BOOK: Lucy E. SALYER, Under the Starry Flag : How a Band of Irish Americans Joined the Fenian Revolt and Sparked a Crisis over Citizenship (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2018). ISBN 9780674057630, €27.00

(Source: HUP)

Harvard University Press is publishing a new book which deals i.a. with aspects of the history of US emigration/immigration law.

ABOUT THE BOOK  

The riveting story of forty Irish Americans who set off to fight for Irish independence, only to be arrested by Queen Victoria’s authorities and accused of treason: a tale of idealism and justice with profound implications for future conceptions of citizenship and immigration.

In 1867 forty Irish-American freedom fighters, outfitted with guns and ammunition, sailed to Ireland to join the effort to end British rule. Yet they never got a chance to fight. British authorities arrested them for treason as soon as they landed, sparking an international conflict that dragged the United States and Britain to the brink of war. Under the Starry Flag recounts this gripping legal saga, a prelude to today’s immigration battles.

The Fenians, as the freedom fighters were known, claimed American citizenship. British authorities disagreed, insisting that naturalized Irish Americans remained British subjects. Following in the wake of the Civil War, the Fenian crisis dramatized anew the idea of citizenship as an inalienable right, as natural as freedom of speech and religion. The captivating trial of these men illustrated the stakes of extending those rights to arrivals from far-flung lands. The case of the Fenians, Lucy E. Salyer shows, led to landmark treaties and laws acknowledging the right of exit. The U.S. Congress passed the Expatriation Act of 1868, which guaranteed the right to renounce one’s citizenship, in the same month it granted citizenship to former American slaves.

The small ruckus created by these impassioned Irish Americans provoked a human rights revolution that is not, even now, fully realized. Placing Reconstruction-era debates over citizenship within a global context, Under the Starry Flag raises important questions about citizenship and immigration.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Lucy E. Salyer is Associate Professor of History at the University of New Hampshire and the author of Laws Harsh as Tigers: Chinese Immigrants and the Shaping of Modern Immigration Law, which won the Theodore Saloutos Book Award for the best book on immigration history. A former Constance E. Smith Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Salyer has received the Arthur K. Whitcomb Professorship for teaching excellence and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Science Foundation, and the American Council of Learned Societies.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Prologue: Erin’s Hope and the Forgotten Right of Expatriation

I. The Fenians and the Making of a Crisis

1. Clonakilty, God Help Us!

2. Exiles and Expatriates

3. The Fenian Pest

4. Civis Americanus Sum

II. Citizenship on Trial

5. A Floating Rebellion

6. The Voice from the Dungeon

7. All the World’s a Stage

III. Reconstructing Citizenship

8. Are Naturalized Americans, Americans?

9. This Is a White Man’s Government!

10. The Politics of Expatriation

11. Private Diplomatizing

12. Treating Expatriation

Epilogue: Exits

Notes

Acknowledgments

Credits

Index

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CALL FOR PAPERS: Migrants and Refugees in the Law - Historic evolution, current situation and unsolved questions ( DEADLINE 15 September, 2018)

(Source: Catedra Inocencio III)

We learned of a Call for Papers for the 4^th International Conference of the Cátedra Internacional conjunta Inocencio III. Here the call:

The International Conferences of the Chair Innocent III constitute a channel of specialised scientific communication that, together with the Journal Vergentis and the Law and Theology Days, allow the exchange of information and ideas between the researchers who study important issues related to the History of Law, the Ius Commune and the Canon Law.

They take place annually, in the headquarters of the Chair, in the Catholic University of Murcia (UCAM). The articles selected by the main scientific committee are published in the next monographic issue of the Journal Vergentis (ISSN: 2445-2394)

The fruitful collaboration between the Catholic University of Murcia and the Pontifical Lateran University allowed the celebration of high level International Conferences, with the participation of well-known academics from all continents. The good results reached until this moment motivate us to keep following the same direction that we chose ever since the first edition of the Conferences: the historical-juridical research with a multidisciplinary approach and a careful eye on the current law, especially canon law. The selection of the topics that constitute the object of the Conferences aims to grant to the historical-juridical studies their authentic functionality, in order to avoid that they become an exercise of juridical analysis of the past as an end in itself, so that they can effectively contribute, instead, to a better comprehension of the current law and they can provide to the jurists new ideas to solve the current problems and new argumentation in the debates de iure condendo.

Call for Papers 2018:

MIGRANTS AND REFUGEES IN THE LAW

Historic evolution, current situation and unsolved questions

Murcia (Spain), December 12 -13 -14, 2018

The Fourth International Conference is organized by the Editors-In-Chiefs of the Cátedra Internacional conjunta Inocencio III, Dr. D. Javier Belda Iniesta [Universidad Católica de Murcia], and Prof. Matteo Nacci [Pontificia Università Lateranense].

The overall theme of the Conference is “Migrants and Refugees in the Law. Historic evolution, current situation and unsolved questions”. The current situation invites us to analyse and comprehend the phenomenon of the “Human mobility”, with a serious and intense interdisciplinary approach, that always has to recognize the central and essential importance of the person. By investigating on the historic evolution and the current situation, this Conference aims to understand whether the Migration has to be contemplated as a mere emergency, or as a possibility for the community.

This International Conference will be divided in three different sessions; each of them will correspond to three distinct periods: the ancient and medieval period [The migration in the ancient and the medieval history. Historical approach to human mobility]; the modern period [Nation, State, Revolution. The situation of the migrants and the refugees from the origin of the modern State] the post-modern period [Between emergency and ordinariness. Proposals for the enhancement of a constant phenomenon in the contemporary age].

December 12: session 1. THE MIGRATION IN THE ANCIENT AND MEDIEVAL HISTORY. Historical approach to human mobility.

December 13: session 2. NATION, STATE, REVOLUTION. The situation of the migrants and the refugees from the origin of the modern State.

December 14: session 3. BETWEEN EMERGENCY AND ORDINARINESS: Proposals for the enhancement of a constant phenomenon in the contemporary age.

The working languages of the Conference will be: English, Italian, German, French and Spanish.

We look forward to a positive confirmation, an honor for us indeed. We believe that your contribution to this field is unparalleled and of great benefit.

The deadline to send us your proposal is September 15, 2018.The Scientific Committee will respond before September 30, 2018.

The proposal must be send to catedrainocencio@gmail.com.

The papers selected by the Scientific Committee will be published in the special issue of the journal

More information here

WORKSHOP: "Migrating Words, Migrating Merchants: Migrating Law" (Frankfurt, September 19-21 2016)

WHAT Migrating Words, Migrating Merchants: Migrating Law, 4th workshop on "the Making of Commercial Law"

WHEN September 19-21 2016

WHERE Frankfurt

all information here

The Fondaco dei Tedeschi in the commercial center of Venice, by the eastern foot of the Rialto Bridge, represents the scope of this workshop – in all three regards suggested in the title.

The Italian word fondaco is a loanword from the Arabic فندق, ”funduq“, which in its turn roots in the Greek πανδοκεῖον, “pandokeion”. These three languages generally share an important vocabulary in regard to economy and trade, and the two younger ones, Arabic and Italian, apparently found both the word and the concept behind it useful enough to import it. The concept, although with important variations, always turns around the issue of housing, feeding, lodging, and controlling foreigners, as well as dealing with them in every sense of the word. Olivia Remie Constable examined both word and fact in her book “Housing the stranger in the Mediterranean World ” (2004) and was able to lay out the 2000-year long journey of the various ways how trade-faring cities and nations hosted and controlled strangers and namely foreign merchants. This is one spectacular example of a wide-spread phenomenon within the realm of commercial law. Let it suffice to list just a few more examples of “migrating words”, choosing three words of the language of the country in which the Commercial Revolution took off: Avaria, Accomandita, Bancarotta, and three words from today’s German (!) legal language: Leasing, Factoring, Franchising – words whose American origin is not necessarily obvious to German law students who use them every day.

The Fondaco dei Tedeschi also represents the “migrating merchants” in our title. Trading techniques are closely intertwined with the question how the merchant was travelling in order to learn the trade, accompany his goods, meet business associates, buy and sell, receive accounts, or even move and change the center of his commercial activity to a new city. It is a likely assumption that the migrating merchant carried his commercial and legal tools with him just like a stonemason would have carried his working tools with him on his way from one construction site to the next. But there, at the end of his journey from Nurnberg to Venice of from Dortmund to Bruges, the merchant encountered new ideas and techniques, and he must have compared his set of tools with those of his foreign partners. The early modern literature on commerce and commercial law (Stracca, Malynes, Marquard, Savary) has one main purpose: Inform the merchant about all matters relevant to his success on his journey and at the destination of his trading route.

The idea behind this workshop is to approach the “migration of laws” by following the migration of words and people in order to verify if, and to what extent, principles, rules and practices, especially in the mercantile world, moved by means of men in flesh and blood more than by means of books. If the interaction between the locals and the strangers, and more precisely the mutual learning process in regard to the daily commercial and legal routine can be considered the necessary premises for the spread of commercial practices, the diffusion of certain technical words provide a witness of the circulation of ideas and rules. The analysis of these two different and at the same time strictly connected kinds of “migrations” can provide a fresh point of view on the problem of the diffusion of commercial practices at a transnational level, with focus on the Mediterranean and Northern European seas.

Osmosis, hybridization, assimilation – a number of widely discussed key words spring to the mind. The two trading route examples were chosen with intention: In 1508, the City council of Nurnberg adopted the Venetian tutelage laws – a fact important enough to the lenders to boast with it by painting the scene in oil and hanging the painting into the Palazzo dei Dogi; and the Hanseatic merchant Hildebrand Veckinchusen who spent childhood years in Dortmund organized his book keeping by copying the model he encountered in Italian and Flemish firms after moving to Bruges around the year 1400. It won’t be hard to come up with additional examples but we will try to take the next step and ask: Why? The merchants adopting something foreign and new must have deemed it favorable, but based on what reflections? What did they find weak and disadvantageous about the usual, traditional ways they were brought up with? Were there regrets? After the failure of the Venetian Company Hildebrand’s brother Sivert Veckinchusen complained in a letter that they should better have stuck to the “old nourishment”, referring to the traditional trade along the axis Bruges-Lübeck-Novgorod. If we listen carefully, we can still hear Sivert sigh.

Programme