The World Transformed (1789-1914)

The underlying premise of this course on the 19th-century global world can be summed up in a single observation made by the late Edward Said. In Culture and Imperialism, Said observed that the historical experience of empire is common to both the colonizer and the colonized. Until recently, the stories of the colonizer and the colonized were often told in isolation, segregated by the habits of academic departments. Throughout the 20th century, the Western Civilization course presented a teleological narrative that dwelled mostly on the story of Europe. In the early 1980s, a dedicated community of high school teachers, community college instructors and professors at four-year universities came together to organize a new way of telling human history. Out of their efforts emerged the field of global history. By the early 2000s, buttressed by patterns of globalization and changes in university structures, the concepts of "global" and "world" history were everywhere. This course will survey recent trends in the field of global history by reading the seminal works of Christopher Bayly and Jürgen Osterhammel, alongside a selection of texts dwelling on such themes as space and time, revolutions, cities, mobilities, nationalisms and imperialisms, the state and education, labor, socialism, capitalism, energy, religion, knowledge, civilizing missions and mass violence.