Global Connections: non-Eurocentric historical narratives
Full course description
Global history is one of the most innovative and productive fields of scholarly inquiry today. It challenges us to think about history and its methodologies, but also the present and current dynamics, in new ways. This course provides the basic tools for non-historians to understand the state of the field and the recent surge in 'global history.' At the same time, the course familiarizes students with some of history’s cornerstone heuristic instruments. We will thus provide historical tools to better understand the most important aspects of globalization and development today. In other words, through scientific reconstruction of global interaction and global processes and theory-led interpretation and application of other methods, students gain access to historic dimensions of a globalizing present. This course uses English-language sources to convey extensive knowledge of global history developments and their impacts on historical processes, institutions, and structures.
Course objectives
After completion of this course, students are able to:
- Show in which ways the interconnectedness of today’s world is not a new phenomenon, but one that is rooted in a long history of exchange and interaction
- Define and explain Global History as a concept and as an approach as well as describe the most recent historical debates and approaches in the field of Global History
- Explain and apply the most relevant methodological tools in the field of Global History: comparison, divergence, connectedness, and the concepts of globalization and microhistory
- Identify and explain the entanglements between specific regions and global political, socio-economic and cultural structures, in this case with a focus on the Global South
- Illustrate how the forces that have continuously shaped and restructured the world in the past, continue to do so today
- Develop non-Eurocentric readings of the global past and present that are critical of Euro-centrism
- Discuss and assess the hitherto pivotal status of Europe in historiography
- Present and discuss theoretical and empirical academic literature in the field of Global History
- Analyse a current global phenomenon from a historical perspective for the purpose of a research paper based on academic literature, and communicate
Prerequisites
The courses - GDS4000, - GDS4001, - GDS4002, - GDS4003 or GDS4004, - GDS4005