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. Using gender, race, and slavery as our primary lenses, it explores the diverse relations among and between Iberians (residents of what would become Spain and Portugal) 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. We require two kinds of readings: (1) historiographic debates that highlight the active conversations between historians on this emerging topic, and (2) primary sources that require students to read carefully and critically, and come to an understanding of how historians ask and answer questions about a past that is largely undocumented.