Race, Culture, and British Travel Narrative, 1682-1789

Catalog description

Eighteenth-century Britain transformed the world in ways that are still with us, and the world also transformed eighteenth-century Britain. As growing overseas colonies and the transatlantic slave trade made Britain into a global superpower, its increasingly literate population eagerly consumed accounts of faraway places and peoples––real, fictional, and everywhere in between. This course will take an in-depth look at these texts, typically referred to as “travel narratives,” with a special emphasis on how they reflected and shaped eighteenth-century ideas about difference among peoples and societies––the kinds of difference that today might be called “race” or “culture.”