This is an introductory meeting to familiarise students with the general outline and requirements of the module. The module will consider both the thematic dimensions of global history--gender, economy, globalisation, material culture, and modernity--and the organisation and distribution of the world according to social-geographical units. To set the stage for discussion in the subsequent weeks, we will begin by delving into various broad-based theories and approaches to the historical study of the globe.

Readings

Core:

Shu-mei Shih, ‘Global Literature and the Technologies of Recognition’, PMLA 119, no. 1 (2004): 16-30. [e-journal]

Maxine Berg, 'Global History: Approaches and New Directions', in Writing the History of the Global: Challenges for the Twenty-First Century, ed. Maxine Berg (Oxford University Press, 2013), 1-18. [e-book]

Prasenjit Duara, The Crisis of Global Modernity: Asian Traditions and a Sustainable Future (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014). [e-book]

Further:

Immanuel Wallerstein, 'The European World Economy: Periphery versus External Arena', in The Modern World System I: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World-Economy in the Sixteenth Century (University of California Press, 2011 [1974]), chap. 6, 300-344. [e-book]

Ann Laura Stoler and Frederick Cooper, 'Between Metropole and Colony: Rethinking a Research Agenda', in Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World, ed. Frederick Cooper and Ann Laura Stoler (Duke University Press, 1997), 1-56. [e-book]

Ann Laura Stoler and Carole McGranahan, 'Introduction: Refiguring Imperial Terrains', in Imperial Formations, ed. Ann Laura Stoler, Carole McGranahan, and Peter C. Perdue (Santa Fe: School for Advanced Research Press, 2007), 3-42. [e-book]

Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper, 'Imperial Trajectories', in Empires in World History: Power and the Politics of Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010), 1-22.

David Palumbo-Liu, Bruce Robbins, and Nirvana Tanoukhi, eds., Immanuel Wallerstein and the Problem of the World: System, Scale, Culture (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011).

Shu-mei Shih, ‘The Concept of the Sinophone’, PMLA 126, no. 3 (2011): 709-718. [e-journal]