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Summary: Spanish and Portuguese colonization in the Americas, from the fifteenth century to the early nineteenth. Stress is on political economy and on the role of the colonial Americas and the broader Atlantic, but coverage extends to the topics of religion, the church, borderlands and frontiers, warfare, disease, enslavement and slavery, women and work, environmental transformation, and state formation. Readings include a combination of primary sources and interpretive articles and book chapters by established historians.

From the syllabus: The purpose of this course is to help you make sense of Latin America and its place in the world today. Yes, you read right, it is about the present: to me, the whole, urgent, point of history in the epoch of ecosystemic collapse and global warming is to understand how we came to be here and now. Only armed with this understanding of the historic logic that is embedded in our present can we create viable alternatives – if we choose to. Grasping this logic requires that we look deeper into the past, because the processes and systems that we live with now were shaped over centuries, and are not the simple product of the last few decades, or the actions of this presidency or that.

Over the next twelve weeks, you will discover how what is happening in Mexico, Brazil, Venezuela, Argentina, Central America, and pretty much anywhere you’ve read about in the media in recent times, actually has its roots in the colonial period. That’s when the devastation of the Amazon began; when migrations were first triggered; when the region’s economies were embedded in the nascent capitalist order; when human rights as they are currently defined began taking shape; when the color red became so bright; when chocolate, cigarettes, corn flakes, and potato chips were made possible. When the baroque exploded. When Castilian and Portuguese became global languages. The connections among all this and more is what we will unpack.

We begin by studying Amerindian as well as Iberian societies before they met, clashed, and meshed on American shores, and end the course with the revolutions that ushered in the modern nation states. Lectures will focus broadly on processes of social and economic transformations, relating these transformations to the lived realities of Amerindians, Africans, Europeans and their descendants. Our website, Listening to Colonial Latin America: Music, Sound and Silence as Historical Sources, extends our understanding of the period through music recordings, films, images and discussions.