History

The course introduces students to economic and social history in global perspective. It covers the period from ca. 1750 to the First World War, an age that saw the emergence of industrialization, the rise of modern European global empires, and what has been considered as the first wave of globalization. The first block of the course examines Glasgow's history and its connections with the wider world forged through slavery, empire, and globalization. Subsequent blocks of the course allow students to integrate study of key historical questions and themes with consideration of different world regions, which may include Europe, East Asia and South Asia, Africa, and North and South America.

Sport is central to life in the modern world. Why do people play sport, watch sport, talk about sport, dream about sport? And why do they choose the sports that they choose? This course examines the modern passion for sport and seeks to explain this passion. It assesses to what extent the straightforward pursuit of pleasure overwhelms everything else when people chose to engage with sport. But it also looks at how such choices are defined (or refined) by the influence of ideology and tradition, class and gender, commerce and geography, education, and employment. From the colosseum of the Roman Empire to the stadia of the 21st century, this course considers the creation of the modern sporting world and analyzes the place of sport within the context of social, cultural, political, and economic change.

 

This course explores the historical evolution of the aerospace industry and technologies, highlighting the development of various elements of aircraft and the impact on human life.

This course offers a study of Spanish history from the late fifteenth to the late eighteenth century including political processes, social relations, and cultural productions of modernity.

This course examines the history of Africa in the 19th and 20th Centuries: the growth of Islam and Christianity, the impact of European colonialism, the development of nationalism, and the variety of different political and social outcomes after independence

This course covers the development of public administrations during the 18th and 19th centuries. It addresses the ways in which government impresses political will onto the day-to-day lives of ordinary people, and how, inversely, society shapes government. It is both a course in history and public law. The course draws attention to the centuries of social evolution and legal tinkering behind many habitual features of our contemporary “bureaucratic” administrations. It explores several administrative systems across the Atlantic and Europe, namely that of the United States, Britain, France, Germany, the Ottoman Empire, and Russia. Each session begins with the commentary of a visual document relating to aspects of a period's daily life containing cues to the legal and institutional context. The rest of the session consists of a brief lecture and a primary sources discussion. Sources are provided in a reader and mostly consist of historical legal documents.

This course offers a study of Spanish history from the end of the 19th century to the present.

This course examines the dynamics of contemporary racism in France through a knowledge of long history. It traces the genealogy of racism as it is expressed, both in the processes at work and in the debates that run through our society. To achieve this, the seminar focuses in particular, but not exclusively, on the legacy of our colonial past in terms of the expression of racism. This focus is directly linked to the lively debates that have arisen since the late 1990s as French society questions its colonial past. The seminar also develops the ability to reflect on the issues raised in a complex and problematized way.

This course deals with political, economic, intellectual and cultural events that occurred in the history of Asia from 1945-1989. The course covers the following topics: 

• The First Indochina War (1945-1954): the Cold War comes to Vietnam 

• The two Vietnams (1954-1964): The Democratic Republic of Vietnam and the Republic of Vietnam 

• The Second Indochina War (1964-1975): Vietnam in the Center of the Cold War  

• Cambodia and Laos (1945-1979): Decolonization and Cold War 

• Indochina at Peace? (1975-1989): Cambodia and Laos 

• Indochina at Peace? (1975-1989): Vietnam 

• Thailand and Myanmar (1945-1989) 

• The Philippines (1945-1989) 

• Indonesia (1945-1989) 

• The Cold War in Southeast Asia as an Intelligence War 

• Southeast Asia after the end of the Cold War 

This course offers a study of the different pre-Hispanic indigenous peoples, from a multidimensional perspective, establishing dialogues with the processes that these peoples currently experience.