Conquest and the ‘Right to Hold’: Territorial Sovereignty and the American Revolution

Project Description

Historians hold these truths to be self-evident: that the ideological origins of the American Revolution lie in arguments about political rights, which were conducted exclusively within English and European frameworks of political ideas. This project takes a different approach, and situates conflict over land at the centre of a contest between settlers, Indians, colonial governors and the Crown. Offering the first sustained analysis of treaties and laws that structured the relationship between settlers and Indians, it recovers a long history of ‘conquest’ that Thomas Jefferson defended as the basis of ‘the right to hold’ and rule territory.