Lecture | Research Seminar Medieval and Early Modern History
Controlling Cosmopolitans: Mobility, Property, and Interpolity Law in the Dutch Atlantic
- Date
- Friday 17 April 2026
- Time
- Serie
- Research Seminars Medieval and Early Modern History academic year 2025 - 2026
- Address
-
Johan Huizinga
Doelensteeg 16
2311 VL Leiden - Room
- Conference room (2.60)
Abstract
This project, currently an advanced book manuscript, explores the politics of mobility and subjecthood in the seventeenth-century Dutch Atlantic empire. Using legal archives to trace everyday colonial contestations over the movements of migrants, merchants, and fugitives, I examine the vernacular legal and political ideas that structured inter-imperial politics in the Atlantic world. I argue that colonists drew on shared ideas about property and subjecthood to construct an inter-imperial legal regime that facilitated the mobility of colonial elites and capital while constricting the movements of servants, debtors, and enslaved people. This talk will survey the book’s main interventions and discuss a number of case studies drawn from New Netherland and Suriname.
Research Seminars Medieval and Early Modern History
The seminars are informal and intended to foster discussion. There are drinks afterwards. Everyone is welcome to join.
If you would like to join a session, and/or receive invitations for the upcoming sessions, you can send an e-mail to: ngassistent@hum.leidenuniv.nl. Further information can be obtained from the organizers Shiru Lim, Judith Pollmann, Jeroen Duindam and Philippe Buc.