HIST245

This course approaches Atlantic history through the lens of race, gender, and power. In the early modern world, the Protestant Reformation, the trans-Atlantic slave trade and the rise of the plantation complex, the substantial depopulation of west and central Africa, and indigenous genocide in the Americas significantly reshaped social orders and the meaning of the most salient categories of difference. This course examines the imposition of these categories from above and how socially marginalized groups pushed back against colonial racial, gender, and sexual economies throughout the Atlantic world and in particular societies, including Mexico, Virginia, Barbados, Ghana, and the Congo.