Global History: History of the World

Course Overview

This course takes you on a voyage into the past. Like many of the explorers you will meet along the way, you will travel across time from when Chinggis Khan’s armies conquered Beijing and Baghdad in the 13th century and the Black Death scoured the Eurasian world – and the course will end with reflections on globalization and its discontents in our times. Do earlier modes of integration and disintegration help us to understand our own age? Along the way, we consider the economic, military, scientific and cultural forces that brought the world together – and drove it apart – for the past seven centuries.

This course invites as to learn globally. It connects you to students elsewhere in the world. Across 22 locations around the world, between Bangladesh and Lebanon, between France and Nigeria, between Argentina to Afghanistan, students are taking the same course simultaneously and posting and sharing their ideas on the course Gallery site. By listening and exchanging with each other, you will learn different perspectives and co-create knowledge about the global past.

Lecture List

1. Peoples and Plunderers

2. Warfare and Motion

3. Clashing Worlds

4. Atlantic Worlds

5. Indian Ocean Worlds

6. The Worlds that Merchants Made

7. East Asian Dynamism and the Seventeenth-Century Global Crisis

8. Empire and Enlightenment

9. The World in Revolution

10. States and Nations

11. Global Frontiers

12. Empires and Nations

13. Worlds in Motion

14. Empire Redux

15. Retreat of the Elephants

16. The World, 1914

17. Civilization and its Discontents

18. Worlds at War

19. Atrocities

20. Aftermaths

21. Recoveries

22. Inventing the Third World

23. Crisis and Globalization

24. The Cunning of History