Tuesday, August 18, 2015

Anglicization of Law and through Law

[We have the following announcement.]

2015-16 Symposium on Comparative Early Modern Legal History: Anglicization of Law and through Law: Early Modern British North America, India, and Ireland Compared, Friday, April 8, 2016, Newberry Library, Chicago

Organized by Jane Ohlmeyer (Trinity College, Dublin), Richard Ross (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign), and Philip Stern (Duke University)

Scholars have long asked whether and how English settlements in North America, India, and Ireland converged towards metropolitan models, or anglicized, over the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. This question has commonly been asked about each region separately. Our conference poses the question comparatively—and from the perspective of legal history. We want to study the comparative anglicization of law and the anglicization of society through law in different portions of the English empire. To this end, we are interested in the following sorts of questions: To what extent does the notion of “anglicization” make sense in the dissimilar contexts of early modern North America, Ireland, and India? What value does the concept have as English law adapted to and conformed with extant legal systems from Belfast to Boston to Bombay? How did local material, demographic, and ideological environments shape the meaning of anglicization? How did imperial officials, settlers, merchants, and indigenous leaders, from their distinct perspectives, treat anglicization as a goal to be advanced, reworked, or resisted? In what ways did each region serve as a laboratory for ideas and policies about anglicization that were later exported to other regions, and there reshaped? The conference will bring together law professors, historians, and social scientists to think about a comparative legal and social history of anglicization across the dispersed early modern English empire.

Speakers and commentators [here.]

The Symposium on Comparative Early Modern Legal History gathers to discuss the comparative legal history of the Atlantic world in the period c. 1492 to 1815. The one-day symposium brings together law professors, historians, and social scientists to explore a particular topic in comparative legal history, broadly understood. We traditionally meet at the Newberry Library in Chicago.  The symposium is overseen by Professor Richard Ross. Funding has been provided by the University of Illinois College of Law.

H.t: Legal Scholarship Blog

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