Making Empire: Law and the Colonization of America

4 credits · Undergraduate

This is an intro to the origins, development, and expansion of European settlement on the North American mainland. We will concentrate on the impulses - commercial, ideological, and racial - that drove European colonizing; the migrations (voluntary and forced) that sustained it; and the political and legal "technologies" that supplied it with definition, explanation, and institutional capacity. We will pay attention to themes of sovereignty, civic identity, race, and "manifest destiny" and will discuss how law provided both the language and technical capacity to transform territory into property, people into slaves, and the land's indigenous inhabitants into "others" who existed "outside" the civic order of the American Republic.