HIST 347 - Pox, Priests and Pirates: The Atlantic World, 1450 -1850

3 Credit(s)

From the establishment of an integrated Atlantic world in the late-15th century until the early-19th century, Africans, Indigenous Americans, and Europeans met and interacted in Europe, Africa, the Americas, and the Atlantic Ocean in-between. They moved between places (often under coercion); exchanged knowledge, pathogens, and commodities; and created new societies, religious and cultural practices, and polities. Quite simply, they revolutionized the societies, cultures, economies, and politics of each of the Atlantic world’s component parts—they created new worlds for all. This course investigates key themes in the history of the Atlantic world, including discovery and conquest, the establishment of colonies, the development of the transatlantic slave trade and new world slavery, and the age of revolutions. In the process, students question how Europeans, Africans, Native people, and Creoles interacted and adjusted to a changing world, and how a variety of transregional exchanges shaped the history of the Atlantic basin, and the modern world.