Capitalism/Community/Americas

3 Credits · Level: Graduate, Undergraduate

Capitalism shaped the Americas and the Americas shaped capitalism from the sixteenth century when the silver economies of Spanish America mobilized indigenous peoples to drive global trades, plantations in Brazil and the Caribbean took bound people from Africa to make sugar and profits, and British North America drew communities of settlers seeking refuges of truth sustained by trades supplying plantation colonies. Nineteenth-century industrial times saw slavery expand in Brazil, Cuba, and the U.S. to sustain industrial production in Britain and the U.S. It finally ended from 1865 to 1888, leaving freed people to struggle while immigrants flooded from Europe to make new farming and working communities. The US gained hemispheric hegemony after 1870 while Latin Americans faced underdevelopment—processes driven everywhere by assaults on native communities and their lands. The 20th-century brought struggles for national development promising equities that rarely came. Then the 1980s saw globalization build on urban concentrations of power and prosperity, marginality and exclusions that spread across the Americas. How did promises of plenty, the powers that promoted them, and diverse communities pursuing their own goals through negotiations, adaptations, and resistance, engage to generate changing ways of life mixing power and plenty, survival and exclusions—ethnic, racial, and gendered—within an enduring and always changing capitalism?