Held at the Newberry Library. The overall theme of this year’s workshops was “Connections, Convergences, and Disjuncture: The Joint Histories of England/Britain and English/British America, 1650-1750.”

Historians of seventeenth-century England increasingly view their subject within the context of “greater” British history and Europe, while early American historians, enamored of Atlantic history and borderlands approaches, treat early America as one of several European empires, giving as much attention to Spain and France as to England/Britain. This workshop considered the causes and consequences of these shifts, asked whether they are problematic or productive, and reflected on possible future lines of enquiry. Participants discussed problems of periodization; the nature of revolution; what “revolutionary principles” might amount to; the role of the political economy and community; political culture; and the historiographies of Britain and British America, with a particularly interesting discussion about what changed before and after 1688 and whether that date had significance on both sides of the Atlantic.

Directors

Mark Knights, University of Warwick
Trevor Burnard, University of Melbourne

Guest Speakers

Timothy Harris, Brown University
Mark Peterson, University of California, Berkeley

This is one of a series of collaborative programs between the University of Warwick Centre for the Study of the Renaissance and the Newberry Center for Renaissance Studies, funded by a generous grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

See the University of Warwick’s web page about this program. Learn more about the Center for Renaissance Studies’ Warwick-Newberry Collaborative Programs.