Making of the Atlantic World

(3 Credit Hours) · Undergraduate

This course is a survey-style introduction to the early modern Atlantic world, the global region brought together beginning in the fifteenth century by commercial interests, military conquest, and the African slave trade. It explores the diverse relations between Europeans and Africans before that trade commenced, and examines how the Iberian conquest of the Americas radically transformed them. It also examines the vast Atlantic diasporas: of Africans scattered around the American continents, of indigenous natives of the southern Americas to Europe and west-central Africa, and Europeans in Africa and the Americas. Students will learn about the life experiences of the men and women who crossed the Atlantic, the effects of these conquests and trade relations on the regions, the development of theories of race, ethnicity, and gender that emerged, and the larger structures of global trade and contact in the early modern world