Introduction to my class
The Atlantic World is defined as the world created by the interaction among Europe, Africa and the Americas (America—this includes North and South America and the Caribbean). The United States did not develop in isolation. The mainland British colonies formed an integral part of a system shaped by sugar in the Caribbean, silver from Latin America, and money from Europe, its inhabitants (largely African slaves) coming from all over the globe. The transatlantic slave trade and the products of slave labor drove an economic engine that tied together the three continents of the Atlantic world. This course examines the Atlantic Slave Trade and New World Slavery as a labor system and its relationship to the following: the emergence of market economies, definitions of race attendant to European commercial expansion, the cultures of Africans in the diaspora, slave control and resistance, free black people and the social structure of New World slave societies, and emancipation and its aftermath. We shall spend considerable time considering how historians have understood these crucial issues.