Each session focuses on a particular commodity and explores how its production, trade and consumption was entangled with important political, social and cultural developments. Taken together, the case studies (ranging from agricultural crops, via chemically produced drugs to mechanical marvels such as the gramophone) provide a picture of major global transformations in the past 300 years.
Lernziel
On one level, the course aims to familiarise students with a currently much debated approach to the writing of global history, namely the history of commodities. Each case study is used to deepen the participants' understanding of complex historical developments by telling seemingly simple stories in a global frame. Thus, for instance, the session on sugar explores plantation economies in the Caribbean and the transatlantic slave trade as well as shifting patterns of diet and consumption in Europe. The session on rubber focuses on botanical expeditions in Latin America, the deployment of Chinese coolies on Malaysian Rubber farms and the rise of the automobile mass production in the USA. By linking the familiar to the unfamiliar and 'exotic' the inter-cultural sensitivity of the students will be enhanced. On a second level, the analysis and understanding of these complex interconnections, it is hoped, will help students to get a more nuanced understanding of the historical process that is currently referred to as 'globalization' and overcome the eurocentric perspective that still structures many scholarly and media writings on this topic.
Leistungskontrolle
Information zur Leistungskontrolle (gültig bis die Lerneinheit neu gelesen wird)
Leistungskontrolle als Semesterkurs