History

Students engage with the cultures and histories of Scotland through a multi-disciplinary perspectives offered by archaeology, Celtic languages, history, and literature all with the common question of how Scottish society has interacted with the outside world. Students consider how Scotland’s migratory, economic, intellectual, and cultural links overseas as well as its own distinctive experience of globalization influenced the development of a range of other societies while simultaneously transforming the country’s own domestic character and culture. This central theme of both influencing and being influenced by links with the outside world enables students to assess the global history of a non-US society in a multi-disciplinary way. In doing so, this course demonstrates how humanities-based disciplines explore the mutually influencing nature of the global, the national, and the local.

The course provides an introduction to the phenomenon of globalization from archaeological and historical perspectives. Topics covered include conditions and driving forces for the globalizing processes, the exchange patterns of the “pre-European” world, the European expansion from the 15th century, cultural encounters and hybridity, merchant capitalism and the East India trade, slavery and plantations, and the life of the non-articulate groups of humanity. Special emphasis is on ecological globalization and the threat to the global heritage caused by climate change.

Reflecting the increased focus on social and cultural themes in Irish historiography, this course addresses the ways in which historians are tackling a broad range of societal questions.  What characterised peoples’ family, working, and social lives? How did people interact with the apparatus of the state and of religious bodies? How did the evolution of media affect daily life? What forces and ideas shaped the provision of education and welfare? What impact did emigration have on both host and home societies? Key to the course is an understanding of what differentiated experiences; how did gender, class, geography, and moral/status hierarchies of different kinds shape individual lives? It also places the social history of Ireland in comparative and global contexts, in order to question ideas of Irish insularity and exceptionalism.

This course reviews the relationship between the Roman empire and the cultures outside its borders, focusing especially on the Germans and the Celts in the period 100 BCE to 400 CE. to 400 e.Kr. Class discussions address the material and cultural manifestations of the cultural encounter between the Roman empire and its neighbors, and reexamine key concepts such as imperialism, view of civilization, ethnic origin, social identity, romanization, and hybridity. Parts of the teaching take place at the Lund University Historical Museum and the National Museum of Denmark and the New Carlsberg Glyptotek in Copenhagen.

This course provides a study of the development of the international economy and the interaction between economic actors and agents from a historical perspective. It examines the different economic causes, effects, and policies related to the movement of people, goods, capital, and ideas in market integration, as well as the processes of economic specialization, convergence and divergence in history. Topics covered include: the first globalization of the 19th century (1820-1913); withdrawal and rupture of international integration (1914-1945); reconstruction of the international economy and second globalization; the world economy at the beginning of the 21st century.