This essay investigates the first century of English colonization of the North American mainland, concentrating on the charters and letters patent that proponents of western planning secured over the course of the century. The elaborated legalities of chartering should be understood as a technology of planning and design. Charters allowed projectors both to justify their pursuit of particular territorial claims and to establish, with some precision, the conceptions of the appropriate, familiar, desired order of things and people that would be imposed onto uncharted social and physical circumstance. The structures of authoritative sociolegal order planned by projectors encountered others implicit in the migrations of actual settlers. Investigating settlers' disagreement with and departure from projectors' designs, the essay discards common explanations—that these were inevitable corrections brought about by the intrusion of local environmental realities on English projectors' fantasies, or the realization of an implicit evolutionary logic of political development, or of legal reception. It argues that disagreements were more often the result of a collision of distinct English legal cultures brought, by migration, into an unavoidable proximity. The essay counterposes the paradigm of “colonization” to both “common law reception” and “bottom-up localism” analyses of the formation of early American legal culture. It proposes that “colonization” also resolves the discontinuity between early (colonial) and later (U.S.) American history.

The Legal Cartography of Colonization, the Legal Polyphony of Settlement: English Intrusions on the American Mainland in the Seventeenth Century

The farmers o f piedmont Virginia’s Tye River Valley adapted their agriculture to a commercial frontier during the eighteenth century. This ‘frontier agroecosystem’ optimized labor returns by exploiting the stored fertility o f mature ecosystems at the expense of conservation, but proved vulnerable to population growth and soil exhaustion. Productivity stagnated and out-migration increased after the Revolution, and the gentry’s promotion of economic development was stymied by the lim ited build-up o f capital and consumerism. The hard-pressed frontier agroecosystem could not provide the reliable commercial returns needed to promote dynamic development or stable neighborhoods. During the early nineteenth century, prominent planters began to demand that Virginia farming be intensified that land productivity be maximized, rather than labor productivity. This strategy, many claimed, would anchor farm families while promoting economic independence. Those among the Tye Valley’s ordinary farmers who practiced traditional intensification increased land productivity through increased labor investment found it led to declining labor productivity, resulting in lower profits, declining consumer opportunities, and diminished political influence. Practical plantation owners with commercial ambitions turned to entrepreneurial intensification the build up of per-acre productivity through the importation o f improved seed, livestock, fertilizer, and machinery. This would also maintain or even improve labor productivity. To attract the capital needed to purchase these imports, the Valley’s leaders had to abandon colonial for capitalist politics, and practice the natural resource conservation necessary to use farmland to insure long-term investments. The commercial and ecological self-sufficiency idealized by republican ‘high farmers’ was compromised. Many Tye Valley farmers, however, resisted the dependence implicit in capitalist agriculture through a popular republicanism that accepted lower living standards and curtailed opportunity as the price o f agrarian independence. Farmers in the lower classes pursued traditional intensification on their land while trying to maintain common access to the ‘free’ resources left over from the frontier property system. They also resisted attempts by the district’s entrepreneurial planter-politicians to modernize Virginia’s political economy and force the state into a capitalist economy. High crop prices during the 1850s, however, helped the Valley’s capitalist farmers reinvest profits in modernized cultivation. By I860, they had gone far toward incorporating the landscape o f the Tye River Valley into a capitalist agroecosystem. Popular resistance, however, slowed the development o f the capital needed for a full transformation. The region therefore still lagged in the intensity o f its cultivation and the profits its farming generated. Valley farmers thus found entrepreneurial farming, elite republicanism, and traditional intensification in jeopardy on the eve o f the C ivil War.

The agroecologies of a southern community : the Tye River Valley of Virginia, 1730-1860

Kentucky's Last Cavalier: General William Preston, 1816-1887

We present 7-180µm photometry of a sample of hyperluminous infrared galaxies (HyLIGs) obtained with the photometer and camera mounted on the Infrared Space Observatory. We have used radiative transfer models of obscured starbursts and dusty torii to model their spectral energy distributions (SEDs). We find that IRAS F00235+1024, IRAS F14218+3845 and IRAS F15307+3252 require a combination of starburst and AGN components to explain their mid to far-infrared emission, while for TXS0052+471 a dust torus AGN model alone is sufficient. For IRAS F00235+1024and IRAS F14218+3845 the starburst component is the predominant contributor whereas for IRAS F15307+3252 the dust torus component dominates. The implied star formation rates (SFR) for these three sources estimated from their infrared luminosities are u M∗,all > 3000M⊙yr −1 h −2 50 and are amongst the highest SFRs estimated to date. We also demonstrate that the well-known radio-FIR correlation extends into both higher radio and infrared power than previously investigated. The relation for HyLIGs has a mean q value of � 1.94. The results of this study imply that better sampling of the IR spectral energy distributions of HyLIGs may reveal that both AGN and starburst components are required to explain all the emission from the NIR to the sub-millimetre.

Observations of hyperluminous infrared galaxies with the Infrared Space Observatory: implications for the origin of their extreme luminosities

This thesis offers a theoretical analysis of the process by which borders have come to be precise, fixed, mappable, and infinitely thin lines traced over the surface of the earth. I argue that accounts of global modernity should understand the linearization of borders as a process related to, but relatively autonomous from processes of state formation and other structures and processes typically associated with global modernity. In other words, linear borders have their own causes and consequences, which the thesis aims to unpack. The contribution of the thesis lies within debates on the historical origins of modern international relations which often overlook the history of borders through a focus on sovereignty.
The thesis theorizes modern linear borders as an outcome of ‘survey rationality’, drawing on theories of rationalization. Survey rationality is a mode of territorial governance which conceives of the location of predefined borders as a technical and non-political question, and therefore susceptible to measurement and calculation through surveys and other technologies. The central argument of the thesis is that survey rationality on its own is not a natural or necessary part of territorial rule, but must be articulated with other historically particular rationalities in order to be effective in practice. I illustrate this argument historically by examining two such historically particular rationalities: first, the logic of agrarian capitalism in the English colonies of North America, and secondly, the logic of the civilizing mission in the ‘Scramble for Africa’. Finally, I show how international politics are different in a world of formally linearized borders. Linear borders underpin hierarchies by altering the distribution of geographical knowledge resources, for example at the 1919 Paris Peace Conference, and they contribute to a modular pattern of territorial partition, from Mysore and Poland in the 18th century to Vietnam and Korea in the 20th.

Sarah S. Hughes

Papers

Surveyors and Statesmen: Land Measuring in Colonial Virginia