University College London

This course uses an array of primary and secondary source readings to explore the emergence of the system of intensive colonial exploitation that we know as the plantation system. The course investigates the economic, political, legal, cultural, intellectual, and technological innovations that undergirded the development of the plantation as a colonial institution. It will also explore the role of bound and enslaved people in resisting and reshaping the institution. The seminar engages extensively with the historiographic debate about the relationship between the plantation system and the emergence of capitalism. It focuses upon developments across the Americas between the 16th and the late-18th century, drawing from the Portuguese, English, French, and Dutch empires and the newly independent United States.

 

The course helps students understand, through ethnographic, political, documentary, and historical material (written and film), key themes of the past 150 years in the former Soviet empire, including revolution, collectivization, socialism, Cold War, gender, art, propaganda, lifestyle, religion, nationalism and identity, and more.

This course critically explores the history and current state of political geography and geopolitics and examines empirical issues from the vantage point of the spatiality and materiality of politics and power. The course develops the complementary insights that politics and power are fundamentally spatial, that geographical phenomena have political dimensions and implications, and that geographic space is infused with both power and political potential.

Our strength of beliefs influence our decision making. But how should we measure strength of belief, and what rational constraints are there on one's strength of belief? How should one's strengths of belief change in response to evidence? And how exactly ought one's strength of beliefs feed through into rational decision making? These are the central questions that students tackle in this course, where they are introduced to the probabilistic representation of strength of belief, arguments for the rationality of probabilistic degrees of belief, arguments for various rational constraints on those beliefs - including constraints concerning belief updates in response to evidence - and to decision theory.