Global Connected Histories of World Politics - Dr Anahita Arian
This module introduces students to the global connected histories of world politics through the exploration of the entangled histories of various processes, structures, and institutions that have historically shaped and constituted modern world politics and international order. As an alternative to Eurocentric histories of world politics, global connected histories examine the historical entanglements, interconnections, circulations and diffusions of ideas, knowledges, and practices between various actors and polities, and across various tempo-spatial realms – e.g., between Europe and Asia – that were made possible through trade, war, diplomacy, colonial expansions, empire-making, mobility, travel, migration, technology, and so on. In this module, students will learn in the first seminar what global connected histories are and how they can be studied through various methodologies before proceeding to a tour d'horizon of various cases of global connected histories in world politics. These include the global connected history of the constitution of international law from the sixteenth century onwards, the multicultural foundation of global capitalism in the early modern period, the eighteenth and nineteenth century Atlantic revolutions, the entangled histories of European empires, colonialism, and genocide in the nineteenth and twentieth century, and finally the connected histories of Pan-Africanism, independence movements in Africa and Asia, and decolonization in the twentieth century.