This conference will discuss the ways in which people and polities from the Americas, Europe, and Africa assumed, legitimized, rejected and interacted with various forms of authority in the "long eighteenth century." This period is typically characterized by the dissolution of Atlantic Empires combined with the emergence of the nation state. Yet, historians have begun to argue that even as nation states began to emerge in the colonial Atlantic, Empires continued to thrive, reconstructing themselves in the face of changing notions of sovereignty, freedom and territoriality. This conference seeks to explore the affinities, groups and networks that were important to peoples’ thinking and acting politically and examine the ways that nations and empires coexisted and came into conflict during the period of the "long eighteenth century."
Keeping in mind that the options for "acting like a state" were not simply national or imperial, we invite proposals from well-established and newer scholars, working on any aspect of the experience and mechanisms of authority in the "long eighteenth century Atlantic world," understood in its broadest sense and reaching across disciplinary boundaries. Topics might
include:
- Collective memories and origin myths about the forming of nations,
- extra-national and supranational bodies, citizenship and subjecthood, migration
- State-knowledge formation; law, legal spaces, jurisdiction
- Consumption; material culture, arts, commodity frontiers/exchange, commodity trade, trade networks
- Political economy
- Authority and the private sphere
- Inter-state interactions and actors
- Politics in Africa, North and South America, informal authorities
- Impositions and experiences of disciplinary regimes (e.g, slave codes, master and servant law, crime and punishment)
- Structures of religious authority
- Wars and violence
Applications will begin being reviewed on June 1, 2009. The conference will be held in New York City on February 26-27, 2010.
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