BOOK: Agnès DELAHAYE, Settling The Good Land. Governance and Promotion in John Winthrop’s New England (1630-1650) (Leiden: Brill, 2020). ISBN: 9789004431393, pp. 357, €124.00

(Source: Brill)

ABOUT THE BOOK

Settling the Good Land: Governance and Promotion in John Winthrop’s New England (1620-1650) is the first institutional history of the Massachusetts Bay Company, cornerstone of early modern English colonisation in North America. Agnès Delahaye analyses settlement as a form of colonial innovation, to reveal the political significance of early New England sources, above and beyond religion. John Winthrop was not just a Puritan, but a settler governor who wrote the history of the expansion of his company as a record of successful and enduring policy. Delahaye argues that settlement, as the action and the experience of appropriating the land, is key to understanding the role played by Winthrop’s writings in American historiography, before independence and in our times.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Agnès Delahaye, Ph. D. (2003), Paris-Sorbonne, is Professor of Anglophone Studies at the Université Lyon II Lumière and a member of Triangle (UMR 5206). She has published articles on New England history and historiography, Atlantic history, business history and settler colonialism.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Front Matter

Copyright Page

Acknowledgements

Abbreviations

Figures

Introduction

Pages: 1–18

The Beginnings of English Settlement

Pages: 19–60

Plymouth Colony and the Birth of Settler Literature

Pages: 61–89

Organizing Settlement: The Massachusetts Bay Company

Pages: 90–120

John Winthrop’s Decision for America

Pages: 121–169

Managing New England

Pages: 170–209

Expansion and Violence in Early New England

Pages: 210–261

Liberty

Pages: 262–309

Conclusion

Pages: 310–314

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Back Matter

Bibliography

Index

More information with the publisher.

BOOK: Allan GREER, Property and Dispossession : Natives, Empires and Land in Early Modern North America [Studies in North American Indian History] (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018). ISBN 9781316613696, £ 22.99

(Source: CUP)

Earlier this year, Cambridge University Press published a book on the processes by which forms of land tenure emerged and natives were dispossessed from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries in New France (Canada), New Spain (Mexico), and New England.

ABOUT THE BOOK

Allan Greer examines the processes by which forms of land tenure emerged and natives were dispossessed from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries in New France (Canada), New Spain (Mexico), and New England. By focusing on land, territory, and property, he deploys the concept of 'property formation' to consider the ways in which Europeans and their Euro-American descendants remade New World space as they laid claim to the continent's resources, extended the reach of empire, and established states and jurisdictions for themselves. Challenging long-held, binary assumptions of property as a single entity, which various groups did or did not possess, Greer highlights the diversity of indigenous and Euro-American property systems in the early modern period. The book's geographic scope, comparative dimension, and placement of indigenous people on an equal plane with Europeans makes it unlike any previous study of early colonization and contact in the Americas.

Provides a comparative approach to the colonization of North America, including a study of French, English, and Spanish colonies

Considers colonization in an indigenous America, contrary to the prevailing Eurocentrism of the history of early modern imperialism

Focuses on property formation as a central dimension of colonization

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Allan Greer, McGill University, Montréal

Allan Greer is a professor in the Department of History and Classical Studies at McGill University in Montreal, Canada. He holds the Canada Research Chair in Colonial North America at McGill University, Montréal. He has published seven books, including Mohawk Saint: Catherine Tekakwitha and the Jesuits (2005) and La Nouvelle-France et le monde (2009).

TABLE OF CONTENTS

1. Introduction: property and colonization

Part I. Three Zones Of Colonization:

2. Indigenous forms of property

3. Early contacts

4. New Spain

5. New France

6. New England

Part II. Aspects of Property Formation:

7. The colonial commons

8. Spaces of property

9. A survey of surveying

10. Empires and colonies

Part III. Conclusion and Epilogue:

11. Property and dispossession in an age of revolution.

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BOOK: Charles Robert MCKIRDY, The Last Great Colonial Lawyer : The Life and Legacy of Jeremiah Gridley (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2018). ISBN 978-1-62534-350-5, $ 32.95

(Source: University of Massachusetts Press)

The University of Massachusetts Press has published a new book on the life of an important 18^th century New England lawyer, Jeremiah Gridley.

ABOUT THE BOOK

Jeremiah Gridley (1702–1767) is considered “the greatest New England lawyer of his generation,” yet we know little about him. Most of his renown is a product of the fame of his students, most notably John Adams. Gridley deserves more. He was an active participant in the Writs of Assistance trial and the Stamp Act controversy, and as a leader of the Boston bar, an editor, speculator, legislator, and politician, his life touched and was touched by much that was integral to eighteenth-century Massachusetts.

The Last Great Colonial Lawyer presents a portrait of Gridley against the background of his times. Religious controversies enter into this narrative, as do colonial wars and the increasing strains with Great Britain, but Charles R. McKirdy also rescues from the footnotes of time subjects such as the smallpox epidemic of 1721 and the currency crisis of the 1740s. Because Gridley was above all a lawyer, the primary focus is on his cases, which illuminate in a unique and very human way attitudes regarding race, status, commerce, property, and power.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Charles R. McKirdy litigated cases for more than twenty-five years and holds a PhD in history and a law degree from Northwestern University. He is author of Lincoln Apostate: The Matson Slave Case, and he has published in the American Journal of Legal History, the Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology, and the Journal of Legal Education.

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