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Name: L. H. Roper
Academic Rank: University Professor
Department: History

Expertise Keywords: England (Great Britain) and its Empire to 1837, American Indians, American War of Independence/American Revolution, Colonial America, Early Modern Britain, History of the United States South, Plantation Slavery in the Americas, South Carolina

Available For: interviews, essays, speaking

Expertise: Co-editor, ed. Elodie Peyrol-Kleiber, Agns Delahaye-Dado, L.H. Roper, and Bertrand Van Ruymbeke, Agents of European overseas empires: Private colonisers, 1450-1850 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2024): co-wrote the Introduction and contributed “Global pursuits: English overseas initiatives of the long seventeenth century in perspective”. My article “Reorienting the ‘Origins Debate’: Anglo-American trafficking in enslaved people” in Atlantic Studies (published online 17 February 2022), https://doi.org/10.1080/14788810.2022.2034570, reconsiders the character of English involvement in the early 17th-century 'Guinea trade', including the traffic in enslaved people. My book _Advancing Empire: English Interests and Overseas Expansion, 1613-1688_ (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2017); https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/advancing-empire/65BEFF85A688E2CE65874E69A8BDDCB1 has been been reviewed in Reviews in History (Institute of Historical Research, UK), https://www.history.ac.uk/reviews/review/2246; A collection of essays I edited, _The Torrid Zone: Caribbean Colonization in the Long Seventeenth Century_ (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2018), appeared last summer: https://www.sc.edu/uscpress/books/2018/7890.html has been reviewed in H-Net: https://networks.h-net.org/node/16821/discussions/3298260/allain-roper-torrid-zone-caribbean-colonization-and-cultural I am co-general editor with Dr Jaap Jacobs and Dr Bertrand Van Ruymbeke of The Journal of Early American History and the book series, The American Colonies, 1500-1830, both published by Brill: http://www.brill.com/journal-early-american-history.

Currrent Research: I have three projects under contract: 1) “Planting and settling” in Oxford Handbook of Travel, Identity, and Race, ed. Nandini Das (Oxford: Oxford University Press); 2) “Poachers Turned Gamekeepers: The Guinea Company and How English Overseas Interests Became a ‘State’ Matter” and co-author of “Introduction” in ed. Na Chang (University of Nanjing) and L.H. Roper, Pirates, Smugglers, and Traders in the Early Modern World: The character of maritime interests, 1520-1720 (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press; and 3) “Snatching Imperial Success from Spectacular Colonizing Failure: The Case of the English Attempt at Santa Cruz (St Croix), 1642-1660” and co-author of “Introduction” in ed. Joseph Wagner and L.H. Roper, European Colonial Failures, c. 1560-1800: Early Modern Polities, Overseas Interests, and Empire Building (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, forthcoming).

I am also working on a book project with Nathan Jopling (University of Birmingham), “The Rules of the Game: Intrigue, Interest, and the Formation of Anglo-America, c. 1630-1730” presently under consideration by an academic press.

Contact Information

E-mail Address: roperl@newpaltz.edu
Personal Web Site: https://hcommons.org/members/roperlh9/

Other Information

Positions held at New Paltz prior to current position:
Assistant Professor, Associate Professor, and Professor of History; Chair, Department of History, 2002-2009

Education

Awards/Grants/Honors

Elected Fellow of the Royal Historical Society (U.K.), 2022-present.

Member, State University of New York Distinguished Academy, 2019-present.

My article 'The Fall of New Netherland and Seventeenth-Century Anglo-American Imperial Formation, 1654-1676', _The New England Quarterly_ 87, no. 4 (December 2014): 666-708, received the 2017 Van Slyke Article Prize from the New Netherland Institute: https://www.newnetherlandinstitute.org/programs/awards/prize-for-the-best-published-article/.

SUNY Chancellor's Award for Excellence in Scholarship or Creative Work, 2014-2015.

Alexander O. Vietor Fellow in Early American History and Cartography, Beinecke Library, Yale University, 2003-04 (held March 2004).

Research and Creative Project Award, Office of Academic Affairs, SUNY-New Paltz, June 2015, June 2013, June 2007, June 2001, June 1999, June 1998.

Professional Development and Quality of Working Life Award, United University Professionals (SUNY New Paltz), May 2015, May 2007, May 2000, November 1998, June, 1998, June 1997.

Member, International Seminar on the History of the Atlantic World, Charles Warren Center for the Study of American History, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, September 1996.

Travel Fellow, The John Carter Brown Library, Providence, RI, July-August 1991.

Graduate Fellow, Department of History, University of Rochester, 1988-1992.

Other professional activities

Exhibition Catalog

Andrew Lyght: Full Circle (New Paltz, N.Y.: Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art at SUNY—New Paltz, 2016). Edited a collection of images and essays and contributed an essay on “Guyana: A Brief Early History” for an exhibition of the work of the award-winning Guyanese artist Andrew Lyght in Spring 2016.

Professional Papers, Workshops, and other Presentations

“Negotiating the Surrender of New Amsterdam: A Role-Playing Workshop for Teachers on the 350th Anniversary of the English Invasion of New Netherland, August-September 1664”, 13 September 2014, SUNY—New Paltz (co-sponsored by the New Netherland Institute and Ulster BOCES).

“The Worlds of the Seventeenth-Century Hudson Valley”, Historic Huguenot Street, New Paltz, N.Y., Part 1: “European Worlds and the Formation of Colonial Worlds” and Part 2: “American Worlds and the Formation of Atlantic Worlds”, 8 and 15 July 2014 (invited).

“Roundtable: The Worlds of the Seventeenth-Century Hudson Valley”, Conference on New York State History, Marist College, Poughkeepsie, N.Y., 13 June 2014 (invited). A synopsis of this roundtable was published at the invitation of the journal’s editors as Jaap Jacobs and L.H. Roper, “The Meeting of American, European, and Atlantic Worlds in the Seventeenth-Century Hudson Valley”, in The Hudson River Valley Review 31, no. 2 (Spring 2015): 42-61.

“The Worlds of the Seventeenth-Century Hudson Valley: A Discussion with the Editors”, The New Amsterdam History Center Lecture Series, Consulate-General of the Kingdom of the Netherlands, New York City, 10 June 2014 (invited).

“The Creation of South Carolina and the Politics of the Seventeenth-Century English Empire”, Annual Meeting of the Southern Historical Association, St. Louis, Mo., 2 November 2013.

“The Fall of New Netherland and Seventeenth-Century Anglo-American Imperial Formation”, British Group in Early American History, University of St. Andrews, U.K., 8 September 2012.

“Maryland and New Albion: Reconsidering an ‘English Proprietary Empire’, the State of Charles I, and the Formation of Anglo-American Colonies”, Colonisation et colonisation en Amerique du Nord, XVIIe-XVIIIe sicles/Colonization and Confessionalization in Seventeenth and Eighteenth-Century North America, Journe d'tude, 13 May 2011, Maison Descartes, Amsterdam (invited).

“The Ties that Bound: the Conception of Anglo-America, 1617-67”, Atlantic History Workshop, New York University, 2 November 2010 and (different version) History of Empire seminar, University of Uppsala (Sweden), 17 March 2010 (both invited).

"The Thrusting Out of Governor Harvey and Other Curious Incidents", Universite de Versailles--St Quentin-en-Yvelines (France), 10 October 2008 (invited).

“Big Fish in a Bigger Transatlantic Pond: the Social and Political Leadership of Early Modern Anglo-American Colonies”, Servir outre-Mer: Les lites europennes dans les colonies du dbut du XVI sicle au milieu du XXe sicle , Universit de Bordeaux 3—Michel de Montaigne, 4 October 2007 (invited and paper will be published).

“New Albion: Anatomy of an English Colonization Failure, 1632-1655”, Columbia University Seminar on Early American History (invited), 12 December 2006 and the Honors Center, SUNY—New Paltz, 23 October 2006.

“The Ambiguous Crucible of Empire: Theater, Politics, and Colonization in Jacobean England”, North American Conference on British Studies, Boston, MA, 19 November 2006.

The Fate of Religious Toleration in Proprietary South Carolina , 117th Annual Meeting of the American Historical Association, Chicago IL, 3 January 2003.

The Goose Creek Men and Early South Carolina History , Transatlantic Studies Association, University of Dundee, Dundee, Scotland, 10 July 2001.

Unmasquing the Connections Between Jacobean Politics and Colonization: Anna of Denmark, Pocahontas, John Rolfe, Ben Jonson, William Herbert, George Villiers, Supporting Cast, and the Start of the English Empire, 1614-1616 , Sixteenth-Century Studies Conference, Denver, CO, 27 October 2001.

Chair, commentator and organizer, Proprietary Colonies in Perspective , Seventh Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture Conference, University of Glasgow, Glasgow, Scotland, 14 July 2001.

Kings of the Carolina Frontier: New Light on the Goose Creek Men , Fifth Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture Conference, University of Texas, Austin, TX, 12 June 1999.

Conceptions of an Early Modern English Society: the Case of South Carolina , Organization of American Historians, Toronto, Canada, 24 April 1999.

Fundamentally Flawed? Carolina s Constitutions Reconsidered , Society of Early Americanists, College of Charleston, Charleston, SC, 4 March 1999.

Conceptions of a New World in Elizabethan and Jacobean England , 23rd International Conference on Patristic, Mediaeval, and Renaissance Studies, Villanova University, Villanova, PA, 9 October 1998.

The Lords Proprietor: A Reassessment , South Carolina Historical Association, Columbia, SC, 8 March 1997.

Promotion, Periphery, and Patronage in Proprietary South Carolina , International Seminar on the History of the Atlantic World, 1500-1800, 7 September 1996, Charles Warren Center for the Study of American History, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA.

The Jesuit Relations: Another Look , Annual Conference on Iroquois Research, 7 October 1995, Rensselaerville, NY.

Organizational Memberships

Associate, Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture

Member, Steering Committee, Summer Academy of Atlantic History, European Association of Early American Studies, 2011-present.

Forum on European Expansion and Global Interaction, 2017-present.

North American Conference on British Studies, 2017-present.

Renaissance Society of America, 2016-present.

Publications

A. Books

Agents of European overseas empires: Private colonisers, 1450-1850, ed. Elodie Peyrol-Kleiber, Agn�s Delahaye-Dado, L.H. Roper, and Bertrand Van Ruymbeke (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2024),

Advancing Empire: English Interests and Overseas Expansion, 1613-1688 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2017).

The Torrid Zone: Caribbean Colonization and Cultural Interaction in the Long Seventeenth Century (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2018).

The English Empire in America, 1602-1658: Beyond Jamestown (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2009).

Conceiving Carolina: Proprietors, Planters, and Plots, 1662-1729 (New York and Houndmills, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004).

Constructing Early Modern Empires: Proprietary Colonies in the Atlantic World, 1500-1750 (w/B. Van Ruymbeke, Leiden, NL and Boston: Brill Academic Publishers, 2007).

The Seventeenth-Century Worlds of the Hudson Valley (w/Jaap Jacobs), Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2014).

B. Scholarly Articles

“English Overseas Empire” in ed. Margaret King, Oxford Bibliographies in Renaissance and Reformation (New York: Oxford University Press, 2023 [2021]), doi: 10.1093/OBO/9780195399301-0468.

“Proprietary Colonies” in ed. Trevor Burnard, Oxford Bibliographies in Atlantic History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2023 [2014]), doi: 10.1093/OBO/9780199730414-0244.

“Reorienting the ‘Origins Debate’: Anglo-American trafficking in enslaved people” in Atlantic Studies 20, no. 4 (2023, published online 17 February 2022): 540-557, https://doi.org/10.1080/14788810.2022.2034570.

“Private Enterprise, Colonialism, and the Atlantic World” in ed. William Beezley, Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Latin American History, (New York: Oxford University Press, September 2018), doi: 10.1093/acrefore/9780199366439.013.684.

“Fear and the Genesis of the English Empire in America” in Fear and the Shaping of Early American Societies, ed. Lauric Henneton and L.H. Roper (Leiden: Brill, 2016), 76-92.

“The Fall of New Netherland and Seventeenth-Century Anglo-American Imperial Formation” in The New England Quarterly 87, no. 4 (December 2014): 666-708, doi: 10.1162/TNEQ_a_00417.

“The Seventeenth-Century English Empire” in L.H. Roper and Jaap Jacobs (eds.), The Worlds of the Seventeenth-Century Hudson Valley (Albany, N.Y.: SUNY Press, 2014), 15-34.

The Chesapeake Bay” in Louise Breen (ed.), Converging Worlds: Communities and Cultures in Colonial America (New York: Routledge, 2012), pp. 122-47.

“The Ties That Bound: The Conception of Anglo-America, 1617-1667” in Journal of Early American History 1, no. 2 (2011), pp. 142-66.

“Big Fish in a Bigger Transatlantic Pond: the Social and Political Leadership of Early Modern Anglo-American Colonies” in C. Laux, F-J. Ruggiu, and P. Singaravelou, eds., Servir Outre-mer: Les lites europennes dans les colonies du dbut du XVI sicle au milieum de XXe sicle (Brussels : Peter Lang, 2009), pp. 141-66.

“New Albion: Anatomy of a Colonization Failure, 1632-1655” in Itinerario, 32/1 (2008).

“The 1701 ‘Act for the Better Ordering of Slaves: Reconsidering the History of Slavery in Proprietary South Carolina” in The William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 64 (April, 2007), 395-418.

“Charles I, Virginia, and the Idea of Atlantic History” in Itinerario, 30/2 (2006), 33-53.

"Unmasquing the Connections between Jacobean Politics and Colonization: the Circle of Anna of Denmark and the Beginning of the English Empire, 1614-1618 in Carole Levin, Jo Eldridge Carney, and Debra Barrett-Graves, eds., High and Mighty Queens of Early Modern England (Palgrave, 2003).

The Unraveling of an Anglo-American Utopia in South Carolina in The Historian, 58 (Winter 1996), 277-88.

Old Wine in New Bottles: New York, the Federal Government and the Oneida Land Claims Cases in New York History, 72 (April 1991), 133-54.

C. Encyclopedia Articles

James Colleton , Sir Nathaniel Johnson , James Moore, Sr. , and Joseph Morton in South Carolina Encyclopedia (University of South Carolina Press, forthcoming).
Theodore de Bry , Peter Martyr , Gerardus Mercator , Matteo Ricci , Martin Waldseemuller , and St Francis Xavier in Jo E. Carney, ed., Reformations: Protestant and Catholic, 1500-1620: An Interdisciplinary Dictionary (Greenwood Press, 2000).
Wade Hampton I and James Moore, Jr. in John W. Garraty, ed., American National Biography (Oxford University Press, 1999).

D. Recent Book Reviews

“Apprehending Sovereign Matters in Seventeenth-Century North America”, review of Paper Sovereigns: Anglo-Native Treaties and the Law of Nations, 1604-1664 by Jeffrey Glover (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014) for H-Empire/H-Net, http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=42509 (November 2014).

“The Atlantic Imperial Constitution: Center and Periphery in the English Atlantic World” by Ken MacMillan (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), in The American Historical Review 117, no. 5 (2012): 1545-1546.

“Unbecoming British: How Revolutionary America Became a Postcolonial Nation” by Kariann Akemi Yokota (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), for H-Empire/H-Net (April, 2012).

“Habeas Corpus: From England to Empire” by Paul D. Halliday (Cambridge, Mass: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2010) in American Historical Review, 115 (2010), no. 5, pp. 1522-3.

“A Very Mutinous People: The Struggle for North Carolina, 1660-1713” by Noeleen McIlvenna (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009) in American Historical Review, 115 (2010), no. 2, pp. 533-4.

“Protestant Empire: Religion and the Making of the British Atlantic World” by Carla Gardina Pestana (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009) in Church History, 79 (2010), no. 1, pp. 213-16.

“Who Shall Rule at Home?” by Jonathan Mercantini (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2006) for H-SC/H-Net (2007).

“Hakluyt’s Promise: An Elizabethan’s Obsession for an English America” by Peter C. Mancall, (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 2007) in Itinerario, 31, no. 2 (2007), pp. 197-8.

“Shaping the Stuart World, 1603-1714: The Atlantic Connection” by Allan I. Macinnes and Arthur H. Williamson (eds.) (Leiden and Boston: Brill Academic Publishing, 2006) in Itinerario, 30, no. 3 (2006), pp. 158-60.

“Conceiving Colonial America”, review of Daniel Vickers, ed., A Companion to Colonial America (Boston: Blackwell Publishers, 2005) for H-SOUTH/H-Net (September 2006).

“Slavery in Colonial America, 1619-1776” by Betty Wood (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2005) in Itinerario, 30, no. 2 (2006), pp. 210-12.

“Mastery, Tyranny, and Desire: Thomas Thistlewood and His Slaves in the Anglo-Jamaican World” (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004) by Trevor Burnard in Itinerario, 30, no. 1 (2006), pp. 128-9.

“A Colonial Complex: South Carolina’s Frontiers in the Era of the Yamasee War, 1680-1730” by Steven J. Oatis (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2004), in William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 62 (2005), no. 3, pp. 543-5.

“Atlantic Virginia: Intercolonial Relations in the Seventeenth Century” by April Lee Hatfield (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), for H-Atlantic (2005).