Timo McGregor is an NWO-Veni research fellow at the Institute for History. His research explores legal and political thought in early modern European empires, with a particular focus on mobility, political belonging, and enslavement.

More information about Timo McGregor

Research

McGregor’s research explores the intellectual history of early modern European empires through a focus on everyday legal politics. Using colonial court records, he examines how routine legal conflicts involving settlers, colonial officials, and indigenous communities generated new political vocabularies for constructing and contesting colonial authority. A comparative global historian, McGregor has worked primarily in Dutch and English archives but is interested in broader patterns of regional and inter-imperial legal ordering. Across his work, he argues that colonists’ everyday legal ideas—particularly about property and political belonging—formed a shared framework that sustained European colonizing as a fundamentally inter-imperial venture.

McGregor’s current research project, funded by an NWO-Veni grant, examines how colonial legal ideas enabled and connected diverse practices of enslavement in the early modern world. Many people in seventeenth-century Dutch colonies were enslaved through legal and social mechanisms. This often happened within the context of household labour. Legal powers to command and punish domestic workers could be exploited by household heads to transform contractual labour arrangements into perpetual slavery. This project uses colonial court records from Dutch Brazil, Suriname, and the Moluccas to explore how households served as an ideological, legal, and social framework for imposing and resisting slavery. It will identify how colonial legal ideas and norms sustained different forms of coerced labour and laid ideological foundations for modern forms of domestic slavery.  

This project builds on McGregor’s previous work on vernacular conceptions of political community and subjecthood in Dutch and English Atlantic colonies. McGregor is currently revising a book manuscript, based on his doctoral research, examining everyday legal disputes over the movements of settlers, merchants, fugitives, and Indigenous people in Anglo-Dutch settlements across the Guianas, West Africa, and Northeastern America. Identifying recurring concepts and idioms in these arguments, this project reconstructs an inter-imperial legal vernacular for contesting the political status of people and property moving across colonial boundaries. Attending to this improvised legal regime and the regional political formations it produced reveals how colonists deployed vernacular ideas about property and private law to constitute empire as an inter-imperial project.

Curriculum Vitae

Academic positions:
2024-present: NWO-Veni Research Fellow, Leiden University
2022-2024: The London School of Economics, LSE Fellow, Department of International History.
2021-2022: Yale University, Henry Hart Rice Postdoctoral Associate, MacMillan Center and
Lecturer, History Department. 

Education:
2013-2020: New York University, PhD in Atlantic History
2011-2012: Cambridge University, MPhil Political Thought and Intellectual History. 
2008-2011: University College Utrecht, BA Liberal Arts. 

Grants: 
2024-27: NWO-Veni grant, “Households and Enslavement in the Seventeenth-Century Dutch Empire”.
2013-18: New York University, Berger-MacCracken Doctoral Fellowship.

Fellowships & Awards: 
2022: The New Netherland Institute, Hendricks Prize for best book-length manuscript or dissertation on Dutch Atlantic history.
2021-22: American Society for Legal History, Wallace Johnson First Book Program.
2018-19: University of Pennsylvania, McNeil Center for Early American Studies, Dissertation Fellowship. 
2018: The Huntington Library, San Marino, CA, Short-term Research Fellowship.
2016: The John Carter Brown Library, Barbara S. Mosbacher Fellowship.
2016: New Netherland Research Center, Student Scholar in Residence.
2016: New York State Archives, Quinn-Archives Research Residency.

Selected publications

“Neighborly Rendition: Interpolity Law, Mobility, and the Boundaries of Political Community in Anglo-Dutch America, 1624-1664,” William & Mary Quarterly, 78, no. 3 (July 2021): 393–426. https://doi.org/10.5309/willmaryquar.78.3.0393

Publications