Early Modern Travel and Empire

This course studies early modern empires through travel and other informative writing. The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were an age of empire on the global scale. The empires on which we focus in this course were political and bureaucratic structures designed to deal with plurality. They covered broad areas of the globe, governed many kinds of peoples in different ways, hosted travelers, and managed the friction of contact at their borders, which they constantly sought to expand and defend. By the end of the fifteenth century, new technologies, commercial motives, and political pressures propelled various European powers, including the Spanish, English, Dutch, and French, into the so-called Age of Exploration from which trading and political empires were formed. In this same period empires flourished in Anatolia and Eastern Europe, North Africa, Persia, and India. This class introduces the history of these empires and focuses on their interactions, especially in the writings of the commercial, diplomatic, and private agents who circulated between them.