Biannual meeting of the European Early American Studies Association

London, 14-16 December 2018

The Making and Unmaking of Identities and Connections in Early America and the Atlantic World, 1650-1850

The 7th biannual meeting of the European Early American Studies Association convenes in London 14-16 December 2018 at King’s College London and Queen Mary University of London. The conference theme for EEASA 2018 is “The making and unmaking of identities and connections in early America and the Atlantic World, 1650-1850.”

Issues of identities and connections were as pertinent to the inhabitants of early America and the Atlantic World as they remain today. Up until the mid-nineteenth century, the geopolitics of the Americas were in constant flux. European and indigenous empires emerged, competed, expanded, contracted and collapsed. New nations and unions were formed and reformed. Identities and loyalties were transitory, political and cultural borders permeable. Weak centers fostered local autonomy and a politics of negotiation interspersed with violence governed relations between neighbours and between peripheries and metropoles alike. New markets appeared, expanded, and disappeared. In this constantly changing world of risks and opportunities individuals had to charter an uncertain course in their business, family, and civic life, often responding to forces and events beyond their control.

The program committee invites scholars to reflect upon the formation, maintenance, and separation of identities and connections in and between business ventures, families, intellectual networks, churches, local communities and states operating in an environment of geopolitical fluidity. We would in particular like to see papers that link the personal to the political, the individual to the citizen, the local to the metropole, the new world to the old, and private ventures to public aspirations

Registration is now open

A pdf of the programme below is available for download here – which includes maps of the venues.