Join us Tuesday, July 25, from 4-5 p.m. ET for a hybrid Fellow’s Forum with S. Max Edelson, Professor of History at the University of Virginia.
Attend in person: Berkeley Conference Room, the Jefferson Library
Preregistration is not required to attend. Zoom link will become active July 25th.
Join via ZOOM »
About the Presentation
King George III’s Royal Proclamation of October 7, 1763 asserted royal control over land ceded to Britain at the Treaty of Paris that concluded the Seven Years’ War. Famously, it halted land grants in Indigenous territories in a bid to pacify a fractious colonial frontier with Native America. Colonists resented this limitation to land speculation and settlement, even though the Crown’s authority to regulate conquered lands seemed settled in western legal thought. Jefferson joined other revolutionary critics of new land policies in British America and fashioned a new legal understanding of colonial land rights as “allodial” or free from feudal obligations to a distant sovereign. He sharpened these ideas in the Summary View of the Rights of British America (1774) and the Declaration of Independence (1776). This talk shows how these key founding documents of the Revolutionary era drew on imperial debates about land, settlement, and the reform of empire.
About Professor Edelson
S. Max Edelson is Professor of History at the University of Virginia. He studies the historical geography of colonization in colonial North America and the Caribbean. He is the author of Plantation Enterprise in Colonial South Carolina (Harvard, 2006) and The New Map of Empire: How Britain Imagined America Before Independence (Harvard, 2017). His current research examines geography and empire in Restoration America. Edelson and Professor Christa Dierksheide direct the UVa Early American Seminar, an ongoing research seminar jointly sponsored by the Corcoran Department of History, the Jefferson Scholars Foundation, and the International Center for Jefferson Studies.