How were the peoples and cultures of the early modern Atlantic world transformed by the encounters between Portuguese missionaries and Amerindians, African slaves and Dutch merchants, Spanish conquistadors and indigenous leaders in colonial Latin America? This course will examine the history of this dynamic region by looking at the nature of these interactions from pre-Columbian times through early European overseas exploration and settlement up to the nineteenth-century wars of independence. We will address how class, gender, racial and ethnic identities took on particular meanings as peoples, ideas, and commodities circulated and intermingled between Africa, Europe, and the Americas. We will look at documents such as court cases to explore the ways in which human dramas were transformed into written records, and the means historians use to reconstruct those dramas. Through close readings of primary sources, we will come to understand how plantation slavery, mining, and other colonial institutions shaped peoples’ experiences and how these same individuals struggled to adapt these imposed institutional structures to suit their own needs. Finally, we will seek answers to why European colonial domination lasted as long as it did, what the primary causes were of its demise, and in what ways modern Latin American nations can be seen as heirs to the legacies of the colonial system.

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