Subject Area: History

This course explores the interrelation of economic change, social structure, cultural life and politics from the origins of the American Revolution to the aftermath of the end of slavery. It will argue that territorial expansion, social reform and slavery form key pillars of nineteenth-century American statemaking. At the same time, it will explain the emergence, by 1890, of a market-oriented nation-state based upon free labour.

Slavery and Freedom will place this formative period of U.S. history in comparative and transnational perspective, exploring its relationships with Europe and Asia and comparing it both to slave colonies in the Caribbean and to other settler colonies in the Americas and Australia.