21B: Early Modern World History, 1450-1850

Professors Emily Baum and Renée Raphael

renee.raphael@uci.edu
Course Zoom links

To an observer in 1500, some of the most stable, powerful, and prosperous political entities in the world were empires with their own intellectual and political traditions located outside what today we recognize as Europe: the Ming Dynasty, the Aztec Empire, and the Ottoman Empire. By the middle of the 19th century, these parts of the world were dominated economically, ideologically, and politically by European nation states who claimed that their own traditions, including science, secularism, and individual liberty, were universal. How do we explain this shift of power? What role did forces like trade, colonialism, slavery, and industrialization play in the rise of this new world order? How did the world come to develop and embrace the values of science and modernity that shape our world today? 

This course will introduce students to major themes in early modern world history, with a focus on the interconnections and circulations of people, commodities, and ideas around the globe. Lectures will provide students with historical context to understand how different peoples conceived of the world around them; exchanged goods, technologies, and ideas; and created and subsequently interacted with emerging global forces and ideologies, both liberating and oppressive. Through an examination of primary source documents, students will develop skills in historical interpretation to develop and assess historical arguments.

• Understand and discuss important events, ideas, and themes in world history from roughly 1450 to 1850;
• Question historical narratives that only privilege Western viewpoints by providing non-Western perspectives;
• Recognize that the shape of the modern world is rooted in global historical processes that often favored one group while oppressing another;
• Contextualize primary source documents by placing their authors in historical context and recognizing implicit biases, assumptions, and beliefs;
• Critically analyze primary source documents using the skills of close reading and contextualization to develop their own historical interpretations based on textual evidence.