been provided by the University of Illinois College of Law, and additional funding by the University of Chicago Law School and the Pennsylvania State University History Department.
Attendance at the Symposium is free and open to the public. Participants and attendees should pre-register by contacting Katherine Gardner at the Newberry Library at renaissance@newberry.org or at 312-255-3514.
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