Topics

SAME AS G57.2901 & G11.2901.

In recent years, a host of new scholarship exploring the relationship between slavery and capitalism has emerged. How might this new canon be reconfigured by a thorough consideration of race and gender in tandem with histories of fungibility and value? Interrogating early Modern notions of finance by asking how they intersected with, shaped, and were shaped by categories of race and gender will garner new understandings of these interrelated processes. Late medieval and early modern modes of accounting cohered around notions of enslavability, and the hereditary mark of race became embedded in how gender produced categories of freedom and slavery—all of which are crucial to the study of economy and race in the Atlantic world. This seminar will explore those intersections between histories of race, gender, and finance that culminate in early modern Atlantic slavery. We will treat the Atlantic world as the dynamic space that it was, attempting to balance engagement across continents and empires though what will primarily come into focus will be the English Atlantic world. . While this is a History course, and the vast majority of the scholars we will engage this semester are Historians, my presumption is that many students in the room will come from other disciplines. Our conversations around the seminar table do not depend on deep historiographical knowledge, though they will be supported by such, rather they depend upon careful reading of the text and engagement with its core organizing principals.