ANZAMEMS Conference Panel: Keeping it in the Family: Mobility, Exchange, and Adaptation in an Age of Discovery, Trade Expansion and Settlement, 1400–1800 – Call For Papers

Panel CFP, ANZAMEMS 2017:

Keeping it in the family: mobility, exchange, and adaptation in an age of discovery, trade expansion and settlement, 1400–1800

Castas en Nueva EspanÞa. Joseì Joaquiìn Magoìn'

Castas en Nueva EspanÞa. Joseì Joaquiìn Magoìn

Family networks transcending national ties and traditional boundaries relating to gender, class, religion, and race, were central to the project of discovery, trade expansion and settlement in the early modern period. This was a period of flux and roles and relations within and outside households were affected. While prolonged absences from home could lead men to establish second families, their wives and daughters had the opportunity to oversee households and businesses.

The panel will investigate the extended family in its widest sense – encompassing mistresses as well as wives, children – legitimate and illegitimate, apprentices, servants and slaves. Families who maintained a connection to their place of origin are as significant as those for whom the dislocation was permanent for, as Merry E. Wiesner-Hanks has shown, interactions and relationships between individuals who are mobile affect those within their network who are not and so even fixed locations can be ‘saturated with transnational relationships’.

The panel will convene at the ANZAMEMS Eleventh Biennial Conference at the Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand, 7-10 February 2017.

Potential topics include but are not limited to:

  • Merchant, maritime and/or military families/households
  • The division between public and private spheres
  • Education and mobility
  • Wardship and/or adoption and/or illegitimacy
  • Families in new worlds
  • Families and possessions
  • The family in text and image
  • Love, loss and memory
  • Race and/or gender and family
  • Faith and family
  • Guilds and/or apprentices and family
  • Servitude and/or slavery and the impact on family

If you would like to contribute a paper to this panel, please send the following to Heather Dalton at hdalton@unimelb.edu.au by 30 July, 2016 (with the subject line ‘Family’):

  • Paper title
  • Abstract (up to 150 words)
  • Your name, affiliation, and email address
  • An indication of AV requirements