Criminal Atlantic: Paradoxes of Early Modern Law and Economy

Catalog description

What does it mean for a system of law to be founded on the unlawful seizure of lands, the theft of natural resources, human trafficking, drug smuggling, and the upheaval of prior systems of law? Simultaneously, the early modern North Atlantic and its scattered islands also served as a refuge for outlaw communities of witches, escaped servants and runaway slaves, pirate ‘utopias’, and black-market trade that sustained the dispossessed refugees and fugitives of early colonial racial capitalism, starting in Europe. This course examines the development of the early modern economy and property law through a critical-historical look at the practices of law-breaking that produced them, the fabricated racial categories that sustained them, and the forms of resistance and revolutionary self-emancipation that people enacted throughout it all. Readings may include texts by John Locke, Olaudah Equiano, W.E.B. Du Bois, Eric Hobsbawm, E.P. Thompson, Angela Davis, Michel Foucault, Silvia Federici, Marcus Rediker, James C. Scott, Cedric Robinson, Saidiya Hartman, and others.