Caribbean and Atlantic World: Introduction
The Negro slave trade was the first step in modern world commerce, followed by the modern theory of colonial expansion.
W. E. B. DuBois, The Negro (1915).
When three centuries ago the slaves came to the West Indies they entered directly into the large-scale agriculture of the sugar plantation, which was a modern system. It . . . required that the slaves live together in a social relation far closer than any proletariat of the time. The cane when reaped had to be rapidly transported to what was factory production. The product was shipped abroad for sale. Even the cloth the slaves wore and the food they ate was imported. The Negroes, therefore, from the very start lived a life that was in its essence a modern life. That is their history - as far as I have been able to discover, a unique history.
C. L. R. James, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint Louverture and the San Domingo Revolution (1938; 1963).
Now to talk to me about black studies as if it's something that [only] concerned black people is an utter denial. This is the history of Western Civilization. I can't see it otherwise. This is the history that black people and white people and all serious students of modern history and the history of the world have to know. To say it's some kind of ethnic problem is a lot of nonsense.
C. L. R. James, "Black Studies and the Contemporary Student," (1969).
Scholarly explorations of political, economic, and cultural linkages among Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Americas have recently revived the notion of Atlantic studies. As the quotations above illustrate, the conception is not new. At the same time, burgeoning interest in probing the origins, reconfigurations, and consequences of the trans-Atlantic movements of peoples, ideas, and commodities has raised questions about the adequacy of historical frameworks premised on the national-state. The Atlantic World concentration brings together students and faculty with interdisciplinary research and teaching interests in the historical connections fashioned by slavery and the slave trade, slave emancipations and post-abolition labor regimes, colonial and anti-colonial liberation movements.