Introducing: Timo McGregor
Timo McGregor recently joined the Institute for History as a NWO-Veni research fellow. His research explores legal and political thought in early modern European empires, with a particular focus on mobility, political belonging, and enslavement. Below he introduces himself.
I’m delighted to have joined the wonderful faculty at the Leiden Institute for History—surely the best place in the world to study Dutch colonial history. Moving to Leiden represents both a return and a new chapter for me. I lived in the Netherlands from 2002 to 2011, completing secondary school and a BA in liberal arts at the University College Utrecht. Since then, though, I have primarily lived in the UK and the US, first moving to Cambridge for an MPhil and then to New York to do my PhD at NYU. My return journey went via postdoctoral stints at Yale and LSE. So, returning to home ground feels both comfortingly familiar and excitingly new: a chance to be closer to family and friends, and to (re)acquaint myself with the Dutch university system.
Perhaps fittingly given all this transatlantic travel, my research explores legal and political ideas about mobility and community in the seventeenth century Atlantic world. I am currently completing a book manuscript, based on my doctoral research, provisionally titled Controlling Cosmopolitans: Mobility and Political Community in the Dutch Atlantic, 1628-1688. Using legal archives from early English and Dutch settlements in North America, the Guianas, and West Africa, the book challenges the persistent reputation of the seventeenth-century Dutch as hyper-mobile cosmopolitans. Instead, I show how the very colonial merchants who were most extensively engaged in inter-imperial trade were also the most deeply anxious about regulating mobility. In their efforts to police the movements of others, these Atlantic ‘cosmopolitans’ constructed inter-imperial legal regimes and political formations to control flows of people, goods, and information. Ultimately, I argue for a view of early modern empire as a fundamentally inter-imperial project, grounded in a widely shared set of legal and political ideas about rights to mobility and political belonging.
My second project, funded by the NWO Veni grant that brought me to Leiden, builds on this interest in vernacular political thought and the everyday politics of mobility. This project asks how colonial legal ideas enabled and connected diverse forms of slaving. It does so by examining the ideological significance of a key institution in coercive labour regimes: the household. From homesteads to haciendas, households formed a critical space in which enslavement could be imposed, concealed, and contested. Household heads wielded absolute patriarchal authority over spouses and children, rights to regulate the activities of servants, and legal authority to violently discipline subordinates. Such expansive claims to dominium over dependents blurred lines between the right to command and the right to own people, enabling household heads to hold indentured workers, bonded debtors, and convict labourers in perpetual bondage. Using case studies from seventeenth-century Dutch colonies in Suriname, Brazil, and the Moluccas, I plan to explore how such ideas about household authority served as an ideological, legal, and social framework for imposing and resisting slavery.
Seeking to connect the histories of slavery in the Atlantic and Indian Ocean worlds, this project will carry me into new historiographical and archival waters. I can’t imagine a better place to navigate this challenge than Leiden, and I have already benefitted enormously from the Institute’s collective expertise in global history and Dutch colonial history. Now that I have also found housing in Leiden (perhaps the greatest research challenge of all at the moment!) I very much look forward to meeting more of you and enjoying many more stimulating conversations and research exchanges over the coming years.