Colonial Encounters in the Early Atlantic

This seminar introduces students to the range of primary sources and archival collections used by historians and other scholars to understand the emergence of an integrated Atlantic world in the period between 1400 and 1650. Analyses of source material will be supplemented by secondary scholarship to consider the various approaches by which historians have characterized patterns of trans-regional exchange, dispossession, and colonialism between Atlantic Africa, Brazil, the Greater Caribbean, and Atlantic Europe. Students will have the opportunity to develop paleographic fluency in late medieval and early modern written sources in any relevant language(s) in which they have preexisting knowledge.