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Professor of History; Affiliate Professor, New York University School of Law
Ph.D. Johns Hopkins University, 1987
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Research Interests: Atlantic world, legal history, comparative imperial history.
Selected Works:
A Search for Sovereignty: Law and Geography in European Empires, 1400-1900. Cambridge University Press (forthcoming).
Law and Colonial Cultures: Legal Regimes in World History, 1400-1900. Cambridge University Press (2002). Winner of the 2003 World History Association Book Award; and the 2003 James Willard Hurst Prize.
Invisible Factories: The Informal Economy and Industrial Development in Spain. Albany: State University of New York Press (1990).
The Informal Economy: Studies in Advanced and Less Developed Countries, eds., Alejandro Portes, Manuel Castells, and Lauren Benton. Johns Hopkins University Press (1989).
“The British Atlantic in Global Context,” David Armitage and Michael Braddick, eds, The British Atlantic World, 1500-1800 (Palgrave MacMillan, 2009, second edition)
“From International Law to Imperial Constitutions: The Problem of Quasi-Sovereignty, 1870-1900,” Law and History Review 26.3 (2009): 595-620.
“Empires of Exception: History, Law, and the Problem of Imperial Sovereignty,” Quaderni di Relazioni Internazionali. December (2007): 54-67.
“Spatial Histories of Empire,” Itinerario 30, 3 (2006): 19-34.
“Constitutions and Empires,” Law & Social Inquiry, 31, 1 (2006): 177-198.
“Legal Spaces of Empire: Piracy and the Origins of Ocean Regionalism,” in Comparative Studies in Society and History, October Vol. 47, 4 (2005): 700-724.
"'The Laws of this Country’: Foreigners and the Legal Construction of Sovereignty in Uruguay, 1830-1875," Law and History Review. 19, 3 (2001): 479-512.
"Making Order Out of Trouble: Jurisdictional Politics in the Spanish Colonial Borderlands," Law and Social Inquiry. 26, 2 (2001): 373-401.
"Colonial Law and Cultural Difference: Jurisdictional Politics and the Formation of the Colonial State." Comparative Studies in Society and History. 41, 3 (2000): 563-588.
"The Legal Regime of the South Atlantic World: Jurisdictional Politics as Institutional Order." Journal of World History Vol. 11, 1 (2000): 27-56.
Research Interests:
My research is best described as focusing on comparative colonial history, with special emphasis on the role of law in the Atlantic world and in global European empires. My current research explores the social construction of European imperial sovereignty between 1400 and 1900, with particular attention to the relation between legal and geographic imagination. Trained as both an anthropologist and historian, I conducted fieldwork earlier in my career and wrote on the history of industrial labor and economic development in the Atlantic world.
Teaching Interests:
I teach graduate and undergraduate courses in Atlantic history, legal history, and the comparative history of empires.
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