Transnational and Global History: Old Problems and New Directions

This course examines transnational and global historical processes, focusing on temporal and geographic scales of analysis outside of traditional national histories, and promotes linking the local and the global. It looks at global forces influencing particular societies and encourages students to place themselves outside conventional local, regional, and national boundaries, and will critically consider a number of the metanarratives that have informed and continue to inform historiography, particularly idea such as modernity, progress, and the ongoing preoccupation with the 'rise of the west'. Given these questions, and the almost endless scope of a course that purports to take the world as its focal point, weekly seminars will begin with a discussion of the possibilities offered by as well as the limits to transnational/global/world history, the various interpretative frameworks in use and their proponents as well as the challenges that transnational/global/world history poses. We will then focus on particular case studies or themes so as to promote discussion that is as much historiographical as it is historical. Such themes/case studies may include: feminism and imperialism, famine and climate change, disease and ecology, military technology and governmentally, global trade and the rise of consumer society(s), colonial knowledge and shifting ideas of race.