Race-Gender-Empire Brit Atlant

Catalog description

This course explores the creation of race as a category of identity in the early Atlantic British empire. Long before the North American colonies became the United States, Great Britain depended on the exploitation of other peoples for its global commercial dominance. Reading works by male and female authors of British, African, and Native American descent from the early days of Atlantic expansion until Britain’s abolition of slavery in the early 19th century, students will examine how the concept and rhetoric of race, particularly notions of gendered race or racialized gender, developed in Britain’s expanding empire.