As European colonial powers established their empires in the sixteenth century, they turned the Atlantic Ocean into a space of commerce, labour, and terrible suffering, forging connections between people on four continents. Looking at a selection of texts written across more than five hundred years, this course will explore how writers conceptualised this Atlantic world and how they represented the sailors, servants, convicts, traders, and enslaved people who kept it in violent motion. We will read texts by a range of writers, from enslavers to abolitionists and transatlantic radicals. Starting with the early days of Britain’s colonial project in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, we will take in the Haitian revolution in the eighteenth century, the abolition of slavery in the nineteenth, and national liberation struggles that forced the dismantling of European empires in the twentieth. The course ends with one week in which we’ll look at twenty first-century writing that creatively explores colonial archives to recover alternative passages of Atlantic history. Each week, we will study a different kind of writing and use it to explore a particular aspect of Atlantic history. Primarily reading texts written in English (alongside a small amount of French and Spanish writing in translation), we will consider the range of genres that writers have used to describe, interpret, and shape the Atlantic world, including adventure fiction, partisan essays, sentimental poetry, heroic tragedy, and other, more experimental forms. In exploring how knowledge, goods, and people circulated in the Atlantic, producing new ideas of human difference and human freedom, we will also engage with twentieth- and twenty first-century critical writing on race and racism, slavery, capitalism, colonialism, and the Black Atlantic.
- Teacher: Robert Stearn