This course examines how racial ideologies shaped the ways early modern Calvinists of African and European descent interpreted the Bible, structured institutions, and engaged with societies in the Dutch Atlantic world. It traces the shift from religious to biological definitions of race in 1704, highlights an African-descended minister’s 1742 challenge to slavery, explores the 1799 debate over African American membership in the Dutch Reformed Church, and follows church members who both criticized slavery and profited from it.

Subject: history, diversity

Stephen T. Staggs holds a PhD and graduate certificate in Ethnohistory from Western Michigan University. A historian of colonial North America, he recently published Calvinists and Indians in the Northeastern Woodlands with the Amsterdam University Press. His research focuses on the interactions between Indigenous, African, and European peoples in the early modern Atlantic World.