# 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”](/Bollettino%20WP-07010%20) 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”](/Botella-Ordinas%20WP-07016 "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”](/Chambers%20WP-07021 "Agents Provocateurs and Indians: The Struggle for the Eighteenth-Century American Southwest") **Session 12: Concluding Session**