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This letter comes at a fractious time in British academia. Readers of previous columns will be aware that during the spring of 2004 Britain’s universities and their academic staff were in conflict over issues relating to pay. An interim agreement was reached which forestalled an all-out strike and temporarily resolved some of the outstanding issues, but the Association of University Teachers (AUT), the union of academic staff, is again at loggerheads with employers. The AUT charges that universities have gone back on an agreement which mandated that at least one-third of the substantial funding that the government had granted to the university sector in 2005 would be used to increase staff salaries and to allow academic pay to begin to recuperate from its stagnation throughout the 1980s and 1990s. The universities, for their part, claim that the introduction in autumn 2006 of drastically increased tuition fees (most universities will charge £3000, or about $5000, per year) has necessitated enormous expenditure on financial aid packages for undergraduates, costs which they say will leave the universities unable to meet the union’s pay claims. As of this writing, both sides are accusing one another of intransigence and dishonesty, with academics contemplating withholding undergraduates’ grades until a settlement is reached. Meanwhile, the run-up to the Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) is producing its usual share of individual and communal anxiety, with each department in every university attempting to increase its research profile and thus gain a higher rating, and a larger sum of research funding, from the Higher Education Funding Council of England (HEFCE). So, on the whole, the atmosphere around many UK universities has been rather anxious of late, and many of us, myself very much included, were happy that we retained the traditional three-week Easter holiday, allowing us to absent ourselves from our workplaces in favor of visiting archives, working from home, or taking advantage of the burgeoning number of budget airlines and escaping to Paris or Prague, Barcelona or Brussels for a short break.

These concerns notwithstanding, as in previous years, British scholarship on the history and culture of early America has flourished in many forms and in numerous venues. Our flagship organization, the British Group for Early American History (BGEAH), held its annual conference this September at Clare College, Cambridge, and hosted scholars from the UK, the U.S., Canada, Ireland, France, and Australia. In addition to twenty-seven papers, attendees were treated to a keynote speech by Jack Greene, just retired from Johns Hopkins, on “Reformulating Englishness: Cultural Adaptation and Provinciality in the Constitution of Corporate Identity in Colonial British America, 1600–1800.” 2006’s conference (chaired by Peter Thompson) will be held September 8–10 at St Anne’s College, Oxford, and will focus on the subject of “Anniversaries and Telelologies: Cultural Themes in Early American History.” Thanks to the efforts of Ben Marsh of Stirling University, BGEAH now has its own Web Site: www.britishearlyamerica.stir.ac.uk, which keeps early Americanists apprised of conferences, publishing opportunities, and other research opportunities.

Although the BGEAH conference is the only annual meeting specifically focused on the history and culture of colonial America, early Americanists registered their presence in many other British academic venues. April’s annual conference of the British Association of American Studies (BAAS), also held at Cambridge and commemorating the organization’s fiftieth anniversary, included panels on “Nature and Politics in Early Transatlantic Texts,” “Race and the South, 1730–1870,” “The Early American Republic: Recent Scholarship,” “Rituals and Order: Communities, Violence, and Authority in the Early Americas,” “Late Eighteenth-Century Letters,” “Faith and Form,” and “Conflict and Society in the Late Eighteenth Century.” Such a strong showing by early Americanists is perhaps not surprising, as BAAS’s chair is Simon Newman (Glasgow), who is currently employing a British Academy Research Readership in order to complete a project on “The Transformation of Working Life and Culture in the British Atlantic World, 1600–1800.” Simon also presented an intriguingly titled paper, “American Foreign Policy through the Bottom of a Wine Glass: Toasts, American Newspapers, and Popular Politics in the Age of George Washington,” at a December seminar at the British Library. The seminar heralded the BL’s recent acquisition of the Readex Archive of Americana; see www.bl.uk/ecclescentre for further information about this new resource.

Several other UK conferences centered on early America and the Atlantic world. In September, the Colston Research Society of the University of Bristol sponsored the inaugural conference of the Bristol Institute for Research on the Humanities and Arts (BIRTHA), on the subject of “Pioneers, Adventurers, and the Creation of the Atlantic World.” The program featured nineteen presenters from the UK, including Bristolians Matthew Brown, Dan Hicks, Mark Horton, and Evan Jones, Celeste-Marie Bernier (Nottingham), Michael Braddick (Sheffield), Barry Cunliffe (Oxford), Anthony McFarlane (Warwick), William O’Reilly (Cambridge), James Symmonds (Sheffield), Nuala Zahedieh (Edinburgh), and myself, as well as colleagues from the U.S., Canada, Cuba, and Portugal. The conference also included a public lecture from Felipe Fernandez Armesto (Queen Mary) on slave languages of the Atlantic world, presented in the Gothic Revival splendor of the Great Hall of the University’s famous Wills Tower. In December, London’s Birkbeck College hosted a conference on “New Worlds Reflected: Representations of Utopia, the New World, and Other Worlds, 1500–1800.” This interdisciplinary gathering hosted scholars from the UK, the U.S., France, and Spain and included papers on images of Native Americans in eighteenth-century Germany, on ideas of the Americas in early modern Italy, on Sir Walter Raleigh’s writings about Guiana, and on piracy in both the Atlantic and Indian Oceans. Equally wide-ranging was University College London’s November conference on “Captivity: From Babylon to Guantanamo Bay,” which featured a keynote speech from Linda Colley. Outside the metropolis, the Historic Society of Lancashire and Cheshire and National Museums Liverpool cosponsored an October conference on “Liverpool and Transatlantic Slavery,” which attracted presenters from as far away as New Zealand and which was kicked off by an address from David Richardson (Hull) on “Liverpool, the African Slave Trade, and Abolition: Thirty Years On,” commemorating the pioneering work of Roger Anstey and P. E. H. Hair on that subject.

Early Americanists were similarly ubiquitous in the UK’s major venues for history seminars. At London’s Institute of Historical Research, the American Seminar hosted Emma Hart (St. Andrews), speaking on Anglo-American urban development in the eighteenth century, and Alan Lester (Sussex) and David Lambert (Royal Holloway) treated the Imperial History Seminar to a preview of their forthcoming collection of essays on the phenomenon of “imperial careering” throughout the British empire. James Walvin, recently retired after many years at the University of York, addressed the Seminar on the Long Eighteenth Century on the topic of that era’s African diaspora, Cassandra Pybus (Tasmania) presented a paper on slavery and penal servitude to the Maritime History Seminar, and the Group of Historical Geographers heard from Diana Paton (Newcastle) on the history of obeah in the West Indies and from Dave Featherstone (Liverpool) on transatlantic mutinies in the 1790s. At Oxford, Peter Thompson addressed the American Seminar on Robert Beverley’s History of Virginia, while Cambridge’s seminar program included Jeremy Gregory (Manchester) on Anglican missions in colonial America, Klaus Weber (Royal Holloway) on German manufactures in the early modern Atlantic world, Marsha Hamilton (South Alabama) on English communities in colonial Massachusetts, David Shields (South Carolina) on Abigail Adams, Michael Sletcher (The Papers of Benjamin Franklin) on Franklin, and myself on the published and manuscript writings of the Antiguan planter Samuel Martin. Mary Beth Norton (Cornell) is just now finishing her stint as the visiting Pitt Professor at Cambridge and spoke to the American Seminar about her work in progress on Lady Frances Berkeley and the gendered politics of colonial Virginia.

British early Americanists were involved in many of 2005’s conferences and events on the other side of the Atlantic as well. Over the past decade, many UK-based scholars have participated in Bernard Bailyn’s Atlantic History Seminar at Harvard; Sherylynne Haggerty (Nottingham), Emma Hart, William O’Reilly, and Nuala Zahedieh gave papers at August’s enormous tenth anniversary conference and celebration. In March, the International Center for Jefferson Studies (ICJS) at Monticello held a conference on “Thomas Jefferson and the Founding Fathers in Retirement,” at which Richard Samuelson (Galway) and Frank Cogliano (Edinburgh) presented papers. In October, the ICJS took a field trip to Salzburg for a colloquium on “The Old World and the New: Exchanges between America and Europe in the Age of Jefferson”; invited participants included Frank Cogliano, independent scholar Julie Flavell, and Sarah Pearsall, newly relocated from St. Andrews to Northwestern. British early Americanists were out in force around Philadelphia’s McNeil Center for Early American Studies (MCEAS), where Brycchan Carey (Kingston) was a visiting research associate and Colin Kidd (Glasgow) spoke to the Atlantic Studies Seminar. At MCEAS’s December conference, “Faces and Places in Early America,” Benjamin Carp (Edinburgh) discussed the “revolution in brick and brush” of the “radical cosmopolitan,” and Marina Moskowitz (Glasgow) spoke about her new project on horticulture in the early Republic. In July, Philadelphia played host to the annual conference of the Society of Historians of the Early Republic (SHEAR), which hosted a Scots contingent of Simon Newman, Frank Cogliano, and Glasgow Ph.D. student Brad Jones.

As the above listing—which is by no means exhaustive— hopefully makes clear, early Americanists of the UK are doing their best to bridge the Atlantic and to encourage research and teaching about colonial America on this side of the pond. If you’d like to join us at the BGEAH or BAAS conferences, the IHR, the British Library, or elsewhere, we promise you a warm welcome.

University of Manchester