Centers and Periphery in Atlantic World

Objectives

The main goal of the curricular unit is to provide students a global, integrated and coherent view on the birth and development of the European Atlantic expansion and on the formation of the Atlantic world. It is intended to give students a broad view on the successive hegemonies, its geographical areas of influence and its patterns of power from the perspective of connected histories and entangled histories and, as well, the most important dynamics and structures in the process of historical formation of the political and economic Atlantic identities from the beginning of the 15th century until today.

1. Generic skills:

1. Organization and fluency of oral and written expression.

2. Capacity of analysis and synthesis.

3. Capacity to cope with complex and contradictory information.

4. Capacity to conceptualize and to question.

Program

1. Atlantic studies: “ the Atlantic as an historiographic object and as a fiels of research.I

2. 1. “Overseas expansion”, “empire”, “imperialism”, “world-economy”, “world-sistem”, “colony”.

2. 2. Centre(s) versus periphery(ies) or imperial networks?

2. 3. Connected histories and entangled histories: the Atlantic as the stage of many and entangled histories.

II

1. From the Iberian overseas expansion to the North-European competition.

2. The struggle for hegemony in the 17th-18th centuries.

3. From the revolutions to the World Wars.

4. Nato’s Atlantic, the Atlantic Rim and the new world order.

III

1. The political and institutional models: between kingdoms and empires.

2. Political centres and colonies: dominations or negotiation?

3. Power and its agents.

III

1. Economic hegemonies: a continuous struggle in the Atlantic.

2. Commercial networks and the autonomous dynamic of the peripheries.

3. Flows, rythms and economic dynamics.

4. The activity of the trading elites.

Teaching Methodologies

1. In the curricular unit the teaching methodologies will be of two kinds: magistral and student-centered active methodologies (oral presentation and debates).

2. The teacher’s magistral presentation will focus mainly on the theoretic issues and in the presentation of historical examples and of empirical data.

3. Students will read and debate in the class texts related with the central problems that are studied in the curricular unit. This will show if the concepts were correctly understood. Thus, the students themselves will participate in teaching in a way that we believe will improve the integration of teaching and learning.

4. Students should write a final essay with 20pp. A4 max.

Bibliography

BAILYN, Bernard, Atlantic History: Concept and Contours, Cambridge, Mass.-London, Harvard University Press, 2005.

Braudel, Fernand, Civilização Material, Economia e Capitalismo, séculos XV a XVIII, Edições Teorema, 1993.

BUTEL, Paul, The Atlantic, London, Routledge, 1999.

CAÑIZARES-ESGUERRA, Jorge; SEEMAN, Erik (eds.), The Atlantic in Global History, 1500-2000, Upper Saddle River, NJ, Prentice Hall, 2006.

CURTIN, Philip D., The Rise and Fall of the Plantation Complex. Essays in Atlantic History, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1990.

GREENE, Jack P.; MORGAN, Philip D. (eds.), Atlantic History: A Critical Appraisal, New York, Oxford University Press, 2009.

KLOOSTER, Wim, Revolutions in the Atlantic World. A Comparative History, New York and London, New York University Press, 2009.

LÉON, Pierre (dir.), História Económica e Social do Mundo, Lisboa, Sá da Costa Editora, 1982 1983 [ed. original: 1977 1978], 6 vols., 12 tomos.