England Bound: The Problem of Reading American Legal History from the Top Down

Abstract:     
If King George III could return from the grave and write a history of America, it would read like Freedom Bound: Law, Labor, and Civic Identity in Colonizing English America, 1580-1865. Deeply rooted in English soil, Christopher Tomlins’s long awaited survey challenges the past “half century” of American historiography, replacing its “ground up” emphasis on “the quotidien social behavior” of “settler populations” with a rich, beautifully written exposition of English imperial theorists – in essence the King’s men (p. 185).

Number of Pages in PDF File: 5

Keywords: Tomlins, colonial, slavery, labor, history

working papers series