After 1776: Settlers, Slavery, and Citizenship in the Atlantic Republics

University College London, 2–3 July 2026

We invite proposals for a two-day workshop that explores how the American Revolution reverberated in the emergence, expansion, and contradictions of settler republics across the Atlantic World. We take the 250th anniversary of 1776 as a point of departure and examine how the rise of settler republics – polities shaped by diverse populations asserting republican sovereignty through migration, land acquisition, and displacement – in North America, the Caribbean, Latin America, and Southern Africa produced new – and often deeply conflicted – forms of political community.

This event forms part of the wider collaborative project to bring together scholars working on the entangled histories of migration, race, citizenship, and settler republicanism across the Atlantic World in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The UCL workshop will be the first major gathering for this network and will support the development of an edited volume on these themes.

We welcome proposals from graduate students, early career researchers, and established scholars, and particularly encourage submissions from those working in or across the Global South.

Themes and Questions

We invite papers engaging with any aspect of settler republicanism, revolutionary change, or political belonging in the Atlantic world. Topics may include, but are not limited to:

1. The People Armed

• How were notions of citizenship forged through revolutionary and frontier violence?
• Military mobilisation, militias, and “citizen-soldiers” in Haiti, the United States, Latin America, or Southern Africa.
• Enslaved, Indigenous, and plebeian actors seeking rights, land, or belonging through revolutionary service.

2. Civic and Racial Citizenship

• How did settler republics reconcile (or fail to reconcile) constitutional universalism with racialised social orders?
• Negotiations of belonging for Indigenous peoples, Afro-descended populations, and migrant groups.
• Statelessness, exclusion, and the limits of republican citizenship.

3. Settlement, Labour, and Capital

• How did settler republics function as engines of demographic, economic and territorial expansion?

• Comparative histories of land policies, labour systems, and legal frameworks in Haiti, the United States, Latin America, Liberia, or Southern Africa.

• The relationship between slavery, coerced labour, and republican state-building.

Travel Support

Limited travel subsidies are available, with priority given to early career researchers, participants without institutional funding, and scholars travelling from outside the UK.

How to Apply

Please send an abstract of 250–300 words, along with a brief 1–2 sentence bio, by 28 February 2026 to: americaafter1776@gmail.com

Please direct any questions to the conference organisers, Dr Jon Chandler (j.p.chandler@ucl.ac.uk) and Dr Tim Gibbs (t.gibbs@parisnanterre.fr)