Freedom Bound

Christopher Tomlins is currently Professor of Law at the University of California, Irvine, on leave from the American Bar Foundation in Chicago, where he has been a Research Professor since 1992. Tomlins began his career at La Trobe University in Melbourne; he has also taught at the Marshall-Wythe Law School, College of William and Mary in Virginia; at Northwestern University Law School; and at Tel Aviv and Haifa Universities in Israel. His interests and research are cast very broadly - from sixteenth-century England to twentieth-century America and from the legal culture of work and labor to the interrelations of law and literature. He has written or edited six books, including, most recently, the multi-volume Cambridge History of Law in America, co-edited with Michael Grossberg. His publications have been awarded the Surrency Prize of the American Society for Legal History, the Littleton–Griswold Prize of the American Historical Association and the Hurst Prize of the Law and Society Association. Tomlins currently edits two Cambridge University Press book series: Cambridge Historical Studies in American Law and Society and Cambridge New Histories of American Law (with Michael Grossberg).

• Prologue. Beginning: 'as much freedome in reason as may be'; Part I. Manning, Planting, Keeping: 1. Manning: 'setteynge many on worke'; 2. Planting: 'directed and conducted thither'; 3. Keeping (i): discourses of intrusion; 4. Keeping (ii): English desires, designs; Part II. Poly-Olbion, or the Inside Narrative: 5. Packing: new inhabitants; 6. Unpacking: received wisdoms; 7. Changing: localities, legalities; Part III. 'What, Then, Is the American, This New Man?': 8. Modernizing: polity, economy, patriarchy; 9. Enslaving: facies hippocratica; 10. Ending: 'strange order of things!'.

“Freedom Bound is a truly magisterial work by one of the finest minds currently working in the field of legal history. It is about no less a topic than the origins of modern America – and, in particular, about the law that framed its genesis and its early development. In this exceptionally erudite study, Christopher Tomlins succeeds in achieving an unusual ‘thickness’ of description, notable alike for its breadth and depth, its subtlety and its comprehensiveness. Even more, he brings an acute analytic eye to a story of enormous complexity, making this a must-read for anyone with a serious interest in either modern American history or law and society.” – John Comaroff, University of Chicago and American Bar Foundation