Download Historical Tripos Part I Paper 21 Empires and World History from the

Historical Tripos Part I Paper 21
Empires and World History from the Fifteenth Century to the First World War
Course Guide 2015-2016
Course description
This course addresses one of the most important historical questions of our time: how did the modern
world come to be? In order to answer this complex and wide-ranging question, the course ranges over the
long run of global history and spans much of the world, from the silver mines of Peru and the sugar
plantations of Barbados to the Eurasian heartlands of the Qing and Ottoman empires, and from the
penal colony of New South Wales to the port-cities of South-East Asia. The course focuses in particular
on the part played by imperial states and populations – European and non-European alike – in the
making of the early modern world. For to understand this world, whose various regions were integrated
as never before into a single, deeply uneven system of global exchange – a world characterised by cultural
connection, convergence and intermingling, but also by dogged differences, by brutal coercion and stark
inequality – we must understand how empires worked, and what they sought to achieve. What systems of
economic extraction, production and exchange, and of political coercion, persuasion and negotiation, did
imperial states devise at different moments in world history? On what legal and administrative
mechanisms, sovereign arrangements and legitimating fictions did they rely? And how did their various
populations respond to such tactics and techniques of imperial rule? This not only a course in top-down
history, focusing on the administrative structures and great men of empire, from Süleyman the
Magnificent to Clive of India, but one that pays attention to the actions and thoughts of imperial subjects,
to merchants and missionaries, peasants, slaves and settlers – to their religious beliefs and conversions,
their accommodations and evasions, their resistance and their revolutions.
Accordingly, the course begins with the momentous political developments that shook early modern
Eurasia – the growth of the Ottoman, Mughal and Qing empires, and the growing ambitions of the
Iberian states that sent their soldiers, friars and merchants out into the Atlantic and Indian Oceans. It
then moves on to consider the ‘great divergence’ and the establishment of Dutch and English corporate
imperialism in South and South-East Asia, and the revolutionary upheavals and slave revolts of the late
eighteenth-century ‘imperial meridian’. Finally, in its last third, it turns to the nineteenth-century world,
examining on the one hand the novel financial, legal and technological instruments European states
deployed in their pursuit of imperial domination, and on the other the efforts of non-European polities to
reform their own states and societies, and of non-European thinkers to devise new political futures free
of empire. Throughout, it never loses sight of the specificities of regional history and the singularity of
human experience.
This is a course, then, that moves up and down scales, seeking to introduce you at once to the large-scale
processes that made the modern world, and to the rich regional historiographies of Africa and the Middle
East, Latin America and the Caribbean, the Indian Ocean and the Pacific, South, South-East, and East
Asia.
Teaching
This is a course that rewards an integrated approach. Your supervisor will help you to select topics that
follow on from one another, enabling you to pick out a path through the course. It is worth pointing out,
however, that you are strongly encouraged to take full opportunity of the course’s breadth, rather than
concentrating on a particular region or period. You are also encouraged to set particular topics in context,
and to think in comparative terms. In other words, it is worth thinking about the connections and
comparisons, and the points of similarity and contrast, which emerge between particular topics, rather
than thinking of each essay as a freestanding unit.
The lectures are designed to help you to see these thematic connections. The core lectures, in particular,
will address broad themes in global history, while suites of lectures on particular parts of the world, from
Africa and Latin America to the Indian Ocean, South Asia, China and the Ottoman world are designed to
give you a firm grounding in specific histories and historiographical debates. You are encouraged to
discuss which lectures to attend with your supervisor at the beginning of term, as you plot your course
through the paper.
Lectures
Michaelmas Term
DR A. ARSAN
Empires and world history from the fifteenth century to the First World War (Eight lectures) F. 11
DR Z. GROVES
Africa in world history
(Four lectures, weeks 1-4) W.10
DR G. RAMOS
Latin America in world history
(Four lectures, weeks 5-8) W.10
DR H. PFEIFER AND DR A. ARSAN
The Ottoman world, c. 1500-1914 (Four lectures, weeks 1-2 and 4)
Th. 11, and (week 4 only) Th. 10
PROF. A. BASHFORD
Pacific history (Four lectures, weeks 5-8) Th. 11
DR L. DENAULT
State and Society in colonial India (Eight lectures, weeks 1-4 are relevant) Tu. 9
DR R. LEOW
China, Empire to Republic (Eight lectures, weeks 1-2 are relevant.)
M. 10
Lent Term
DR R. LEOW
The imperial world in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (Four lectures, weeks 1-4) M. 10
DR A. ARSAN
Global Islam (Four lectures, weeks 1-4) Th. 12
DR J. SLIGHT
The European empires and Islam (Two lectures, weeks 1-2, week 1 is relevant.) Tu. 9
DR M. SINHA
Anti-colonial texts (Two lectures, weeks 1-2 week 1 is relevant) F. 10
PROF. D. LIEVEN
Russian imperialism (Four lectures, weeks 5-8) M. 10
DR C. DEJUNG
Indian economy and world capitalism (Two lectures, week 3) F. 10, 11
DR C. SKOTT
The Indian Ocean world and South East Asia (Eight lectures) W. 10
Easter Term
DR A. ARSAN
Revision Classes
(Two two-hour classes, weeks 1-2) M. 10
For further specialist lectures please consult Part II papers 25, on the Middle East; 27 on Latin America; 28 on the
Indian subcontinent; and 29 on Africa.