Course Description:

The Caribbean is one of the most crucial geographic, political, and cultural sites on earth for any accurate, coherent, and historically conscious understanding, through documentary analysis and through your own documentary writing, of the origins, nature, and course of the modern age.

Though the importance of Caribbean history from 1500-1800 is frequently overlooked, it and that period are an origin of economic, industrial, cultural, military, and geopolitical reality leading to the evolution of a later period of colonialism and of European/Anglo-American expansionism. That is why it is crucial to the creation and course of modernism (1800-1900). As Caribbean scholar Perry Mars says, “Despite its relatively small geographic and demographic size, the Caribbean still boasts of a historically dynamic and disproportionate impact on world politics.”