The Struggle for the Americas, 1500-1763
2007 Annual Seminar
Tuesday, August 7
Session 1: The Struggle for Jamestown’s Survival
Chair: Karen Kupperman, New York University
William Goldman, University of California, Berkeley, “The Limit of Empire: Spain and the Founding of Jamestown, 1604-1618”
Emily Rose, University of Cambridge / Princeton University, “The Reluctant Imperialist: King James I and the Surrender of Virginia”
Session 2: Colonial Governance and the Metropole: Governors and Viceroys
Chair: Bernard Bailyn, Harvard University
Taylor Stoermer, University of Virginia, “‘I Enjoy Nothing But What I Have Obtain’d Under Ye Rose’: Alexander Spotswood as an Avatar of a New British World, 1710-1722”
Christoph Rosenmüller, Middle Tennessee State University, “The Struggle for Mexico, 1700-1755: A Game-Theoretical Analysis of Transatlantic Social Networks”
Wednesday, August 8
Session 3: Defense Strategies: Spanish versus Dutch
Chair: David Armitage, Harvard University
Margarita Gascón, Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones, Argentina, “Nature and Empire: The Struggle for South America during the Seventeenth Century”
Martine van Ittersum, University of Dundee, “Mare Liberum in the West Indies? Hugo Grotius and the Case of the Swimming Lion, a Dutch Pirate in the Caribbean at the Turn of the Seventeenth Century”
Thursday, August 9
Session 4: The French Imperium I
Chair: Catherine Desbarats, McGill University
Robert Morrissey, University of Tennessee, Knoxville, “The Terms of Encounter: Language and Contested Visions of French Colonization in the Illinois Country, 1673-1702”
Richard Weyhing, University of Chicago, “‘La Terre Renversée’: The Founding of French Detroit, the Origins of the Fox Wars, and the Ends of Empire”
Session 5: The French Imperium II
Chair: Catherine Desbarats, McGill University
Marion F. Godfroy, Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, “The Kourou Expedition of 1763, or the Ultimate Struggle of the Monarchy for a French America”
Plenary Session I
Catherine Desbarats, McGill University
About the Groupe de l’histoire du monde Atlantique
Martine van Ittersum, University of Dundee
About the International Network for Dutch Atlantic History
Friday, August 10
Session 6: Race and Military Defense
Chair: Ben Vinson, Johns Hopkins University
Maria Alessandra Bollettino, University of Texas, Austin, “Black Warriors and the British Empire: The Evolving Bounds of Race and Civilized Warfare in the Seven Years’ War in the West Indies”
William Nelson, University of Cambridge, “Human Instruments of Empire: Ideas of Racial Engineering in Eighteenth-Century Saint-Domingue”
Plenary Session II
Victor Enthoven, Royal Netherlands Naval College
“Death in the West: A Preliminary Concept of Colonial Warfare in the Atlantic World”
Keith A. J. McLay, University of Chester
“American Military Exceptionalism in Colonial Northeastern America and Its Atlantic Dimensions”
Saturday, August 11
Session 7: The Mores of Natives: Clients and Allies
Chair: Allan Greer, University of Toronto
Michael A. LaCombe, Adelphi University, “Commensality and Contest in the English Atlantic World: Meals and the Struggle for Authority, 1570-1650”
Adam Stueck, Marquette University, “‘Drawn from 500 leagues by the smell of fresh human flesh’: Amerindian Torture and Cultural Violence in Eighteenth-Century New France”
Monday, August 13
Session 8: Strategic Hubs of Imperial Control
Chair: Eliga Gould, University of New Hampshire
Jeffers Lennox, Dalhousie University, “An Empire on Paper: The Founding of Halifax and Conceptions of Imperial Space, 1744-1755”
Timothy P. Grady, University of South Carolina, Upstate, “Anglo-Spanish Rivalries and the Effects of La Florida on the Exploration and Settlement of Virginia and Carolina”
Session 9: Defending Imperial Ambitions
Chair: Eliga Gould, University of New Hampshire
Eva Botella-Ordinas, Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, “Debating Empires: Atlantic Imperial Ideology and the Spanish-British Competition for the Americas, 1660s-1720s”
Josef Köstlbauer, Universität Wien, “Lawless and Precarious Spaces: The Struggle to Control Imperial Borderlands”
Tuesday, August 14
Session 10: England and the Protestant Imperium
Chair: Carla Gardina Pestana, Miami University
Aaron Slater, New York University, “A Reformed Empire? Spain, Great Britain, and the Americas in the Imperial Imaginary of Thomas Scott”
María Fernanda Valencia Suárez, University of Cambridge, “Earliest English Images of the Aztecs: The Anglo-Spanish Struggle for the New World, 1553-1603”
Wednesday, August 15
Session 11: Pragmatic Grounds for British Success: Conquest and Defense
Chair: Jane Landers, Vanderbilt University
David Aworawo, University of Lagos, “From Pirates’ Haven to Sugar Island: Anglo-Spanish Rivalry and the Transformation of Jamaica, 1655-1720”
Ian Chambers, University of Idaho, “Agents Provocateurs and Indians: The Struggle for the Eighteenth-Century American Southeast”
Session 12: Concluding Session