Module description
The modules offered in each academic year are subject to change in line with staff availability and student demand: there is no guarantee every module will run. Module descriptions and information may vary between years.
World History is a way of thinking about, approaching and doing history, as well as a way of understanding the history of the world. Though diversely understood, studied, and presented, its core concerns are comparison, interconnections, and exchange across borders—challenging more traditional nation-state based histories or histories centred on Europe and the West. This first-year module is an introduction to World History.
Starting in 1870, a moment that some historians think of as “a world connecting” in ways significantly different from the early modern period (Rosenberg et al, 2012), the module takes students through developments and events of global importance or relevance in the next century and a half. Three strands will particularly stand out:
• Globalisation and its history: the expanding, uneven and contested processes of economic, technological, social, cultural and intellectual integration of the globe since the 1870s; space-time compression; local formulations of global horizons and imaginings, global consciousness, and global governance.
• Imperialism and its consequences: emancipations and decolonisations; the formation of and resistance to racialised global orders; the persistence of unequal relations in global politics;
• Histories that do not take Europe and the West as an epicenter, but rather offer de-centred and diverse perspectives on everyday life across the globe and on world historical processes and events (world wars and revolutions, 1960s protest movements, the Cold War, consumerism, poverty, political ideologies and alternative futures.
• The health of our planet and of mankind: energy, natural and environmental resources and catastrophes, the challenges of planetary sustainability, the biosphere and pandemics.
“World History 1870s-2000s” therefore asks students to think thematically and transversally; to detect connections and contrasts between events and phenomena across the globe; to think beyond dominant Western-centred narratives; and to consider multiple possibilities of periodising the last hundred and fifty years—in short, to develop “a world historical imagination”.
Assessment details
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1 x 3 hour examination (100%)
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Teaching pattern
20 x 1-hour lectures (weekly); 20 x 1-hour seminars (weekly)