Last modified: 31 May 2022 13:22
This course aims to introduce students to Atlantic history by using one of its key themes: race. It seeks to provide an introduction not merely to broader frameworks of Atlantic world history, but also to a range of methodological approaches in the study of social, cultural, political and intellectual history. The course begins by looking at methodological approaches to Atlantic world history before charting ancient and medieval ideas on race, racialism and xenophobia. The first half of the course focuses on the ways in which exotic peoples and lands were represented in European texts, and the social history of early settlement and colonial exploitation. Five sessions then follow on the history of racial ideas as they related to religion, science, society, human ‘progress’ and the management of globalising empires. The course then turns to examine the twin crises of revolution and abolitionism and their role in the development of racial ideas and practices in Europe and the Americas. The final session explores the reinvention of race in the diffusion of Darwinian evolution throughout the Atlantic world. A research-based approach to teaching and learning will be taken throughout, partly by drawing directly on the course organiser’s own research, and through a focus on the analysis of seminal texts in each seminar.
| Study Type | Undergraduate | Level | 3 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Term | First Term | Credit Points | 30 credits (15 ECTS credits) |
| Campus | Aberdeen | Sustained Study | No |
| Co-ordinators |
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Week 1. Introduction: Defining Ethnicity, Race, Racialism, Racism
Week 2. Ethnic Diasporas
Week 3. Fluidity of Race in Early Modern Europe and Africa
Week 4. Colonising Racism in the New World
Week 5. Racial Theology: Preadamites, Monogenesis, Polygenesis
Week 6. Sciences of Racial Difference: Physiognomy, Climate
Theory, and the Anatomy of Human Nature
Week 7. Ethnographical Travel Narratives
Week 8. Imperial Race Relations
Week 9. Racial Limits of Natural Liberties in the Age of
Revolution
Week 10. Liberating Race in Nineteenth-Century Abolitionism
Week 11. Modernising Race in Darwinian Evolution
Week 12. Revisions
Information on contact teaching time is available from the course guide.
2 source analyses (20% each)
Discussion board participation (20%)
Online Exam (40%)
resit: 3 hour exam
There are no assessments for this course.
| Knowledge Level | Thinking Skill | Outcome |
|---|---|---|
| Factual | Understand | Have an understanding of the ways in which ideas of race developed in historical contexts. |
| Factual | Understand | Recognise the influence of geographical, imperial and social contexts on the intellectual and institutional constructions of race in the Atlantic world. |
| Procedural | Evaluate | Be aware of the complex relationships among commerce, religion and science within conceptual ideas of race. |
| Procedural | Analyse | Be able to analyse primary source texts, situating them in terms of context, genre and argument. |
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