KEYNOTE ADDRESS
Professor Jack P. Greene
Johns Hopkins University
​
​
​
Jack P. Greene is Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the Humanities, Emeritus, Johns Hopkins University, where he presided over the creation of the Program in Atlantic History and Culture in the late 1960s and early 1970s and taught for forty years. Since 2000, he has also been Adjunct Professor of History at Brown University. He has also taught at Michigan State University, Western Reserve University, the University of Michigan, and the University of California, Irvine. He has also a visiting professor at the College of William and Mary, Oxford University, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, University of Richmond, and the Freie Universitat of Berlin. Over the past seven decades, he has published widely on the political, constitutional, social, and intellectual history of colonial British America and the early modern British Empire. His most recent books are Atlantic History: A Critical Appraisal, 2008 (with Philip D. Morgan); Exclusionary Empire: English Liberty Overseas, 1600-1900, 2010; Constitutional Origins of the American Revolution, 2010; Evaluating Empire and Confronting Colonialism in Eighteenth-Century Britain, 2013; Creating the British Atlantic: Essays on Transplantation, Adaptation, and Continuity, 2013; Settler Jamaica: A Social Portrait of the 1750s, 2016; and Exploring the Bounds of Liberty: Political Writings of Colonial British America from the Glorious Revolution to the American Revolution, 2019 (with Craig B. Yirush). His edition of James Knight’s, previously unpublished History of Jamaica, written between 1737 and 1746, will be published with Greene’s introduction in two volumes in 2019. He is now completing a comparative study of the changing corporate identity during the two centuries beginning in 1600 in Virginia, Barbados, Jamaica, and South Carolina—in London widely regarded by the era of the American Revolution as Britain’s economically most successful long distance settler colonies.
​
​
“The Ground upon which all Government stands . . . is the consent of the people”: Some Reflections on Voice and Authority in the Construction and Operation of Long-Distance Empires and Their Successor States in the Americas
Drawing upon the insights of late-twentieth-century state formation literature, my own earlier efforts to apply those insights to the functioning of long-distance and transoceanic empires in the Americas, theoretical work by the American economist Albert O. Hirschorn on the role of voice in large organizations, the late-seventeenth-century ruminations of the English political analyst Sir William Temple on the relationship between authority, opinion, and custom in early modern European governance, and recent literature on petitioning in late medieval England, this paper uses the English example to explore the role of consent as it functioned in the construction and operation of long-distance empires and their successor states in America from the late fifteenth through the early nineteenth century, more specifically examining the relationship between consent and authority in the emergence of settler constitutionalism and intra-imperial relations. The key words in my long title are thus consent, people, voice, authority, construction, operation, long-distance, and successor, all of which I will attempt to explicate.
​
​
​
​
KEYNOTE ADDRESS
Professor Simona Cerutti
Ecole des Hautes Etudes
en Sciences Sociales
​
​
​
Simona Cerutti is currently Directrice d’Etudes à l’Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris. She was co-director (together with Carlo Ginzburg and Giovanni Levi) of the book series Microstorie(Einaudi, 1985-1990). In 1989 she became co-director of the journal Quaderni Storici, and in 2015 she became a member of the Research Community (WOG) Urban Agency at University of Antwerp, coordinated by Bert De Munck.
Her main interests concern social classifications and hierarchies in early modern societies, with particular attention to the culture of law in the language and in the categories of social actors. The social belonging of places and the claims of rights to local resources are at the heart of her most recent works. She is responsible for an international research group (Citoyenneté et propriété au nord et au sud de la Méditerranée, XVIe-XIXe siècles: 2016-2020), comprised of students engaged in a comparative project on “citizenship” both in northern and the southern regions of the Mediterranean. She is developing a reflection on the future of social history and the developments of micro-historical methods. Currently she is writing a book on petitions and communication with authorities in early modern Italian societies.
Her publications include: La ville et les métiers, Naissance d'un langage corporatif (EHESS, 1990); Giustizia sommaria. Pratiche e ideali di giustizia in una società di Ancien Régime (Feltrinelli, 2003); Etrangers. Etude d’une condition d’incertitude dans une société d’Ancien Régime(Bayard, 2012); “Who is below? E. P. Thompson, historien des sociétés modernes: une relecture” (2015); “Sources and Contextualizations: Comparing Eighteenth-Century North African and Western European Institutions” (with I. Grangaud, 2017).
Petitions and debts /credit relationships (Savoyard State, XVIIIth Century)
​
An 18th century German proverb highlights a specific feature of private petitions on which the various national historiographies often agree: "anyone can freely write a petition, just as they can freely drink a glass of water." According to this view, writing a petition in early modern societies was a “normal” act that anyone could perform, whatever their social status or condition. At the same time, private petitions have often been analyzed as acts of deference and acknowledgement of the established order that appealed to the sovereign’s mercy and to his benevolent attitude towards his subjects.
Through my research, based on a corpus of around 2000 private petitions which were addressed to the Chancellery of the Savoyard state in the first half of the 18th century, I would like to question these assumptions. This research aims to remove the petition from the anthropological and timeless framework of patron- client relations and dependence, and to inscribe it instead in the political domain of jurisdiction of the lord over "his" people. That is to say, in a relationship of domination which, in the societies in question, is characterized by a reciprocal (though asymmetrical) dependence of the parties. I will aim to analyze the terms of that mutual dependence that this framework of jurisdiction implies. The case of petitions concerning the debt and credit relationships will serve as the arena for this reflection.
​
​
​
​
​
