Representations of avaricious Spanish conquests and imperial practices in the Americas, which came to be known as the Black Legend, embodied changing and competing conceptions of empire. In the early modern world, other narratives about the moral, religious, and legal imperatives of empires around the Atlantic basin emerged alongside the Black Legend. Drawing from these narratives, debates about the moral foundations of empire, the ethical implications of imperial practice, and philosophical and theological questions occurred on multiple axes of interaction on intra- and inter-imperial scales. Imperial officials, indigenous populations, enslaved peoples, and colonial subjects deployed these narratives to legitimize, alter, invoke, or challenge imperial governance. Concurrently, cross-cultural contacts around the Atlantic basin also prompted various peoples to reassess their own inherited notions of law, religion, and human nature.

This conference will explore the ways in which these multiple actors constituted, challenged, contested, negotiated, and put into practice narratives about the moral foundations and authority of empire. How were black and white legends deployed to fuel imperial rivalries and conflicting visions of the proper practice of empire? Who made use of these narratives, in what contexts, and to what ends? This conference will emphasize notions of morality, broadly construed, as understood by and contested among the historical actors themselves, rather than twenty-first-century assessments of the moral implications of their actions. Possible topics include the following:

• Interactions between European, African, and Amerindian notions of law, legitimacy, and imperial authority
• Debates between metropolitan officials and colonial settlers
• The circulation of local narratives about morality
• Religious value systems and their convergences and disjunctures with imperial practice
• Claims to enslavement, ownership, resistance, and/or freedom
• Sexual morality
• Cultural “deserters” and liminal people
• Moral economy and ideas about comparative value in inter- and intra-imperial trade relations
• The relationship between the human body and the natural world
• The interaction between concepts of geography, space, and morality

The conference will be a forum for new and established scholars to present their work, and we encourage and welcome submissions across multiple disciplines and fields. Send your submissions to daniel.kanhofer@nyu.edu and gr800@nyu.edu by October 17. Please include a 200-300 word abstract and CV.