HI153: Making of the Modern World
Making of the Modern World (MMW) studies modern history from c.1800 to the present, avoiding Eurocentric limitations (i.e. viewing Europe / Europeans as the centre of the universe) and tracking the wars, atrocities, epidemics, revolutions, liberations, and continuations that have brought us to where we are today; a so-called “modern” world still reeling in the aftershocks generated by the historical forces of the past two centuries. As each week moves from the sugar plantations of Cuba to revolutionary Haiti, the Fascism of the 1930s to the Theresienstadt Ghetto, post-war Britain to post-colonial Kenya, and the modern drug trade, you will track, consider, and discuss historical shifts on a global scale.
Analysing primary sources, querying historical theory, and developing your own ideas as historians, this module will equip you to consider Global History as an enormous, entangled web traversed (often forcibly) by peoples, goods, ideas, pathogens, and extremisms. Writing essays and exams, collaborating on feedback, and recording your own historical podcast, you should aim to complete this first-year module confident in your knowledge and abilities to dive deeper into the historical subjects that capture your imagination in your subsequent years at Warwick.
Aims and outcomes
By the end of the module, students should be able to:
- Identify a range of theoretical frameworks, conceptual approaches and historiographical debates.
- Gain a broad understanding of the historical processes of the later modern era and of associated terminologies in global perspective.
- Identify and critically engage with related primary sources including official documents, statistics, memoirs, oral history, film, music, painting, architecture, radio, television, museums, memorials, and monuments.
- Demonstrate an ability to work effectively with others and recognise factors that affect team performance.
- Develop their own voice as young intellectuals who can orient themselves in the current difficult political times.
- Write well-researched essays on a university level.
- Read and understand academic texts.
Indicative readings
Priya Satia, Time’s Monster: How History Makes History
Raj Patel and Jason W Moore, A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things: a Guide to Capitalism, Nature, and the Future of the Planet
Ngugi wa Thiong'o, Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature
David T. Courtwright, Forces of Habit: Drugs and the Making of the Modern World
Henry Louis Gates Jr., Black in Latin America