Atlantic Empires

Undergraduate / Graduate

This course explores classic and emerging scholarship on European empires and colonies in the early modern Atlantic world (c. 1400s-1800s). We will examine the rise and consolidation of empires and colonies through comparative, trans, and circum-Atlantic approaches. Additionally, the course will pay particular attention to the perspectives of colonized peoples (such as enslaved and freed people of African descent, Creole populations, and Indigenous peoples). Geographically, the course will span the Atlantic World, including regions such as the Caribbean, West Africa, Latin America, and North America. Topics we will cover include the formation of empires and colonial systems; Atlantic slavery; the emergence of Atlantic ideologies of race; gender, and kinship; knowledge formation, environment, and disease; anti-slavery struggles, and the "Age of Revolution."