Invitation to the forthcoming International Symposium Empires in Early American History organized by the McNeil Center for Early American Studies and the Lawrence Henry Gipson Institute in Philadelphia (April 2027).
This conference will bring together scholars to discuss: What, if anything, was distinctive about early modern American empires? In what ways have new emphases of empire’s significance altered older imperial frameworks? What exactly is new and imperial about neo-imperial historiography, and how should we understand the relationship between imperial approaches and the body of work most often described as Atlantic?
My contribution is titled “Empire as Contested Practice: Thomas Jefferson’s and José de Gálvez’s Vision on Imperial Expansion,” and interrogates the frameworks of early modern empires in North America through a comparative analysis of the ideas, pursuits, and strategies of two key imperial architects: José de Gálvez y Gallardo (1720-1787), the Spanish royal Visitador General in New Spain, and later Minister of the Indies in Madrid, and Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826), the Virginian statesman and Founding Father.
