Topics in the History of the Atlantic Slave Trade

Catalog description

This course will explore the history of the Atlantic slave trade that brought captive Africans as exploitable laborers to North, South, Central America and the Caribbean between the 1500s and the 1800s. This human traffic has long been recognized as foundational for the economic growth of the Americas and Europe, and the making of the modern world. It has also been recognized for its extreme inhumanity, its global reach and its complex effects on the African continent. Course also covers inter-regional slave trafficking within the United States and around Latin America and the Caribbean. The course also addresses this forced migration as a unique process of cultural interaction and cultural change. Sometimes the course will focus more narrowly on specific themes such as the role of gender in shaping Atlantic slave trade history, or the formal and customary and laws and regulations which permitted, regulated and later prohibited this form of human trafficking.