Transformations: The Atlantic World in the Late Seventeenth Century

March 30-April 1, 2006

Thursday, March 30 

Welcome and Introduction 

Bernard Bailyn, Harvard University

Roundtable: The Atlantic World in the Seventeenth Century

Chair: Bernard Bailyn, Harvard University

Karen Kupperman, New York University

Joseph Miller, University of Virginia

Mark Peterson, University of Iowa

Friday, March 31

Session I: Slavery: Supply and Demand in America and Africa

Chair: Joseph Miller, University of Virginia

Alan Gallay, Ohio State University, "Beachheads into Empires, Villages into Confederacies: Atlantic World Trade and the Transformation of the American South"

Lorena Walsh, Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, "Transformations in Migration Patterns and Labor Recruitment"

Session II: The Loss of Control: Defeat and Defiance

Chair: Mark Peterson, University of Iowa

Daniel K. Richter, University of Pennsylvania, "Dutch Dominos: The Defeats of the West India Company and the Reshaping of Eastern North America"

Kenneth Banks, University of North Carolina, Asheville, "Creating Illicit Commerce in the Late Seventeenth-Century Atlantic World"

Session III: Studying Nature: Bodies and Science

Chair: Bernard Bailyn, Harvard University

Kathleen Brown, University of Pennsylvania, "Empire’s New Clothes: Textiles, Laundresses, and Bodies in the Fin-de-Siècle Atlantic

Pamela H. Smith, Columbia University, "The Authority of Nature in the Late Seventeenth Century"

Session IV: Accounting for the Women, in Africa and in Slavery

Chair: Karen Kupperman, New York University

Jennifer Morgan, Rutgers University, "Accounting for the Women in Slavery: Demography and Epistemology of Race and Slavery in Early America"

Linda Heywood and John Thornton, Boston University, "Central African Creole Culture and the Making of the 'Plantation Generation,' 1660-1740"

Saturday, April 1

Session V: Iberian America: Change, Challenge, and Continuity

Chair: Joseph Miller, University of Virginia

Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, University of Texas at Austin, "Transformations in Spanish America: Narrating the Riots of 1624 and 1692 in Mexico City"

Jane Landers, Vanderbilt University, "Alternative Visions and Failed Transformations: Late Seventeenth-Century Rebellions in the Americas"

Session VI: The Web of Empire: Politics and Trade

Chair: Bernard Bailyn, Harvard University

David Hancock, University of Michigan, "Phase Transition: How the Atlantic Became a Place, 1674-1714"

Steven Pincus, Yale University, "An Interlude between Barbarism and Stability? The Revolution in British Political Economy and the Atlantic World"

Closing Roundtable: Transformations?

Bernard Bailyn, Harvard University

Karen Kupperman, New York University

Joseph Miller, University of Virginia

Mark Peterson, University of Iowa