week 4: across the atlantic

With a foundation in the pre-Conquest Americas, this week we turn to the Iberian Peninsula, the close-in Atlantic islands, and to Africa to look at the roots of conquest in the so-called “Old World.” Consider the culture of conquest cultivated by Isabella and Ferdinand in the 1490s, and also what lessons Iberians learned of conquest and expansion in their control of Atlantic Islands and the trade in enslaved captives with West Africa.

September 10 (Tuesday) – Castile and Portugal

• “Las Siete Partidas: Laws on Jews.”

• “King Ferdinand, Marriage Concessions (1469)” in Jon Cowans, ed. Early Modern Spain: A Documentary History (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003): 7-9.

• “Surrender Treaty of the Kingdom of Granada (1491)” in Cowans, Early Modern Spain: 15-19.

• “Decree of Expulsion of the Jews (1492)” in Cowans, Early Modern Spain: 20-23.

September 12 (Thursday) – Atlantic Africa

• 1619 Project, “The sugar that saturates the merican diet has a barbaric history as the ‘white gold’ that fueled slavery,” Khalil Gibran Muhammad.

• John K. Thornton, “The African Background,” A Cultural History of the Atlantic World, 1250–1820 (Cambridge Univ. Press, 2012), pp. 60-100.