Beyond redrawing North American borders and establishing a permanent system of governance, the Quebec Act of 1774 fundamentally changed British notions of empire and authority. Although it is understood as a formative moment - indeed part of the "textbook narrative" - in several different national histories, the Quebec Act remains underexamined in all of them. The first sustained examination of the act in nearly thirty years, Entangling the Quebec Act brings together essays by historians from North America and Europe to explore this seminal event using a variety of historical approaches. Focusing on a singular occurrence that had major social, legal, revolutionary, and imperial repercussions, the book weaves together perspectives from spatially and conceptually distinct historical fields - legal and cultural, political and religious, and beyond. Collectively, the contributors resituate the Quebec Act in light of Atlantic, American, Canadian, Indigenous, and British Imperial historiographies. A transnational collaboration, Entangling the Quebec Act shows how the interconnectedness of national histories is visible at a single crossing point, illustrating the importance of intertwining methodologies to bring these connections into focus.

In Louis XIV’s New France, colonial authorities attempted to reproduce French regal authority in novel ways, often by performing typical metropolitan political rituals. When these practices were transposed into the St Lawrence Valley settlements, where a small French population lived alongside a substantial Indigenous presence, they took on new meanings. The colony of Canada replicated many features of the developing French absolutist state. Yet while the king likely knew more about his colony than he did about most parts of metropolitan France, this transatlantic setting imposed new constraints on absolutist authority, from the challenges of distance to an Indigenous population that largely lived outside European norms. Political Culture in Louis XIV’s Canada examines royal power as it was represented in ritual (ceremonial entrances, Te Deums, processions), in rhetoric (political disputes over cabals and factions), and in objects (portraits, royal busts, currency, buildings, maps, and censuses). Colin Coates describes the successes and failures the French authorities experienced in exporting their political practices. He reveals how those authorities’ understandings of Indigenous political culture shaped ideas of the proper relation between rulers and the ruled. This book traces the establishment of a colonial political culture that continued to shape the lives of the French in Canada long after the Sun King’s death in 1715.

A compelling reexamination of how Britain used law to shape its empire For many years, Britain tried to impose its own laws on the peoples it conquered, and English common law usually followed the Union Jack. But the common law became less common after Britain emerged from the Seven Years’ War (1754–63) as the world’s most powerful empire. At that point, imperial policymakers adopted a strategy of legal pluralism: some colonies remained under English law, while others, including parts of India and former French territories in North America, retained much of their previous legal regimes. As legal historian Christian R. Burset argues, determining how much English law a colony received depended on what kind of colony Britain wanted to create. Policymakers thought English law could turn any territory into an anglicized, commercial colony; legal pluralism, in contrast, would ensure a colony’s economic and political subordination. Britain’s turn to legal pluralism thus reflected the victory of a new vision of empire—authoritarian, extractive, and tolerant—over more assimilationist and egalitarian alternatives. Among other implications, this helps explain American colonists’ reverence for the common law: it expressed and preserved their equal status in the empire. This book, the first empire-wide overview of law as an instrument of policy in the eighteenth-century British Empire, offers an imaginative rethinking of the relationship between tolerance and empire.

How modern data-driven government originated in the creation and use of administrative archives in the British Empire Over the span of two hundred years, Great Britain established, governed, lost, and reconstructed an empire that embraced three continents and two oceanic worlds. The British ruled this empire by correlating incoming information about the conduct of subjects and aliens in imperial spaces with norms of good governance developed in London. Officials derived these norms by studying the histories of government contained in the official records of both the state and corporations and located in repositories known as archives. As the empire expanded in both the Americas and India, however, this system of political knowledge came to be regarded as inadequate in governing the non-English people who inhabited the lands over which the British asserted sovereignty. This posed a key problem for imperial officials: What kind of knowledge was required to govern an empire populated by a growing number of culturally different people? Using files, pens, and paper, the British defined the information order of the modern state as they debated answers to this question. In tracing the rise and deployment of archives in early modern British imperial rule, Asheesh Kapur Siddique uncovers the origins of our data-driven present.

"This handbook contains 38 essays that provide up-to-date scholarship on all aspects of the globally important Seven Years' War (1756-1763). The volume carefully examines the three major areas of conflict in the war-Europe, South Asia, and the Americas-treating each theater as distinct from each other but often linked in ways that helped create a new geopolitics from the 1760s onward. Chapters trace the causes of the war in the interior of America; outline the triumphs of Britain and Prussia in fierce fighting across Europe; and explain how the British under the East India Company came to play an important role in South Asian politics and commerce. The handbook pays due attention to military conflict but does much more than this. It investigates social, cultural, and intellectual developments in a crucial period of reorientation during the mid-eighteenth century. The handbook is notably diverse in its authorship, with leading scholars on the Seven Years' War from Europe and South Asia as well as Britain and North America, providing perspectives from many areas outside an Anglo-American frame. It treats the Seven Years' War as a world-transformative event: important not only in its own right-in shaping commerce, politics, science, art, demography, religion, and gender during the conflict-but also central to the evolving history of South Asia, Europe, and the Americas in the second half of the eighteenth century"--

This collection brings together an international group of scholars in order to provide new insights into the diversity of imperial legalities. Across empires, legalities were produced not just – or even – through the imperial imposition of laws and legal forms, but through local processes of negotiation and contestation. Far from the metropoles, local actors found ways to creatively navigate and subvert imperial frameworks and laws and to create space in which to shape new legalities, responsive to local circumstance and need. Covering topics as diverse as smuggling in eighteenth century Jersey, the criminalisation of female market women in World War II-era southern Nigeria, and whiteness and race in ‘sexual perversion’ cases in twentieth-century Malaya, the collection elaborates new legal histories of empire. Drawing from Britain, Ireland, Australia, Canada, the USA, India, Sri Lanka, Africa and Malaysia, the collection brings together chapters that examine the stories of the peoples of empires and shows how they constituted, experienced, navigated and subverted the legal complexities of living under empire. This book will be of interest to scholars and researchers in law and history, but also to those with relevant interests in post-colonial and cultural studies, as well as in criminology and sociology.

Speaking at the Congress of African People in September 1970, Amiri Baraka said, “In Newark, when we greet each other on the streets, we say, ‘what time is it?’ We always say, ‘It’s nation time!’ Nationalism is about land and nation, a way of life trying to free itself.” National identity and nationhood are too often easily dismissed as retrograde populism or racist exclusion. Instead, they need to be understood as a key part of a vision of globalization that holds the imperatives of diversity and solidarity in a delicate balance. Jerry White offers a defence of the nation based on the assumption that struggles for national identity have often unfolded in ways that should be familiar to those who defend the political standpoint of the progressive left. Having evolved into something that a wide variety of actors have sought to defend, nations can also serve as a defence against the homogenizing forces of globalization and as havens of diversity in opposition to more singularly minded forms of affiliation. It’s Nation Time is structured as a series of specific case studies that speak to theories of nation and their historical and cultural manifestations. It includes examples as varied as Black nationalism, Simone Weil’s hopes for a postwar France, the first independence period of Georgia, the Bollywood cinema of Nehru-era India, and small or stateless nations such as New Zealand, Quebec, Ireland, Catalonia, the Métis, the Mohawk, and the Inuit to argue that nationalism is a social form that has much potential and life in it. Broadly internationalist but also deeply insightful about the particular cultures and politics of small nations, It’s Nation Time defends an idea of nation, and a form of nationalism that are rooted in the potential for diversity, flexibility, and progressive politics.