Università Roma Tre

This course is designed to introduce graduate students to the methods, theories, and criticisms of picturing the early days of global and world modern history. Seeks to familiarize students with major historiographical debates and definitions concerning the first phase of intensification of global connections that began in the 15th century. The course retraces the different ways in which various scholars have analyzed the dramatic expansion of intercultural interactions and economic exchanges over the centuries that led to the formalization of the modern nation-state. By the early 17th century, European merchants had established maritime trading networks across the Atlantic Ocean and east to India and China. These nets allowed them to purchase fur, tea, sugar, spices, and other luxury goods in high demand across Europe. In the Americas, European settlers began to use large numbers of enslaved Africans to growing labor-intensive crops, such as sugar cane and tobacco for export to Europe. Portuguese, and later Dutch, merchants acquired many of these slaves from trading posts on the West African coast. Once the slaves had been sold in the Americas, merchants used the proceeds to buy local goods to sell in Europe. This circular trading pattern dominated the Atlantic economy until the 1800s. European nations closely monitored their trading networks to protect them from rival states. The Dutch East India Company, for example, had its own private army and navy, which was used to defend its trade links with India and Southeast Asia.
Global trade has changed patterns of production and consumption around the world and has led to the rapid growth and development of England and the Netherlands at the expense of the old colonial powers such as Spain and Portugal. In this course, we will examine the growth of global trading networks in the 1600s and assess the political, social, and cultural impact of these networks on the peoples of Africa, Europe, and the Americas. Particular attention will be paid to the global circulation of objects and books in the first phase of the modern world.

The basic text will be Charles H. Parker, Global Interactions in the Early Modern Age, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2010.
At the beginning of the course a syllabus will be distributed with the assigned weekly readings