The Department of History, University of Maryland, College Park, and the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture will jointly sponsor a conference entitled "The 'Political Arithmetick' of Empires in the Early Modern Atlantic World, 1500-1807," to be held March 17–18, 2012, at the University of Maryland, College Park. The call for papers indicates areas of interest for economic historians:
The full call for papers is available on the Institute website; the deadline for submissions is July 31, 2011.This conference takes its title from the celebrated pamphlet of Sir William Petty published in 1690. The organizers are particularly eager to receive submissions from scholars working on subjects that Petty and his contemporaries believed formed the basis of the new concept of “political economy,” especially as these related to the Americas from the sixteenth century through the eighteenth.
Petty’s pamphlet was largely devoted to the question of how best to construct an English empire within which trade, people, and nation would flourish. His calculations involved not only economic factors but also issues of authority, hierarchy, and justice. The purpose of this conference is to examine the many components, economic as well as cultural, that cohered and/or fractured empires in the early modern Atlantic world between 1500 and 1807.
