The Legal Cartography of Colonization, the Legal Polyphony of Settlement: English Intrusions on the American Mainland in the Seventeenth Century

Abstract

This essay investigates the first century of English colonization of the North American mainland, concentrating on the charters and letters patent that proponents of western planning secured over the course of the century. The elaborated legalities of chartering should be understood as a technology of planning and design. Charters allowed projectors both to justify their pursuit of particular territorial claims and to establish, with some precision, the conceptions of the appropriate, familiar, desired order of things and people that would be imposed onto uncharted social and physical circumstance.The structures of authoritative sociolegal order planned by projectors encountered others implicit in the migrations of actual settlers. Investigating settlers' disagreement with and departure from projectors' designs, the essay discards common explanations-that these were inevitable corrections brought about by the intrusion of local environmental realities on English projectors' fantasies, or the realization of an implicit evolutionary logic of political development, or of legal reception. It argues that disagreements were more often the result of a collision of distinct English legal cultures brought, by migration, into an unavoidable proximity.The essay counterposes the paradigm of "colonization" to both "common law reception" and "bottom-up localism" analyses of the formation of Christopher Tomlins is a senior research fellow at the American Bar Foundation in Chicago (clt@ahfn.org).

Theorizing the US Racial State: Sociology Since Racial Formation

“…From this theoretical vantage point, we note that nearly all of the studies in the previous section assume that antiracism demands full inclusion by and into the US state. But the assumption breaks down once we recognize the ongoing history of overland and overseas colonialism without which there is literally no US state: the original thirteen colonies broke away from Great Britain “in large part, in order to free themselves from imperial constraints that restrained their own colonizing (or to use the preferred anodyne phrase, their own ‘westward movement’)” (Tomlins :365), and every moment of territorial expansion has been one of further colonization. To assume that the freedom struggles and dreams of colonized peoples, like Native Americans, Native Hawaiians, and Puerto Ricans, have centered on full inclusion or assimilation into the US state would be a grave error – but an easy one, given that sociology of the US state is embarrassingly impoverished in dealing with race and colonialism .…”

The Ends of Innocence: Age as a Mode of Inquiry in Sociolegal Studies

“…Regional analysis could also be applied to Brewer's study. For instance, Christopher Tomlins (2001) has recently placed great emphasis on legal regionalism in England to understanding the discourse of servitude. Pastoral areas, he finds, were quite different from manorial ones.…”

“…As Christopher Tomlins has written, law works as an authorizing discourse, legitimating some social relations and proscribing others. It creates the “facts of life” (Tomlins 1993, 16; see also Tomlins, 1995, 2001). One of those facts of life that is particularly important for children and youth is what Tomlins calls “disciplinary authority”; such power is “built on difference” and “it dominates by declaring legitimate subordinations” (Tomlins 1995, 77).…”

Cultivating and Challenging the Common: Lockean Property, Indigenous Traditionalisms, and the Problem of Exclusion

“…Other theorists, such as Pramod Kumar Mishra, have refined Tully's account by placing greater emphasis upon the contrapuntal dynamics of Locke's claim to modernity via colonialism (Mishra, 2002, 224-226). Historians, meanwhile, have looked beyond the agriculturalist argument to emphasize the many types of colonial claims (Tomlins, 2001;Fitzmaurice, 2003) and practices in early Atlantic settlement (Kupperman, 1980;White, 1991;Calloway, 1999). Nonetheless, Tully's account highlights aspects of Locke's argument that were later propounded either in part or in whole by many who sought to legitimize possession of the colonies.…”