Foreign Law Without Borders in the Early Vast America. Spanish Legal Literature in 19th Century North America.

By studying some case studies, this article shows how the works of some Spanish jurists from the 17th and 18th centuries were used in the 19th century, both in Britain and also overseas in the British Atlantic (from Washington to California, passing through Florida), to solve judicial conflicts about land and exploitation. The reader will see to what extent some unexpected sources of law were intertwined into the daily practice of North American courts. Such entanglements are at the very heart of the comparative analysis of the field of legal history.

The Art of Coining Christians: Indians and Authority in the Iconography of British Atlantic Colonial Seals, 1606–1767

Between the founding of Jamestown in 1606 and the conclusion of the Seven Years’ War, images of Indigenous men and women rose and fell on the great seals of the British Atlantic colonies. At the peak of this process, “the Indian” was the most persistent seal icon save for that of the arms and image of the monarch himself. This essay traces the sigillary Indian's illustrious career, as evolving imperial structures and legal debates about the nature of empire positioned and repositioned him (and her) in relation to just claims of authority. Early depictions reflected the settler colony concerns of private charter companies, justifying claims to land, not the rule over people. Royal colonies, by contrast, imagined Indians as a form of vassal, essential aids in the procurement of raw materials from the land. By the mid-eighteenth century, however, the image of the Indian had yielded to classical motifs and representations of the land through maps, mirroring the increasing centrality of territoriality to British imperial thought. Taken together, seal images of Indians in the British Atlantic present the rise and fall of a visual paradox: depicting Indigenous people as symbols of authority over white settler colonies.