April 26, 2008
This one-day Workshop examined the practices and theories of people’s engagement with the land: the forms and consequences of land distribution in conquered territories; the different meanings of possession, tenancy, and usufruct; the conflicts among and transformations in European concepts and practices of land management in the Americas; the passion of individual Europeans for free ownership of land in the Americas; and the role of available land overseas in Britain's "Great Divergence."
Introduction
Bernard Bailyn, Harvard University
Morning Session
Allan Greer, University of Toronto
"Feudal North America"
Stuart Banner, University of California, Los Angeles
"Manhattan for $24: Interpreting Indian Land Transactions of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries"
Rebecca Horn, University of Utah
"A Patchwork in the Countryside: Nahua and Spanish Land Tenure Practices in Central New Spain"
Afternoon Session
Claire Priest, Northwestern University
"Understanding the End of Entail: Information, Institutions, and Slavery in the American Revolutionary Period"
Lauri Tähtinen, University of Cambridge
"Views of Land among the Jesuits and Amerindians in Sixteenth-Century Brazil"
Faren Siminoff, Nassau Community College
"Creating Atlantic America: Transforming Land to Property in the Seventeenth-Century Southern New England Basin"