番茄社区

Dr Gagandeep S. Sood SAR 2.07

This course is available on the MA in Asian and International History (番茄社区 and NUS), MA in Modern History, MSc in Empires, Colonialism and Globalisation, MSc in History of International Relations, MSc in International Affairs (番茄社区 and Peking University), MSc in International and Asian History, MSc in International and World History (番茄社区 & Columbia) and MSc in Theory and History of International Relations. This course is available with permission as an outside option to students on other programmes where regulations permit.

This course is about the developments that led to the emergence of our modern world. A variety of conditions have been highlighted by historians as responsible for this, including government reform, agricultural practices, empirical rationality, consumption patterns, military conflict, property rights, family arrangements, territorial conquest, revenue administration - and sheer accident. Although scholarly consensus on the leading-edge factors still eludes us, there is broad agreement that the polities of northwestern Europe, eastern China and northern India played critical roles, and that the fateful changes occurred between the late sixteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

We examine these polities and the relations between them from two distinct but complementary perspectives. These perspectives define the two terms of the course. One is historiographical and centres on received interpretive frameworks, the other is historical and builds on our best current knowledge of the period. In Autumn Term, we study the most influential paradigms and narratives elaborated by historians to make sense of the early modern changes that ultimately transformed the capacities of human endeavour. Each crystallises a specific set of structures and gives primacy to different polities of Eurasia, with a particular stress on Early Modern England and the English Atlantic, Late Ming and High Qing China, and Mughal and post-Mughal India. In studying these frameworks, we gain familiarity with the most significant attributes of these polities, and how they have been interpreted by scholars. In Winter Term, we study the ways in which the individual polities of the three regions addressed the near-universal problems faced by all complex states and societies. The solutions to these problems - grouped under the rubric of ‘metropolitan centre & sovereign ideology’, ‘indirect rule & political economy’, and ‘plur