History

From interpersonal violence to political violence, from sex crimes to organized crime, from the family sphere to the public arena, from “news stories” to historical trials, criminal justice reveals our societies, their obsessions, the norms and values that underpin them and evolve over time. Society protects itself by criminalizing deviance and transgression, and in the courtroom, the repulsive figures of this deviance are forged and assigned to the dock. In contemporary France, the legitimacy and symbolic force of the sanction, in terms of the law but also under the weight of representations, social expectations and media focus, are the subject of constant questioning, as the emergence of the victim figure tends to redefine the balance of penal interactions.

This course focuses on current history from the last third of the 20th century to the present. Topics include: politics and international relations; the economy; culture; international conflicts in a global world; technological and scientific globalization; global society and risk; global civil society. 

This course looks at the interaction of social change and politics in postwar Britain, integrating social and cultural history with political history. It introduces students to change thinking about class, race, and gender among political parties in Britain, looking at political thought, political ideologies, and political propaganda. Students examine the changing social and cultural bases of politics, and why “new social movements” like the Women’s Liberation Movement and Gay Liberation exploded onto the scene from the late 1960s onwards. 

This course provides a general introduction to economic history. The objectives of this course is not only to provide an opportunity to know the economic development of world in long-run, from the origin of civilization to present, but also to show how theoretical approaches and quantitative methods can be applied to explain important historical events which happened in world, for example, the origin of civilization, religion reform, Industrial Revolution, Columbian Exchange, Black Death, and the Great Depression.

This course examines the historical developments in the African Continent under the formal rule of different European powers; the emergence and development of the 'nationalist' phenomenon before and after the First World War; decolonization and independence; problems of nation building; attempts at continent-wide and regional collaborations.

The course is an introduction to the study of ancient historiography, itself a crucial element of the study of history, past and present. I.e. the course encourages students to analyse a good number of ancient historians and histories, especially the key figures and key texts in the development of the practice we call history, including Herodotus, Thucydides, Xenophon, Polybius, Livy, Cassius Dio, Tacitus, Ammianus Marcellinus, and others. The selection of authors to be studied in any one year depends on the research expertise of staff teaching the course so as to allow maximum scope for cutting-edge teaching based on new research undertaken by staff at Edinburgh.