Institutional Spaces: Land Companies and Jurisdictional Politics in the Eighteenth-Century British Empire

Philip Stern, Duke University

Part of a larger book project on the role of corporations and companies in structuring the expansion of the British empire from the sixteenth to the twentieth centuries, this paper examines the origins, efflorescence, and legacy of the use of land companies to order legal and political space in the eighteenth-century British Empire.  Tracing this history from seventeenth century urban and commercial expansion and into the nineteenth century resurgence of colonial companies, the paper itself focuses on the case study of the late eighteenth-century Susquehanna Company, and the attempts of a group of Connecticut investors and projectors to plant a colony within territory also claimed by Pennsylvania. Sitting at the intersection of ambiguous legal geographies and a diversity of colonial bodies ranging from the Crown, to colonies, to companies, this paper—as the manuscript from which it is drawn and modified— suggests that a narrative that emphasizes legal and institutional forms offers as story of the British Empire that bridges both the divides between early modern and modern and the Atlantic and Asia-Pacific empires that often frame longue durée histories of that empire. Tracing the evolution of competing ideological and institutional models for empire— in this case, the corporation — also sheds light on the necessarily hybrid and pluralistic form that empire took, as well as the fragmented nature of intra-colonial conflicts and debates that ultimately, if perhaps problematically, came to be seen as a sort of coherent “British Empire.”

 

Digital History, Computational Science, and International Affairs

Matthew Connelly, Columbia University,

Whether officials can be trusted to protect national security information and at the same time preserve democratic accountability has become a matter of great public controversy. The declassification of millions of electronic records has made it possible to analyze this question with rigor and precision. Using machine-learning methods, we can mine databases of declassified documents to understand the scope and nature of official secrecy. This research confirms that there are longstanding problems of both overclassification and underclassification, which puts recent controversies in a new light. The most egregious scandal about secrecy is not whether this or that official mismanaged classified information, but that the government spends $17 billion a year protecting state secrets without even asking whether officials can even agree on what should be protected.

 

Privatization, Oil, and the Collapse of Communism

Fritz Bartel, Yale University

Thatcherism in Britain and martial law in Poland are not often thought of as crises of the same kind, but they were in fact two attempts to impose economic discipline on defiant domestic populations.  This paper, the fourth chapter of a larger book project on the economic causes of the end of the Cold War, examines the two crises in comparative perspective to discover why democratic capitalism proved more adept at imposing economic discipline than state socialism.  The imposition of discipline was the key factor in determining the survival of political regimes and governing ideologies in both East and West after the oil crisis of 1973-74.  The energy and financial markets that developed after the oil crisis forced governments on both sides of the Iron Curtain to impose economic and social restraint on their own societies.  Governments that could successfully impose discipline without inviting a destabilizing social backlash survived; those that could not, collapsed.  Thus, this chapter presents a key component of the book’s larger argument: the competition between democratic capitalist and state socialist states began as a race to expand the social contracts that prevailed in their societies, but it ended as a competition to discipline their respective social contracts.  The Cold War, in other words, began as a race to make promises, but it ended as a race to break promises.

American Evangelical Christians and the Apartheid Regime

Melani McAlister, George Washington University

This essay examines the role of transnational networks in shaping the conversation about apartheid among evangelicals in the US and South Africa in the 1980s. Drawing on the work of Bruno Latour, it explores how evangelicals negotiating their understandings of community, the state, race, and social justice.