World During the Decade After the Seven Years' War"

1763 and All That:
Temptations of Empire in the British World
During the Decade After the Seven Years' War

Call for papers for a conference to be held on February 25th and 26th,
2010, at the University of Texas at Austin, sponsored by the Department of
History¹s Institute for Historical Studies.

The focus of the conference is the British Empire during its "decade of
crisis" between the end of the Seven Years' War in 1763 and the passage of
the Tea Act ten years later. Over the course of this decade, Britons
drastically transformed the way they viewed themselves and their empire.
For the first time, British imperial policy extended to the governance of
the French Catholic inhabitants of Canada, the Native people of the
trans-Appalachian interior of North America, Africans in the new colony of
Senegambia, and the twenty million inhabitants of Bengal subject to the
authority of the East India Company. In Britain itself, the governance of
this vastly extended empire engendered an enormous amount of bitter debate
and anxious discussion in the halls of power as well as in the popular
press. Among historians of each of the different parts of the British
World, this decade has long been seen as one of crucial importance.
However, while invaluable work has been done to examine British and
indigenous relations and exchanges in specific colonial contexts, as well
to examine connections between the metropolis and specific colonial
regions, there has been as yet few attempts to interrogate the links across
and between the colonial regions and to set developments in particular
regions into the context of the transformation of the British Empire as a
whole. We aim to address this need by bringing scholars working on various
aspects of the British World into dialogue and debate over the causes and
character of the imperial transformation of the 1760s and early 1770s.

We invite submissions for individual papers on these themes. Please note
that the conference will be organized around the discussion of
pre-circulated papers. Accepted papers must be submitted for circulation
to participants no later than February 1, 2010. Each proposal should
include a brief précis of the paper topic and a clear indication of how the
paper will undertake to connect the specific research subject to larger
events and processes taking place across the British Empire. The
deadline for receiving proposals is September 1, 2009.

Paper proposals (as well a brief C.V.) should be submitted via e-mail to
the conference organizers, Robert Olwell and James Vaughn, at:
historyinstituteaustin.utexas.edu. Please send all queries to the same
address.

For more information on the Institute for Historical Studies at the
University of Texas at Austin, see:
http://www.utexas.edu/cola/insts/historicalstudies/