Introduction: Disputation

Abstract

“Disputation,” an Anglophone construction from Latin, to mean controversy, active doubt, and confusion, is culturally and temporally particular. Britons debated relations between man and God, man and man, and formed and reformed links and hostilities across domestic boundaries. Then they sent their restlessness overseas. The long seventeenth century, presaged by the nationalistic adventurism of the late Elizabethan era, gave way in 1603 to the Union of the Crowns and the British imperial vision of James VI of Scotland and I of England and Ireland. From the safety of our twenty-first century remove, we are led to believe that when the last (Protestant) Stuart died in 1714, disputatiousness was being tamed by a profitable empire and a “balanced eighteenth-century constitution.”¹ Our long seventeenth century ends around 1720, to denote a time at which metropolitan institutions were reining in colonial disputation.