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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.