Norwich, UK, September 7, 2013
The 2013 annual meeting of the British Group of Early American Historians (BGEAH)
has featured several topics of considerable interest to legal historians. Carla Pestana’s plenary address on Thursday
was delivered in the medieval Dragon Hall. Her talk focused on the unsuccessful
seventeenth-century attack on Spanish Caribbean islands by Britain. Debates over the validity of plunder under
the law of war raged alongside powerful invocations of divine blessing and
support on both sides of the fight.
Other papers have
treated the law and practice of surrender, the granting of “peace bonds”
by judges in colonial Pennsylvania, and the law of corporations in the early
Republic, in addition to presentations on taverns, elite Mohawk culture, silkworms, and more.
BGEAH is a relatively new group. The website records meetings going back to
2000, but others report the first meeting was several years earlier. It is a delightfully collegial,
non-hierarchical, and welcoming society (there is no membership fee, for
example).
This year's conference includes nine panel sessions, two plenaries,
and tonight's conference dinner at the beautiful Sainsbury Centre for the Visual Arts.
Founding member Betty Wood of Cambridge University has
worked extensively on slavery and power. She is currently studying relations between
servants in the eighteenth-century Chesapeake, and welcomes insight into the
law governing conflict between servants, including the practice of “auctioning”
off newborn babies born to servant women at town fairs.
