History 111 University of Massachusetts



History 605 University of Massachusetts

Wednesday 2:30-5:00 pm Department of History

READINGS IN WORLD HISTORY SINCE 1400

INSTRUCTOR: Professor John Higginson;

OFFICE HOURS: Herter 703, Monday and Friday, 1:00-2:00 pm

TELEPHONE: 545-1330

E-MAIL: for Higginson jeh@history.umass.edu;

Course Description:

Our course begins with a glance at the world before the dramatic geographical shift of the lines of power and wealth from the Indian Ocean and Mediterranean Sea to the North Atlantic countries of Western Europe at the close of the fifteenth century. There was no single reason for the shift from the countries bordering the Indian Ocean and Mediterranean Sea to those on the northern coast of the Atlantic Ocean. Nor did it happen all at once. But by the end of the eighteenth-century, from the vantage point of European observers like Adam Smith, it appeared to be permanent and indelible. Meanwhile Qin Lung, the Qing Emperor of China, thought it hardly worthy of notice. What made for such a disparity in perspectives? Much of our work this semester will be focused such questions.

The course ends with an examination of the world since the global shift of lines of power and wealth from societies ringing the North Atlantic to those framed by the Asian North Pacific. The course will also focus on how the practical application of powerful forces such as fossil fuels, international networks of organized crime, nuclear power, micro processing and genetic engineering have affected this transition. At its conclusion, the course will pay particular attention to the challenge that North Pacific Asian economic performance and a global resurgence of Islam offer to continued western dominance of global affairs.

Course Requirements:

Attendance and participation should be an important part of the approach of any student who wishes to do well in this course. Attendance and participation are, in fact, obverse sides of the same phenomenon. After all, knowledge is cumulative. One’s understanding of a given subject does not happen all at once. Charge yourself to be invested in the reading and to participate in class. Look interested. Looking interested when you are in fact bored to tears is a great skill to master for any professional career.

Each week a discrete group of students will be responsible for a synoptic essay of five to eight pages on the readings and a few questions. The essays will be circulated in advance by means of email. All students will write at least two synoptic essays and a longer topic paper on a theme drawn from our class discussions.

Required Reading:

The required text for the course can be found at Amherst Books and online in two instances:

Edward E. Baptist, The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism

Antoinette Burton and Isabel Hofmeyr, Ten Books That Shaped The British Empire: Creating an Imperial Commons (Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 2014)

Susan Whitfield, Life along the Silk Road second edition (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2015)

Christoph Strobel, The Global Atlantic: 1400-1900 (Routledge and Kegan Paul, 2014)

Zhao Ziyang, Prisoner of the State (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2009)

Norbert Wiener, The Human Uses of Human Beings (New York: De Capo, 1991)

Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations (online and at Amherst Books)

Karl Marx, Capital Volume One (online and at Amherst Books)

SELECTED SUGGESTED READINGS

Sven Bickert, Empire of Cotton (New York: Knopf, 2014)

Robin Blackburn, The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery, 1776-1848 (London: Verso Books, 1988)

G. W. Bowersock, The Throne of Adulis: Red Sea Wars on the Eve of Islam (London and New York: Oxford University Press, 2013)

K.N. Chaudhuri, Asia Before Europe: Economy and Civilisation of the Indian Ocean from the Rise of Islam to 1750 (London: Cambridge University Press, 1990)

Clifton Crais, Poverty, War and Violence in South Africa (New York and London: Cambridge University Press, 2011)

G. E. M. de St. Croix, The Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek World (Ithaca, New York and London, England: Cornell University Press, 1981)

Eugene Genovese, The World the Slaveholders Made (New York: Vintage Books, 1971)

C. L. R. James, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution (New York: Vintage Books 2nd Edition, 1989)

W. Arthur Lewis, Growth and Fluctuation, 1870-1914 (Boston: Aldine, 1965)

Sidney Mintz, Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History (New York: Penguin, 1985)

Barrington Moore, Injustice: The Social Basis of Obedience and Revolt (New York: M. E. Sharpe, 1981)

Barrington Moore, The Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Lord and Peasant in the Making of the Modern World (Boston: Beacon Press, 1966)

David F. Noble, Forces of Production: A Social History of Industrial Automation (New York and London: Oxford University Press, 1984)

Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2014)

Kenneth Pomeranz, The Great Divergence: China, Europe and the Making of the World Economy (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2000)

Pierre Verger, Flux et reflux de la traite des negrès entre le golfe de Benin et Bahia de Todos Os Santos du XVIIeme au XIXeme siècle (Paris: Mouton, 1968)

Mary C. Karasch, Slave Life in Rio de Janeiro, 1808-1850 (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1987)

Eric Williams, Capitalism and Slavery (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 1944 and 1994)

Course Schedule:

9-16 September: Whitfield, xi-13; Burstein, Butzer and Kobischanov articles on class Moodle page

16-23 September: Whitfield, 14-89; Field and Prostov, Gibb, Lattimore and Liu articles on Central Asia and Tang capital of Chang’an on Moodle page

23-30 September: Whitfield, 90-201; Resichauer, Allen, Wong et alia (on Moodle page)

30 September-7 October: Strobel, Introduction and Part I; J. H. Elliot, “The World After Columbus,” New York Review of Books, October 10, 1991 (on Moodle page); John Day, “The Great Bullion Famine of the Fifteenth Century,” Past and Present, No. 79 (May 1978) @ JSTOR and on Moodle page; Jonathan Spence, “China Mulberries and Famine,” New York Review of Books, April 1, 1982 (on Moodle page)

7-14 October: Strobel, Part II; Jack A. Goldstone, “East and West in the Seventeenth Century: Political crises in Stuart England, Ottoman Turkey and Ming China, Comparative Studies in Society and History, Vol. 30, No. 1 (January 1988), @JSTOR and on Moodle page

14-21 October: Smith, Book One, Chapters I-X and Book Two, Chapters III and V; Ben Fine and Ellen Leopold, “Consumerism and the Industrial Revolution,” Social History, Vol. 15, No. 2 (May 1990), 151-179 [JSTOR]; R. C. Allen, “Why the industrial revolution was British: Commerce, induced invention and the scientific revolution,” Economic History Review, Vol. 64, No. 2 (May 2011), 357-384 [Wiley Online Library]; Maxine Berg, “What Difference Did Women’s Work Make to the Industrial Revolution,” History Workshop, No. 35 (Spring 1993), 22-44; Joseph Inikori, “Slavery and the Revolution in Cotton Textile Production in England,” Social Science History 13:4 (Winter 1989) [all articles are on JSTOR and Moodle page]

21-28 October: Marx, Chapter X (“The Working Day”); Chapter XIV (“The Division of Labor and Manufacture”); Part VIII (“The So-Called Primitive Accumulation”); Baptist, Introduction to Chapter Four (“Left Hand”)

28 October- 4 November: Baptist, Chapter Five to Chapter Eight (“Blood”)

4-11 November: Baptist, remainder of book; three slave testimonies from the Federal Writers’ Project (on Moodle page)

11-18 November: Burton and Hofmeyr, 1-111; ”); Raphael Samuel, “Workshop of the World,” History Workshop, No. 3 (Spring 1977), 6-72 [JSTOR]

18-25? November: Burton and Hofmeyr, remaining chapters

2-9 December: Zhao, entire book; He Qinglian, “Does the Free Market Corrode Moral Character” (on Moodle page)

Topic papers are due by 16 December 2015!

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