According to earth scientists, European colonization of the Americas constituted an ecological disaster of global proportions. The environmental impact of colonization, however, was experienced at every scale as new people, animals, plants, and microbes collided in unprecedented and unanticipated ways. This course will explore all of these scales and introduce students to both the field of environmental history and to the Atlantic World, a term used by scholars to describe interactions between Europeans, Africans, and Americans from the fifteenth to the nineteenth century. The major themes of this course will be the exploration and exploitation of the natural world by Europeans, the creation of knowledge about the natural world, the use of environment as a tool of resistance by enslaved Africans and Indigenous peoples and changing views of the natural world throughout the early modern period.