History

The Brexit referendum of 2016 was a clash between two types of political representation in Britain: the "people’s will" versus the sovereignty of parliamentary sovereignty. Is this such a new phenomenon? This course explores this tension between the popular control of Parliament and the doctrine of indirect representation by Members of Parliament over the last 200 years British history.

This course explores the historical development of racial prejudice and antisemitism, from their roots in the classical and mediaeval worlds to the rise of National Socialism in the early 20th century. It analyses the way religious, cultural, linguistic, and physical/biological forms of exclusion have overlapped and reinforced each other. It is one of the principal contentions of this course that National Socialism’s exterminatory antisemitism is not merely a product of centuries of anti-Jewish prejudice; rather, racial antisemitism must be understood as something which evolved in close symbiosis with racial prejudices directed against Indigenous Peoples, Africans (slave and free), and colonial peoples from the early modern period onward, culminating in the historically particular form of exterminatory racial antisemitism which formed the necessary precondition of the Holocaust. A focus of the course is the rise of exclusionary racial, anti-Semitic, and nationalist discourses in Central Europe from the middle of the 19th century until the Final Solution. Throughout, the course analyzes disparate and contradictory perspectives on the history of racism using primary sources as well as theoretical conceptualizations. It critically examines divergent conclusions and, through a focused, discriminatory, and judicial critique of these sources, produces evidence to creatively integrate these divergences into something which reflects the student’s unique perspective.

This course examines the history of London on the cusp of the modern age. Between 1550 and 1750 the city was transformed from a packed square mile of workshops and churches, bounded by a city wall and intensively governed, to a metropolis of trade and empire, bustling shops, polluting industry, enticing leisure and low-level crime, stretching from Wapping to Westminster and Islington to Vauxhall, and with connections to the Atlantic and Caribbean. The city's population was young, disproportionally female, and increasingly diverse. This course focuses on London's people and the structures with which they lived, introducing a range of historiographical approaches to put individual lives and themes in historical context. 

The 19th century saw the reinvention of the subterranean. From the sewers in Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables to the striking miners of Émile Zola’s Germinal, novelists began exploring the space beneath their feet. By the turn of the century, the opening of the Paris catacombs to the public and the construction of the metro system fueled the collective imagination, while the hidden strata of history and consciousness were being charted by the developing fields of archaeology and psychoanalysis. In the early to mid-20th century, the subterranean was as much a metaphor as it was a reality, with artists and philosophers drawing inspiration from newly discovered prehistoric cave paintings and the French Resistance returning once again to Hugo’s sewers. This class follows modernity as it goes underground. This course discusses topics including French and Parisian history and culture, urban text and its expressions in literature and film, and historical events and reinterpreting them in the context of their reliance on hidden historical and cultural undercurrents.

This course introduces students to the field of postcolonial studies. By drawing on history, anthropology, sociology, political theory, international law, psychology, and comparative literature, the course delves into processes of European colonization post-1600 and how they shaped interactions, mentalities, and ideas of authority both in the European metropoles and in the areas that came to be defined as colonies. The course focuses inquires on countries such as the Netherlands and looks carefully at the period from the late 19th century onwards. The course probes the historical transformations, political imperatives, and cultural rationales that shaped the experience of colonialism and its aftermath, both in metropole and colony.  The course further explores how legacies of empire are inscribed and represented in contemporary public spaces. By doing so, students become more aware of, and are able to grapple with the residues and reckonings of colonialism today.

Why are some countries rich while others are poor? Since the publication of the WEALTH OF NATIONS by Adam Smith, the sources of global inequality have been a key subject in economics. As Robert Lucas has famously claimed, once we start thinking about them, "it is hard to think about anything else." This makes the study of economic growth and development over the long run relevant for economics and the social sciences alike. Economic history introduces tools and methods of describing and analyzing growth and development and it develops critical thinking by demonstrating both the potential and limitations of economic theory in explaining economic change in the real world. The course consists of an overview of Western economic development from the early modern period, ca. 1500, to the present. The course focuses on the drivers of industrialization and of increased prosperity in the Western world and on the historical origins of the disparity in the wealth of nations today. The course is organized in two parts. The first part discusses the drivers of long-run development: the commercial, agricultural, and industrial revolutions, the role of institutions, and the origins of globalization. The second part illustrates the impact of major shocks on economic development in the 20th century: the World Wars, the Great Depression, and the challenges of the new globalization since the 1970s.

Postcolonialism first emerged as a discipline in the United States in the 1980s, but it has its roots in the work of anticolonial writers from the first half of the twentieth century. Postcolonial theory looks at the interaction between European nations and the societies they colonized and, in doing so, raises questions about concepts such as power, race, language and identity. Literature plays a key role in the anti-colonial struggle as it can offer an alternative vision to the official history of colonization. This course introduces students to some of the key concepts in postcolonial theory through the study of two novels, THE SECRET RIVER (2005) by the white Australian author Kate Grenville and THE WHALE RIDER (1987) by the Maori writer Witi Ihimaera.