The History Department at Queen's University offers a variety of courses in Global History and related topics.
See the History Department's website for more information and full course offerings.
Graduate
Professor Ariel Salzmann
Capitalism: A Historical View departs from a review of pre-history: the post-Pangea continental drift that distributed animal and vegetable species unevenly around the globe (furnishing Afro-Euro-Asia with an “head start”) and the historic climate window of the Holocene (the last 11,500 years during which global temperatures and sea levels have been unusually stable) which permitted early urbanization and state formation. The course then addresses some of the key economic and historical questions concerning the emergence and expansion of global, capitalistic relations: When did “capitalism” actually ‘take-off’: 5,000 or 500 or 250 years ago? What role did geography, technology, raw materials, and scale play in early market formation and manufacturing? Did capitalism drive war and colonialism or did colonialism and war drive capitalism? What caused the “great divergence” between early modern Asia and Europe? Finally, how have historians attempted to narrate and calibrate capitalism's vast, interconnected tales of human, animal and environmental exploitation?
Not offered in 2022-23
Professor Ishita Pande
This course examines the history of imperial formations and colonial contact in the British empire in the east in the 19th and 20th centuries, with a focus on the interdisciplinary and theoretical approaches of postcolonial criticism. Themes include statecraft and governmentality, colonial development, race and diaspora, power and archives, decolonization and the afterlives of colonialism.
Not offered in 2022-23
Professor Amitava Chowdhury
This seminar provides an advanced introduction to Global, World, and Transnational History. The course will examine global history as a methodological and spatial perspective and as a critique of methodological nationalism. Thematically, we will study the origins, defining debates, and methodological underpinnings of the field. Topics will include global microhistory, deep history, world-systems analysis, postcolonialism, nationalism, commodities, and the Anthropocene. Framed as a critique of post-Enlightenment historical philosophy, the course will help us to discover and appreciate a new historiography suited for the twenty-first century.
Fall 2022
Professor Daniel Woolf
This seminar course for 4th year undergraduates and Masters students will introduce those enrolled to a number of critical issues in the current theory and practice of history. It is not a course on methods and approaches, nor on the philosophy of history per se. Rather the intent is to discuss some past and current key thinkers on historiographic matters over the past century, and current issues both within and outside the academic profession. In the second half of the course the we will endeavour to combine theory with practice by choosing cases where positions taken with respect to the past have had a significant impact in the public sphere. Issues discussed will include how we use the past to make sense of the present (and vice-versa); who “owns” the past; the moral and ethical responsibilities of the historian; the question of judgment in history; the pros and cons of counterfactual thinking in history; the relationship between history and memory; and the impact on historical writing of postmodernism and postcolonialism. Students are advised in advance that this course and its readings will touch on some controversial and sensitive topics such as Holocaust denial; political persecution; war crimes; genocide and ethnic cleansing; cultural appropriation; and debates over reparations and reconciliation.
Winter 2023
Professor Awet. T. Weldemichael
To study Africa is to study the world. Whether as a cradle of Homo Sapiens or as a contemporary site of cut-through geopolitical and economic competition among the world’s most powerful, Africa has increasingly been gaining attention as a gateway to world history. The forced and voluntary dispersion of Africans and African heritage across the globe has also rendered the study of Africa an inherent global phenomenon. There have accordingly been significant methodological innovations and epistemic breakthroughs in – and through – the study of the African past. This course is an advanced methods seminar that focuses on global African history from the Atlantic to the Indian Ocean and their respective African diasporas. It will cover the major trends in historiography; explore epistemological controversies in history in general and African history in particular; and examine how trade, warfare, population movement, and the environment (both social and physical/maritime) are substantive and methodological avenues for the study of history.
Winter 2023
Undergraduate
A thematic introduction to world history from prehistoric times to the present, with particular emphasis on the changing balance of power between regions of the globe and the contributions of the peoples of Africa, Asia, Oceania and the Americas to modernity.
Not offered 2022-23
Alanna Loucks
A survey of various historical case studies that will explore the causes, conflicts, and consequences that have occurred wherever indigenous peoples have encountered colonizing invaders. Significant questions will include who is indigenous?, who is not?, and can one speak of a global indigenous history?
Winter 2023
Professor Aditi Sen
This online course will attempt to study aspects of global history using food as a central theme. We begin from the reflection that food has successfully transcended political and cultural boundaries in the global past, and it provides a promising path for interrogating socio-economic and cultural issues in transnational contexts.
Winter 2023
Professor Aditi Sen
Since antiquity, poison has been used as an effective and frequently employed murder weapon. However, the role of poison is not limited to delivering untimely death, and an historical perspective reveals its many roles in varied social and cultural contexts. This course will examine how toxins have played an important role in health, forensic research, standards of beauty and intercultural associations. Through an examination of several global instances ranging from the role of poison in slave resistance to colonial laws governing exotic poisons in India and the diaspora, we will interrogate the larger socio-cultural contexts in which poisons hold meaning.
Winter 2023
Professor Aditi Sen
Choosing from the case studies of the bubonic plague, smallpox, influenza, cholera, tuberculosis, and AIDS, this course will help us understand how the history of pandemics is crucial to understanding the major turning points in global history, and how diseases can serve as a useful lens to understand the major currents of sociocultural history.
Fall 2022
Advanced introduction to the fields of Global, World, and Transnational History. The origins, foundational debates, and major contributions of the field. Study how commodities, people, intellectual trends, and the environment can serve as methodological avenues in uncovering the global shape of our interconnected past.
Not offered in 2022-23
This seminar provides an in-depth introduction to the history of the nation-form: narratives of its global origins, its historical development and global dispersal in Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Americas, the simultaneous emergence of anticolonialism and ultra-nationalism, its eclipse, and subsequent resurgence and revival in the post 9/11 world.
Not offered in 2022-23