HSTY 345 COURSE SCHEDULE

Note: All dates and assignments are subject to change based on university decisions about modality, weather-related closings, and health concerns. Please be aware of any announcements made in class or via the course website.

Last updated: March 4, 2022

Date Topic Read to Prepare for Class Do to Prepare for Class
Wed., Jan. 19 Course introduction
Mon., Jan. 24 What is Atlantic history?
  • David Armitage, “Three Concepts of Atlantic History,” in The British Atlantic World, 1500-1800, 2nd ed., edited by David Armitage and Michael J. Braddick (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 13–29.
  • Cécile Vidal, “The Reluctance of French Historians to Address Atlantic History,” Southern Quarterly 43 (2006): 153–89.
  • Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, “Some Caveats About the ‘Atlantic’ Paradigm,” History Compass 1 (2003): 1–4.
Wed., Jan. 26 Four Continents, Part I António Vieira, “Sermon of St. Anthony,” in António Vieira: Six Sermons, ed. Mónica Leal da Silva and Liam Matthew Brockey (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018), 61–92.
Mon., Jan. 31 Four Continents, Part II ʻAbd al-Raḥmān ibn ʻAbd Allāh Saʻdī, Timbuktu and the Songhay Empire: Al-Saʻdī’s Ta’rīkh Al-Sūdān Down to 1613, and Other Contemporary Documents, ed. John O. Hunwick (Leiden: Brill, 2003).

  • Read Ta’rīkh Al-Sūdān, ch. 7 (pp. 29–34) and “Leo Africanus’s Description of the Middle Niger, Hausaland and Bornu,” pp. 272–91
Wed., Feb. 2 Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade, Part I Smallwood, Saltwater Slavery, introduction, chapters 1–3
Mon., Feb. 7 Oceanic Circulation
Wed., Feb. 9 Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade, Part II Smallwood, Saltwater Slavery, chapters 4–7
Mon., Feb. 14 Researching Slavery
Wed., Feb. 16 Data, Archives, and Inequity
  • Jennifer L. Morgan, Reckoning with Slavery: Gender, Kinship, and Capitalism in the Early Black Atlantic (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2021), chapter 3.
  • Filipa Ribeiro da Silva and Stacey Sommerdyk, “Reexamining the Geography and Merchants of the West Central African Slave Trade: Looking Behind the Numbers,” African Economic History 38 (2010): 77–105.
 Source Analysis 1
Mon., Feb. 21 Presidents’ Day No class meeting
Wed., Feb. 23 States, Corporations, and Other Schemes
  • Philip J. Stern, “‘Bundles of Hyphens:’ Corporations as Legal Communities in the Early Modern British Empire,” in Legal Pluralism and Empires, 1500-1850, edited by Lauren Benton and Richard J. Ross (New York: New York University Press, 2013), 21–48.
  • Regina Grafe and Alejandra Irigoin, “A Stakeholder Empire: The Political Economy of Spanish Imperial Rule in America,” Economic History Review 65, no. 2 (May 2012): 609–51.
 Source Analysis 2
Mon., Feb. 28 Staples Theory Quantitative Exercise 2
Wed., Mar. 2 Merchants and Traders
  • David Hancock, “Self-Organized Complexity and the Emergence of an Atlantic Market Economy, 1651-1815: The Case of Madeira,” in The Atlantic Economy during the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries: Organization, Operation, Practice, and Personnel, edited by Peter A. Coclanis (Columbia, S.C.: University of South Carolina Press, 2005), 30–71.
  • Pierre Gervais, “A Merchant or a French Atlantic? Eighteenth-Century Account Books as Narratives of a Transnational Merchant Political Economy,” French History 25, no. 1 (2011): 28–47.
 Source Analysis 3
Mon., Mar. 7 Mercantilism
Wed., Mar. 9 Pirates and Other Illicit Trade Slave trade project due
Mon., Mar. 14
Wed., Mar. 16		 Spring Break No class meeting
Mon., Mar. 21 Wars for Empire
Wed., Mar. 23 Continental Interiors
  • Molly Warsh, “Political Ecology in the Spanish Caribbean,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 71, no. 4 (Oct. 2014), 517–50.
  • Cécile Fromont, “Common Threads: Cloth, Colour, and the Slave Trade in Early Modern Kongo and Angola,” Art History 41, no. 5 (November 2018): 838–67.
 Source Analysis 4
Mon., Mar. 28 Eighteenth-Century Expansion
Wed., Mar. 30 Women’s Work Anishanslin, Portrait of a Woman in Silk, 1–103.
Mon., Apr. 4 Producing Empire
  • Anishanslin, Portrait of a Woman in Silk, 107–61.
  • Strother E. Roberts, “The Fight for a New England Turpentine Trade: Empire, Markets, and the Colonial Landscape at the Turn of the Eighteenth Century,” The New England Quarterly 92, no. 3 (September 2019): 391–430.
 Source Analysis 5
Wed., Apr. 6 Colonial Consumption Anishanslin, Portrait of a Woman in Silk, 165–221.
Mon., Apr. 11 Luxury and Taste Anishanslin, Portrait of a Woman in Silk, 225–312.
Wed., Apr. 13 Author Visit Prepare a question for Dr. Anishanslin
Mon., Apr. 18 Patriots’ Day No class meeting
Wed., Apr. 20 Consumer Culture
Mon., Apr. 25 Imperial Reforms Advertising project due
Wed., Apr. 27 Bubbles and Corruption Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, edited with an Introduction, Notes, Marginal Summary and an Enlarged Index by Edwin Cannan (London: Methuen, 1904), Book IV, introduction, chapters 1-2.
Mon., May 2 Alternative Frameworks
  • Joyce E. Chaplin, “The Atlantic Ocean and Its Contemporary Meanings, 1492-1808,” in Atlantic History: A Critical Appraisal, ed. Jack P. Greene and Philip D. Morgan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 35–51.
  • Peter A. Coclanis, “Beyond Atlantic History,” in Atlantic History: A Critical Appraisal, ed. Jack P. Greene and Philip D. Morgan (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 337–56.
 Source Analysis 6
Wed., May 4 The End of the Atlantic?

Final assignment due on date assigned by the Registrar.