Conference: States, local jurisdictions and borderlands in Europe and the Americas

Tuesday 1 & Wednesday 2 June, 10:00-18:45

‘States, local jurisdictions and borderlands in Europe and the Americas, c.1713-1914’ is an international conference organised by Luis Gabriel Galán-Guerrero and Shyam Sridar (University of Oxford) with the support of Past & Present and the Latin American Centre, University of Oxford.

Throughout the 18th and 19th centuries, populations and settlers in Europe and the Americas set up a wide range of public offices, administrative bodies and corporations that asserted their own jurisdictions within monarchies and republics. In recent years, more nuanced interpretations on the process of state formation have highlighted the process of negotiation within republics and ‘composite monarchies’, and acknowledged the importance of corporations, legal pluralism, overlapping jurisdictions, local elites and borderlands in the functioning of the state.

This conference extends these existing lines of enquiry into the nature of states and aims to establish connections and comparisons on the processes of state-building on both sides of the Atlantic in the 18th and 19th centuries. It attempts to answer the following questions:

  • How did administrative bodies negotiate, cooperate and conflict with local powers and jurisdictions in both Europe and the Americas?
  • How and why did these interactions change from the 18th to the 19th centuries?
  • What can the study of these relationships between public officers, corporations and different social groups in borderlands tell us about the nature of states in this period?

Make sure you do not miss the following talks!

Keynote address – 1 June, 17:00 (BST)
Professor Alan Knight (University of Oxford)
‘Colony, Revolution, Nation: The Iberian-American Sequence, c. 1780-1914’

Concluding remarks – 2 June, 17:30 (BST)
Professor Joanna Innes (University of Oxford)

For more information, the complete programme, and to register for the event, please visit:
www.eventbrite.co.nz/e/states-local-jurisdictions-and-borderlands-in-europe-and-the-americas-tickets-149481752947