Symposium on Comparative Early Modern Legal History:
Anglicization
of Law and through Law:
Early
Modern British North America, India, and Ireland Compared
Date:
Friday, April 8, 2016
Location:
Newberry Library, Chicago
Organized
by: Jane Ohlmeyer (Trinity College, Dublin), Richard Ross (University of
Illinois at Urbana-Champaign), and Philip Stern (Duke University)
Scholars have long asked whether and
how English settlements in North America, India, and Ireland converged towards
metropolitan models, or anglicized, over the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries. This question has commonly
been asked about each region separately.
Our conference poses the question comparatively—and from the perspective
of legal history. We want to study the
comparative anglicization of law and
the anglicization of society through
law in different portions of the English empire. To this end, we are interested in the following sorts of
questions: To
what extent does the notion of “anglicization” make sense in the dissimilar
contexts of early modern North America, Ireland, and India? What value does the concept have as
English law adapted to and conformed with extant legal systems from Belfast to
Boston to Bombay? How did local material, demographic, and
ideological environments shape the meaning of anglicization? How did imperial officials, settlers,
merchants, and indigenous leaders, from their distinct perspectives, treat anglicization
as a goal to be advanced, reworked, or resisted? In what ways did each region serve as a
laboratory for ideas and policies about anglicization that were later exported
to other regions, and there reshaped? The conference will bring together
law professors, historians, and social scientists to think about a comparative
legal and social history of anglicization across the dispersed early modern
English empire.
Jane Ohlmeyer (Trinity College, Dublin),
Richard Ross (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign), and Philip Stern
(Duke University) organized “Anglicization of Law and through Law: Early Modern
British North America, India, and Ireland Compared.” The
conference is an offering of the Symposium on Comparative Early Modern Legal
History, which gathers every other year 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.
Funding has been provided by the University of Illinois College of
Law.
Attendance
at the Symposium is free and open to the public. Those who wish to attend should preregister
by sending an email to Richard Ross at Rjross@illinois.edu.
Papers will be circulated electronically to all registrants several
weeks before the conference.
For information about the conference, please consult our
website at http://www.law.illinois.edu/symposium-comparative-early-modern-legal-history or contact Prof. Richard Ross at Rjross@illinois.edu or at 217-244-7890.
Here
is the schedule:
9:00
Welcome: Jane Ohlmeyer (Trinity College, Dublin, History), Richard Ross (Illinois, Urbana-Champaign,
Law and History), and Philip Stern (Duke, History)
9:05
to 10:35: Panel: Foundations
and Constitutive Elements of Anglicization
Brendan Kane (Connecticut, History): “Criminalization as
Anglicization: A Case Study of Early Modern Ireland”
Elizabeth Mancke (New Brunswick, History): “Sites of
Sovereignty: The Body of the Subject and the Making of Britain’s Overseas
Empire”
Brendan
Gillis (Miami University, History):
“Frontiers of Peace: The
Anglicization of Law Enforcement in British America and India”
Commentator: Jack Greene (Johns Hopkins, History)
Chair: Richard Ross (Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, Law and History)
10:35
to 10:50: Refreshment Break
10:50
to 12:20: Panel: Circulation
of Anglicization Practices among Imperial Regions
Jane Ohlmeyer (Trinity College, Dublin, History):
“Anglicization of Law and through Law: Ireland and Bombay in the Seventeenth
Century”
Jennifer Wells (Brown,
History): “Anglicizing Social Control and Punishment,
from Irish Servants to East Indian Slaves”
Paul Halliday (Virginia, History): “Building an Empire of Courts”
Commentator and Chair: Mitra Sharafi (Wisconsin, Law)
12:20
to 1:40: Lunch: Participants and audience members are invited to try the
restaurants in the neighborhood around
the Newberry.
1:40
to 3:10: Panel: Limits of Anglicization
Andrew MacKillop (Aberdeen, History): “‘English’ or ‘British’
Empire: Scots Law, Legal Pluralism, and the Limits of Anglicization, c.
1707-c.1820”
Julia Rudolph (North
Carolina State, History): “Credit Practices and Comparative
Anglicization: Ireland and North America”
Lisa Ford (New South
Wales, Humanities): “Inquiring into
Empire”
Commentator: Patrick Griffin (Notre Dame, History)
Chair: Philip
Stern (Duke, History)
3:10
to 3:25: Refreshment Break
3:25
to 4:55 Panel: Ironies of Anglicization
Nicholas Canny (National University
of Ireland, Galway, History): “English
Law in Early Modern Ireland: An Instrument for, or an Impediment to,
Anglicization?”
Mitch Fraas (University of Pennsylvania, Library):
“Anglicization Beyond
British North America: The Rise and Fall of British Law in Eighteenth-Century
India”
Robert Travers (Cornell,
History): “Anglicization as Colonial Despotism: The
Judicial Reforms of Lord Cornwallis in Bengal”
Commentator: Jennifer Pitts (University of Chicago, Political
Science)
Chair: Jane Ohlmeyer (Trinity College,
Dublin, History)
5:00
Adjourn
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