Friday, June 2
8:30 - 9:00 AM
Breakfast and check-in
9:00 - 9:15 AM
Program Introduction
Alan Karras & Shane Carter
9:15 AM - 12:15 PM
Introduction to Legal Regimes
Richard Buxbaum
12:15 - 1:00 PM
Lunch
1:00 - 4:00 PM
Commercial Relations in an Entangled Greater Caribbean World: Eighteenth-century Transformations
Ernesto Bassi
Often characterized as a crossroads of empire, the Caribbean became transimperial from the first non-Spanish Europeans touched ground on one of its islands. Though deemed illegal by European authorities, commercial exchanges between rival European subjects were a fundamental lifeline for Caribbean inhabitants during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The eighteenth century witnessed a series of legal transformations that resulted in an intensification of commercial exchanges among European rivals in the Caribbean, redefining the meaning of contraband as European powers moved to increasingly favoring a more open trade. Using examples of specific lines of trade (e.g. clothing, enslaved Africans, and brazilwood) I will show some of the most fundamental transformation in commercial legislation that enabled the Greater Caribbean to emerge as one of the most dynamic global zones of transimperial trade.
Saturday, June 3
8:30 - 9:15 AM
Breakfast and check-in
9:15 AM - 12:15 PM
Legal networks of empire and spectrums of forced migration
Kerry Ward
How were large scale global patterns of trans-oceanic forced migration created and sustained in the era of European global empires from the sixteenth through the twentieth centuries? These population flows were based on creating legal categories of people that determined their status in the laws governing colonial regimes. Colonial formation mostly involved the recognition and incorporation of indigenous social, religious, ethnic, and legal identities and hierarchies. These could be radically altered in the process of migration as individuals became legally categorized as "colonist", "soldier", "slave", "convict", "contract laborer", or "exile". Migration involved a spectrum from voluntary to involuntary. Forced migration involved not only slavery but penal transportation and political exile. The end of legal slavery and slave trading fostered other forms of migration which blurred the boundaries between free and forced. Our world is still shaped by these historical population movements that resonate in legal claims for recognition, and in some cases, reparations and rights to repatriation.
Arab Jews, Arab States, and the Question of Reparations
Emily Gottreich
This talk will zoom in on a particularly complicated case of reparations: that of Middle Eastern and North African Jews who emigrated from their countries of origin en masse in the mid-20th century, as empires gave way to nation states. What happened to the assets Jews were forced to leave behind in places like Egypt, Libya, Iraq, and Algeria, as new governments took power that were either unwilling or unable to protect their minority populations? Who today has the right to speak for Arab Jews and claim their losses? We will consider these questions against the backdrop of an even bigger issue: who "counts" as a refugee in the ongoing discursive war between Israelis and Palestinians?
12:15 - 1:00 PM
Lunch
1:00 - 4:00 PM
The Afterlives of Empire: Indigeneity, Conservation, and Capitalism in the Philippines
Noah Theriault
After the fall of the first Marcos regime in 1986, the Philippines became the first country in Asia to codify indigenous rights. This hard-fought reform aimed to protect the ancestral lands of the archipelago’s remaining indigenous groups. Since then, however, these groups have become increasingly embroiled in resource politics, and many have found that claiming their rights does as much to facilitate their dispossession as to prevent it. In this seminar, we will examine how these developments have unfolded on Palawan, an island in the far southwestern Philippines. With examples drawn from ethnographic research, we will see how bureaucrats, investors, and conservationists impose their own designs on indigenous rights as they vie for land, labor, and legitimacy. But we will also see how their designs collide with the dreams–both figurative and literal–of indigenous persons themselves. Rather than an all-or-nothing force of domination or resistance, the recognition of Indigenous rights turns out to be a paradox – at once a tool of neocolonial rule and a catalyst for everyday encounters that challenge it.
