Description: Freedom Bound is about the origins of modern America - a history of colonizing, work, and civic identity from the beginnings of English presence on the mainland until the Civil War. It is a history of migrants and migrations, of colonizers and colonized, of households and servitude and slavery, and of the freedom all craved and some found. Above all it is a history of the law that framed the entire process. Freedom Bound tells how colonies were planted in occupied territories, how they were populated with migrants - free and unfree - to do the work of colonizing, and how the newcomers secured possession. It tells of the new civic lives that seemed possible in new commonwealths, and of the constraints that kept many from enjoying them. It follows the story long past the end of the eighteenth century until the American Civil War, when - just for a moment - it seemed that freedom might finally be unbound.
Brief description: 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).
Review Quotes: "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