Fradera on citizens and subjects in four empires

In 2018, Josep M. Fradera, Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona published The Imperial Nation: Citizens and Subjects in the British, French, Spanish, and American Empires with Princeton University Press. From the publisher:

Historians view the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries as a turning point when imperial monarchies collapsed and modern nations emerged. Treating this pivotal moment as a bridge rather than a break, The Imperial Nation offers a sweeping examination of four of these modern powers—Great Britain, France, Spain, and the United States—and asks how, after the great revolutionary cycle in Europe and America, the history of monarchical empires shaped these new nations. Josep Fradera explores this transition, paying particular attention to the relations between imperial centers and their sovereign territories and the constant and changing distinctions placed between citizens and subjects.

Fradera argues that the essential struggle that lasted from the Seven Years’ War to the twentieth century was over the governance of dispersed and varied peoples: each empire tried to ensure domination through subordinate representation or by denying any representation at all. The most common approach echoed Napoleon’s “special laws,” which allowed France to reinstate slavery in its Caribbean possessions. The Spanish and Portuguese constitutions adopted “specialness” in the 1830s; the United States used comparable guidelines to distinguish between states, territories, and Indian reservations; and the British similarly ruled their dominions and colonies. In all these empires, the mix of indigenous peoples, European-origin populations, slaves and indentured workers, immigrants, and unassimilated social groups led to unequal and hierarchical political relations. Fradera considers not only political and constitutional transformations but also their social underpinnings.

Presenting a fresh perspective on the ways in which nations descended and evolved from and throughout empires, The Imperial Nation highlights the ramifications of this entangled history for the subjects who lived in its shadows.

In praise of the book: 

“Prodigious and stimulating, The Imperial Nation reveals the complexities of the relationship between empire and nation in the Atlantic world from the late eighteenth century into the twentieth. This impressive and vigorously argued book will be the focal point of scholarly debate for some time to come.” - Frederick Cooper

“Superb, important, and complex, this book compares and analyzes the British, Spanish, French, and American empires between 1750 and 1920: how they adopted constitutions, treated different populations, and viewed the construction of the state in an imperial context. With its revolutionary arguments, The Imperial Nation will help historians understand the complex social and ethnic battles of the past two centuries. An amazing book by an original and brilliant historian.” - Antonio Feros

Further information is available here. 

-Mitra Sharafi

On the Indigenous Experience in the Americas

One of the issues that habitually frustrates me is the disconnect between historians who work on the colonial period and those who specialize in the indigenous world. Theoretically, both engage with the same period and depend on similar or even (on occasions) identical sources, but their aims and their readings are often diverse, the bibliography they consult is habitually distinct, and they frequently belong to different fields and professional associations. The result is that they are seldom in conversation with one another. Having participated recently in a search for a historian of Indigenous North America made this clear to me, but so have many years working as a scholar of Spanish America.

How could one place colonial and indigenous history in dialogue? To answer this question, I authored two pieces. The first piece was concerned with Indigenous right to land, the other focused on campaigns to resettle natives in new, Spanish-style communities.[i]

Attempting to understand why some historians insisted on Spanish respect to native land rights (mostly historians of the Spanish colonial state) while others criticized Spain for the massive dispossession of natives (mainly historians interested in the native experience of empire), I observed how respect to native rights operated in the colonial period.  I argued that respect did not guarantee continuity. On the contrary, it (often) introduced change. This could happen because Spanish judges, although willing to recognize indigenous right to land, understood land rights not according to Indigenous law but according to European juridical traditions. These judges tied land rights to occupation and described occupation in ways that resonated with the European experience. The result was both the suppression of ancient rights as well as the invention of new entitlements. In other words, examination of how European norms were applied vis-à-vis natives enabled to affirm that respect to native rights and native dispossession could operate simultaneously.

With regards to native resettlement, historians of native Spanish America usually denounced resettlement campaigns as a colonial measure aimed at controlling, converting, and exploiting the native population. Yet, as a historian of Spain in both Europe and the Americas I knew that resettlement did not only target natives but also Spaniards and that it operated in both the Old and the New World. Justifying it were contemporary convictions that only people who resided in proper communities (and indigenous communities were not considered “proper”) could be tied to the polity religiously and civically. The question when resettlement was required, against whom, and for which end, thus demanded a larger and a longer vision. As happened in the case of native land rights, just looking at natives, just looking to the Americas, was insufficient.

These remarks are not meant to diminish the plight of native Americans. European colonialism turned the native world upside down. It was a human-made hurricane that touched and upset almost everything. But, regardless of how terrible it had been, if we wish to understand how it operated, we should not separate the study of the native world from the study of the colonial (and by extension European) world, with which it was closely entangled.

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[i]  Tamar Herzog. “Colonial law and ‘Native Customs’: Indigenous Land Rights in Colonial Spanish America.” The Americas 63(3) (2013): 303-321 and Tamar Herzog. “Indigenous Reducciones and Spanish Resettlement: Placing Colonial and European History in Dialogue.” Ler História 72 (2018): 9-30 (an earlier version of this work was published under the title “Terres et déserts, société et sauvagerie. De la communauté en Amérique et en Castille à l’époque moderne.” Annales HSS 62 (3) (2007): 507-538)).

Rugemer on slave law in the early Atlantic world

Edward B. Rugemer, Yale University, has published Slave Law and the Politics of Resistance in the Early Atlantic World with Harvard University Press. From the publisher:

The success of the English colony of Barbados in the seventeenth century, with its lucrative sugar plantations and enslaved African labor, spawned the slave societies of Jamaica in the western Caribbean and South Carolina on the American mainland. These became the most prosperous slave economies in the Anglo-American Atlantic, despite the rise of enlightened ideas of liberty and human dignity. Slave Law and the Politics of Resistance in the Early Atlantic World reveals the political dynamic between slave resistance and slaveholders’ power that marked the evolution of these societies. Edward Rugemer shows how this struggle led to the abolition of slavery through a law of British Parliament in one case and through violent civil war in the other. 

In both Jamaica and South Carolina, a draconian system of laws and enforcement allowed slave masters to maintain control over the people they enslaved, despite resistance and recurrent slave revolts. Brutal punishments, patrols, imprisonment, and state-sponsored slave catchers formed an almost impenetrable net of power. Yet slave resistance persisted, aided and abetted by rising abolitionist sentiment and activity in the Anglo-American world. In South Carolina, slaveholders exploited newly formed levers of federal power to deflect calls for abolition and to expand slavery in the young republic. In Jamaica, by contrast, whites fought a losing political battle against Caribbean rebels and British abolitionists who acted through Parliament. 

Rugemer’s comparative history spanning two hundred years of slave law and political resistance illuminates the evolution and ultimate collapse of slave societies in the Atlantic World.

Praise for the book:

 “This is, to my mind, the best history of the Anglo slaveholders and their slaves in the western Caribbean.”—Ira Berlin

“At its heart, this spirited and comprehensive reevaluation of the British imperial project in the Americas is a story of the clashing politics of slave resistance and slaveholders’ repression. It reveals how the slave laws, first initiated in Barbados and later adopted in Jamaica and South Carolina, became progressively more draconian in the face of mounting slave resistance.”—R. J. M. Blackett

“In this significant contribution to the history of slavery, we see how slaveholding regimes developed in response to slave resistance, were transformed in the Age of Revolution, and finally succumbed to concerted action from an array of antislavery forces. Tracing this process through the most profitable and brutal slave societies in Anglo-America, Rugemer sets a new standard for comparative history.”—Vincent Brown

“Edward Rugemer’s vital new book focuses our attention on the relationship between politics and organized violence in the two largest economies of British America. A superb example of comparative history that reveals how the most pernicious institution in the Western Hemisphere contained the seeds of its own demise.”—Peter C. Mancall

Further information is available here.

On Turner’s Westward March from a Different Perspective

Frederick Turner’s description of U.S. territorial expansion as a march to no man’s land (the so-called Turner frontier thesis) has been questioned and to a large degree discredited in recent decades. Among other things, historians have pointed out to the obvious: the land was never empty and most actors were aware of the presence of native peoples (and of other colonial subjects) whom they sought to dispossess. 

Having studied the territorial expansion of Spain and Portugal in both Europe and the Americas, I cannot but agree.[i] Yet, dismissing Turner altogether is like throwing the baby out with the bathwater. As happened with the Tannenbaum Thesis (that compared slavery and race in South and North America), once completely discarded and now undergoing at least a partial rehabilitation, it is perhaps time we recalibrated our visions regarding how European actors (and their American descendants) sought to justify their activities. 

The experience of Spain and Portugal can be useful in this regard. Although the Spanish and the Portuguese signed bilateral treaties and invoked rights by discovery, conquest, and, on occasions, papal bulls, they mostly based their claims on occupation. They disagreed about what occupation was, and they certainly conflicted over who had it, but they referenced a common framework according to which those who used the land “appropriately” would acquire rights to it. This vision permeated both what they did and what they said in both Europe and the Americas, vis-à-vis members of their own group as well as vis-à-vis outsiders, both natives and other colonial powers. 

The linking of land rights to possession was of course anchored in European legal traditions. By the early modern period, these traditions instructed that, to obtain rights, one had to occupy the land for an extended period without suffering opposition. Most actors who invoked these ideas were not jurists and many among them were illiterate peasants living in remote communities that their contemporaries classified as uncivil. Yet, these individuals were convinced that if they acted on the territory, if they opposed the pretensions of their rivals (the best opposition being the most vocal and most violent because it best manifested their disaccord), they would acquire rights.  

Contemporary actors never explained where this understanding came from and they were rarely cognizant that their discussions replicated erudite legal doctrines. Instead, they usually affirmed that this was the way things were, everywhere, always. They described having watched their parents and friends do the same or having heard stories about what happened when they did not. Faced with this reality, I constantly asked myself: did these ideas originate in customs that were then formalized by jurists (as many of us now view the contribution of ius commune jurists to European legal development), or did jurists succeed in disseminating their doctrines to the point that they permeated debates among contemporaries, even the most illiterate and the most peripherical? If they did, what instruments did they use? Who and what contributed to their success? 

While contemporary documentation gave no answers, it nevertheless made clear that actors were aware of the existence of native peoples (and other colonists) and were cognizant of their entitlements. Nevertheless, almost none of them considered that this presence should hinder their penetration and occupation.  Some justified penetration and occupation by the duty to convert or civilize but most based it on discrediting the use natives (or other colonists) made of the land, arguing that it was inappropriate and therefore bestowed no rights. In this respect, Turner was right. From the perspective of contemporary actors, the land was empty, if not of people, at least of rights. However, Turner was wrong because he failed to appreciate the degree by which debates on land were entangled in debates about people. Contemporaries knew that the best way to take possession of the land was either to discredit its inhabitants or by taking possession of them. Conversion was one common way to take possession of people (conversion being considered to have both religious and civic consequences), but alliance making, and conquest was another. Imagining natives, not territory, as the true no-man’s land, in Spain and Portugal, at least, actors suggested that before Europeans arrived and natives were subjected to them, natives belonged to no one and any European could take possession of them as a “vacant” property. Yet, these Spanish and Portuguese also asserted that after natives were “taken,” indeed possessed, they were occupied and could not be legitimately “taken over” by another group. 

Because at stake was not only occupying land, but also (perhaps mainly) occupying people, Spanish and Portuguese presence in the Americas was much more unstable, tentative, and provisional than most colonial historians tend to describe. Ambiguity and chaos were more typical than certainty and clarity. The outcome was not the construction of an uninterrupted colonial territory, but instead the emergence of a fragmented space that constantly changed shapes alongside a struggle over the use of land, which was never detached from the struggle to control people.  

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[i] Tamar Herzog. Frontiers of Possession: Spain and Portugal in Europe and the Americas. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2015 (also available as Fronteras de posesión: España y Portugal en Europa y las Américas. Madrid: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2018; Fronteiras da Posse. Portugal e Espanha na Europa e na América. Lisbon, Imprensa de Ciências Sociais, 2018 ; a Brazilian translation is forthcoming).

Lambourn and friends on legal encounters on the medieval globe

Elizabeth Lambourn (De Montfort University) edited Legal Encounters on the Medieval Globe, which came out with the Arc Humanities Press in 2017. From the publisher: 

Law has been a primary locus and vehicle of contact across human history—as a system of ideas embodied in people and enacted on bodies; and also as a material, textual, and sensory “thing.” The seven essays gathered here analyze a variety of legal encounters on the medieval globe, ranging from South Asia to South and Central America, Africa, the Middle East, and Europe. Contributors uncover the people behind and within legal systems and explore various material expressions of law that reveal the complexity and intensity of cross-cultural contact in this pivotal era. Topics include comparative jurisprudence, sumptuary law, varieties of punishment, forms of documentation and legal knowledge, religious law, and encounters between imperial and indigenous legal systems. A featured source preserves an Ethiopian king’s legislation against traffic in Christian slaves, resulting from the intensifying African slave trade of the sixteenth century.

Contents after the jump:

Symposium: Rule of Law, the Hebrew Bible and Foreigners in the Americas

[We share the following announcement.]

Symposium on Comparative Early Modern Legal History:

Arguing for the Rule of Law:

Using the Hebrew Bible and Caricatures of Foreigners in British and Spanish America

Date: Friday, October 26, 2018

Location: Newberry Library, Chicago

Organized by: Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra (University of Texas, Austin) and Richard Ross (University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign)

How did settlers, imperial officials, indigenous peoples, and Africans in the New World seek to demonstrate, or disprove, that a polity respected the rule of law?  (The phrase “rule of law” is modern; but the core of the idea is not).  Colonial rule invited accusations of arbitrary government and systematic lawlessness.  This conference will focus on two common techniques used to assess whether a polity respected the supremacy of law.  First, controversialists asked whether governance accorded with God’s expectations of justice as laid out in Scripture, particularly the Hebrew Bible.  Second, caricatures of other societies could be held up to make one’s own appear lawful and just, or the reverse.  British American settlers applauded the civility of their law by reference to the presumed barbarism of the Irish and Amerindians.  They saw liberty in their exploitive legal order by opposing it to the supposed absolutism of the Spanish and French empires.  Spanish settlers justified their rule and derecho by contrasting them to the law of indigenous polities and of their New World rivals.  The conference will bring together historians, law professors, and social scientists to think about the complex debates about the rule of law in the English and Iberian Atlantic.  

Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra (University of Texas, Austin) and Richard Ross (University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign) organized “Arguing for the Rule of Law: Using the Hebrew Bible and Caricatures of Foreigners in British and Spanish America.”  The conference is an offering of the Symposium on Comparative Early Modern Legal History, which gathers every other year at the Newberry Library in Chicago in order to explore a particular topic in the comparative legal history of the Atlantic world in the period c.1492-1815.  Funding has been provided by the University of Illinois College of Law. 

            Attendance at the Symposium is free and open to the public.  Those who wish to attend should preregister by sending an email to Richard Ross at Rjross@illinois.edu.  Papers will be circulated electronically to all registrants several weeks before the conference.

For information about the conference, please consult our website at https://law.illinois.edu/faculty-research/specialty-programs/legal-history/ or contact Richard Ross at Rjross@illinois.edu or at 217-244-7890.