The Caribbean and/in Britain, c. 1640-1700 - Single View

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The seventeenth century saw Britain’s entry to the imperial war zone of the Caribbean. Capturing colonizers’ imagination, the region became the object of numerous pieces of writings. Descriptions of tropical nature unknown to most Britons at the time introduced tropes that still exert their influence today, while the plantation attracted ample attention in its own right. A violent laboratory for new commodities, racial identities, and ways of organizing labour, the plantation was to have profound implications for Caribbean history and the Atlantic world at large. Likewise, the lifestyle of the planters, whose upper echelons became Britain’s nouveaux riches, received much comment ranging from admiration to derision.

This class will approach the Caribbean in the 1600s through the lens of the literature produced in those turbulent times. By reading island descriptions, satire, political pamphlets, and Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko (arguably the first novel written in English), we will trace contemporaries’ views — and incomprehension — of the history unfolding around them. Discussion topics will include bonded labour, race, attitudes towards tropical nature, and consumption. Attempts will be made to clarify the world-historical significance of the seventeenth-century Caribbean, and to highlight that period’s relevance for issues like racialized labour and tourism today.

Please purchase:

Horne, Gerald. The Apocalypse of Settler Colonialism: The Roots of Slavery, White Supremacy, and Capitalism in 17th Century North America and the Caribbean. New York: Monthly Review, 2018.

Behn, Aphra. Oroonoko (Norton Critical Editions). Ed. Joanna Lipking. New York and London: W.W. Norton, 1997.

Ligon, Richard. A True and Exact History of the Island of Barbados. Ed. Karen Ordahl Kupperman. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 2011.

Additional readings will be provided via Moodle.

Students are expected to attend the class regularly and to have read the assigned texts. Since our topic requires a solid grasp of developments in seventeenth-century Britain and the Caribbean, students should be prepared to read a fair share of history texts alongside the ‘primary’ literature. Students seeking to get either an ungraded pass/fail note or 3 credit points have to submit one reading response, once per semester either minutes or a thesis statement, and, at the end of the course, a reflection. Students seeking to get 6 credit points are required to submit a term paper instead of the reflection, in addition to the other course components.