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!'.