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Présentation
This is not a history course, traditionally understood. While it revisits a vast array of both renown and neglected episodes of history, from encounters on the silk roads over witch trials in Europe to the Japanese decision to enter WWII, it does not provide any encompassing, universal history. Instead, this is a course in historical perspective and reflection aimed at encouraging students to think critically about how such everyday historical notions as origins, progress, and development are always already part of our political imagination and academic analysis. In this sense, ‘history’ is not only inescapable, but it also shapes, in any specific variant, what seems desirable, possible, and necessary in research and political practice. Following a prelude on different perspectives on history, the course discusses in part I dominant myths and rationalizations of history, including ‘repetition’, ‘origins’, and ‘progress’, the master tropes behind such narratives as the rise and fall of great powers, the identity of ‘the West’, and mankind’s path of development. It probes in part II the fragmentation of these stereotypical imaginations by exploring contingencies and virtual histories, cultural connections and hybridity, and untold stories and silenced subjects. In part III, the course cursorily revisits elements of the global emergence of modernity, including in terms of political economy, international order, and dialectics of rule and resistance.
Modalités
PART I: PRELIMINARIES
1 Introduction: Entering the maze
No readings.
2 The global turn and the politics of history
Buzan, Barry, and George Lawson. 2013. ‘The Global Transformation: The Nineteenth Century and the Making of Modern International Relations.’ International Studies Quarterly 57(3): 620-634.
Conrad, Sebastian. 2016. What is Global History?, Princeton: Princeton University Press, introduction, 1-16.
White, Hayden. 1980. ‘The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality.’ Critical Inquiry 7(1), 5-27.
PART II: MASTER NARRATIVES OF HISTORY
3 Origins, identities, and repetition
Kennedy, Paul. 1988. The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers. Economic Change and Military Conflict from 1500 to 2000, London: Unwin Hyman, Introduction, xv-xxv, and Chapter I, (‘The Rise of the Western World’), 3-38.
Huntington, Samuel. 1993. ‘The Clash of Civilizations?’, Foreign Affairs, 7, Summer 1993, 22-49.
Question 1: Is the notion of cultural or civilizational ‘identity’ compatible with historical inquiry, yes or no?
4 Progress, corruption, and intervention
Morgan, Lewis H. 1907 [1877]. Ancient Society or Researches in the Lines of Human Progress from Savagery through Barbarism to Civilization. New York: Henry Holt, chapter 1 (‘Ethnical Periods’), 3-18.
Fukuyama, Francis. 1989. ‘The End of History?’ The National Interest, (16), 3-18.
Schmitt, Carl. 2005 [1922]. Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, Chicago: Chicago University Press, chapter 4 (‘The state philosophy of the counter-revolution’), 53-66.
Hirschman, Albert. 1991. The Rhetoric of Reaction: Perversity, Futility, Jeopardy. Cambridge, M.A.: Harvard University Press, chapter 1 (‘Two hundred years of reactionary rhetoric’), 1-10.
Question 2: Can deliberate ‘intervention’ help to accelerate progress or stop decline, yes or no?
PART III: FRAGMENTING HISTORIES
5 Scopes: Macro- and micro-histories
Wolf, Eric. 1982. Europe and the People without History. Berkeley: University of California Press. Chapter 6 (‘The fur trade’), 158-194.
Ginzburg, Carlo. 1989. Ecstasies: Deciphering the Witches’ Sabbath. New York: Pantheon, Introduction, 1-30.
Andrade, Tonio. 2010. ‘A Chinese Farmer, Two African Boys, and a Warlord: Toward a Global Microhistory.’ Journal of World History 21(4): 573-591.
Question 3: Which scope provides a better angle for understanding history, the macro or the micro one?
6 Connections: Encounters and entanglements
Williams, Steven. 2003. The ‘Secret of Secrets’: The Scholarly Career of a Pseudo-Aristotelean Text in the Latin Middle Ages, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, introduction, and chapter 1 (‘The Contents and the Formation of the Secret of Secrets’), 1-30.
Frankopan, Peter. 2015. The Silk Roads. A New History of the World, London: Bloomsbury, chapter 1 (‘The Creation of the Silk Road’), 1-26.
Subrahmanyam, Sanjay. 1997. ‘Connected Histories: Notes towards a Reconfiguration of Early Modern Eurasia.’ Modern Asian Studies, 31(3), 735-762.
Question 4: Do encounters and connections challenge traditional understandings of distinct civilizations, yes or no?
7 Chances: Contingencies and counterfactuals
McNeill, John R. 2010. Mosquito Empires: Ecology and War in the Greater Caribbean, 1620-1914. Cambridge University Press, Introduction, 1-14.
Lebow, Richard N. 20