Cultures & Contexts: New World Encounters

Catalog description

During the Atlantic Age of Sail, from the fifteenth though the nineteenth centuries, the peoples of four continents—Europe, Africa, North American and South America—began to interact in sustained and complex ways for the first time. They brought to their encounters diverse cosmologies (beliefs about the spiritual world), epistemologies (systems of knowing and gathering empirical knowledge), family formations (networks of kinship), state configurations (forms of political organization), trading patterns (systems of material accumulation and exchange), and traditions of war and peace (forms of conflict and negotiation across groups). From their divergent approaches to the distribution and regulation of land, population, and goods arose a complex new transoceanic system that would tie together these four corners of the Atlantic. Reading early historical accounts, travel narratives, personal memoirs, novels, poems, and plays, we see how Atlantic peoples make sense of their changing worlds and the creative tensions of encounter, and come to understand the productive conflicts that ultimately gave rise to an Age of Atlantic Revolutions.