Seeds of Globalization: The Making of the Modern World

Doug Weiner
Summer 2014
WEDNESDAYS |  
9:00 a.m. - noon
August 6, 13, 20, 27, 2014
Course Format: Hybrid
Location: Main Campus
Tuition: $120.00

How did our globalized economy and international culture come to be?

The “Rise of the West” idea has long suggested something innately superior about “Western civilization.” But there are better grounded ways than appeals to cultural or racial superiority to explain the emergence of today’s world, based as it is on European economic power, market logic, science and technology, and to a significant extent, culture. We will learn the central roles of biogeography, epidemiology, patterns of trade, geopolitics, and pure accident in the “Rise of the West.”

We will explore how the various regions of the world eventually became linked up. Then we will focus on the narrower question of how the current global system of capitalism and northern countries’ political and economic domination emerged and thrived. Now that system is globalized, and the era of northern hegemony may be coming to an end. We will see if we can make some sense of all this.

Required Reading
  • Crosby, Alfred. Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900-1900. Cambridge University Press, 2004. ISBN: 0521546184.
  • Davis, Mike. Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World. Verso, 2002. ISBN: 1859843824. (excerpts)
  • Marks, Robert B. The Origins of the Modern World: A Global and Ecological Narrative from the Fifteenth to the Twenty-first Century. Rowman and Littlefield, 2006. ISBN: 0742554198.
Recommended Reading

Additional readings listed on the syllabus have been uploaded to our password-protected site at http://course.hsp.arizona.edu

Meet Your Instructor

Professor

A former president of American Society for Environmental History, DOUG WEINER has taught and studied Russian and Soviet history, environmental history, and the history of science. Among his publications are Models of Nature: Ecology, Conservation and Cultural Revolution in Soviet Russia and A Little Corner of Freedom: Russian Nature Protection from Stalin to Gorbachev.

Location

POETRY CENTER
Dorothy Rubel Room
1508 E Helen
Tucson, AZ 85721
United States

Located on the SE corner of Helen Street and Vine Avenue, one block north of Speedway and three blocks west of Campbell Ave.

Street map image of Poetry Center

Open Courses You May Also Be Interested In