Core Course Seminars for MA in Global History

Tutor: Julia Lovell

Email: ubra235@mail.bbk.ac.uk
Time: Mondays, 7:30-8:30pm
Venue: 401, 30 Russell Square

The core course seminars (MA Global History) consider the wider historiographical and
conceptual issues raised in the Mastering Historical Research: Birkbeck Approaches
lectures. For each seminar, you should as a minimum do the set reading for the main
lecture (reader) and for the seminar (Moodle) in this outline. It is important that you do
these readings, in order to participate fully in the discussion.

Starting from Week 2, students will be asked to give a brief presentation. Each
presentation should last a maximum of 10 minutes and should focus on the set reading
for the seminar. Presentations should consist of a maximum of five key points, and work
as a starting point for the discussion rather than a full presentation.

Please check Moodle periodically for updates.

Some suggested introductory reading:

C.A. Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World: Global Connections and Comparisons, 1780-
1914 (2004)
Tony Judt, Post-War. A History of Europe since 1945 (London, 2005).
Eric Hobsbawm, Age of extremes. The short twentieth century, 1914-91 (London,
1994).
Mark Mazower, Dark Continent. Europes twentieth century (1998).
Odd Arne Westad, The global cold war (Cambridge, 2005).
Charles S. Maier, Among Empires. American ascendancy and its predecessors (Cambridge
Mass. 2006).

Week 1 (9 October 2017): Historians

Required Reading (lecture):

J. H. Arnold, History: A Very Short Introduction (OUP, 2000) Chapter 2 [moodle]

John Tosh, The Pursuit of History, 5th edition (2009)

Required Reading (seminar):

Barbara Weinstein, History Without a Cause? Grand Narratives, World History,
and the Postcolonial Dilemma, International Review of Social History, Vol. 50, Issue
1 (April 2005), 71-93.

Recommended Reading:
Michael Geyer and Charles Bright, World History in a Global Age, American
Historical Review 100, no 4 (October 1995): 1034-60

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 Dorothy Ross, Grand Narrative in American Historical Writing: From romance
to uncertainty, The American Historical Review, vol 100, No 3 (June 1995), 651- 677
(JSTOR) http://www.jstor.org/stable/2168599
Lawrence Stone, The Revival of narrative, Past and Present, 1979, vol. 85, 1, pp. 3-24.
[http://www.jstor.org/stable/650677]
Eric Hobsbawms, The Revival of narrative. Some comments. Past and Present,
1980, vol. 86, 1, pp. 3-8. [http://www.scribd.com/doc/49227020/The-revival-of-
narrative-some-comments-Eric-Hobsbawm]
David Washbrook, Problems in Global History, in Maxine Berg, ed., Writing the
History of the Global (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), pp. 21-31.

Week 2 (16 October 2017): Empires

Required Reading (lecture):

Stephen Howe, Empire: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2002),
chs 1, 2 and 5.

Required Reading (seminar):

O.A. Westad, The Empire of Liberty: American Ideology and Foreign
Interventions chapter 1 - The Global War: Third World Interventions and the Making
of Our Times (2007).

Recommended Reading (please also refer to Lecture Course readings list):

P. Cain and A. Hopkins, Gentlemanly Capitalism
Ernest Mandel, Monopoly Capitalism and Imperialism in Marxist Economic
Theory, Vol. 2
Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, Part Two Imperialism (ch. 5-9)
Daniel Headrick, The Tools of Empire
John Gallagher and Ronald Robinson, "The Imperialism of Free Trade", The
Economic History Review, Second series, Vol. VI, no. 1 (1953) An online
version of this seminal article is available at:
http://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/ipe/gallagher.htm

Week 3 (23 October 2017): States and Nations

Required Reading (lecture):

Eric Hobsbawm, Nation and Nationalism Since 1870 (1990), ch. 1.

Required Reading (seminar):

Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of
Nationalism, pp. 18, 3746 and 83112.

Recommended Reading:
Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism
E. Hobsbawm & T. Ranger (ed.), The Invention of Tradition, pp. 114
P. Duara, Rescuing History from the Nation: Questioning Narratives of Modern China, pp.
351 and, if possible, 177205.

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 P. Chatterjee, The Nation and its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories, pp. 313.
J. Hutchinson & A. D. Smith (eds.), Nationalism: critical concepts in political science,
Sections 1, 2 and 5, which include different views on The Question of Definition,
pp. 1546; Theories of Nationalism, pp. 4769; Nationalism outside Europe, pp.
196236.
Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literature, pp. 123158.

Week 4 (30 October 2017): Migration and Encounters

Required Reading (lecture):

David Feldman, Migration in M. Daunton (ed.), The Cambridge Urban History of
Britain, 1850-1950 (Cambridge University Press, 2000).

Required Reading (seminar):

Adam McKeown, Global Migration, 1846-1940, Journal of World History, Vol. 15,
No. 2 (Jun., 2004), pp. 155-189.

Recommended Reading:
Sunil Amrith, Migration and Diaspora in Modern Asia (Cambridge, 2011),
Introduction.
James Clifford, Travelling Cultures, in Clifford, Routes: Travel and Translation in the
Late Twentieth Century (Harvard University Press, 1997).
Robin Cohen, Global diasporas: An introduction (Routledge, 2008), ch 2.
Jan Lucassen and Leo Lucassen, Measuring and Quantifiyng Cross-Cultural
Migrations: An Introduction Lucassen and Lucassen, Globalizing Migration History:
The Eurasian Experience 16th-21st Centuries (Brill, Leiden, 2014).

Week 5 (6 November 2017): Thinking Historiographically: Preparing your essay.

In this session, we will reflect back upon the discussions and lectures in the first half of
the course as students prepare to submit their outlines for their historiographically-
focussed core course essay. The session will include general reflections on the
importance of thinking historiographically; some practical advice about preparing
outlines, researching, and writing; and a Q&A session to give students a chance to
address any questions they have about the course so far, or their assignment.

Week 6 (13 November 2017): Minds and Bodies

Required Reading (lecture):

Roy Porter, The Patient's View: Doing Medical History from Below, Theory
and Society (1985): 175 98.

Required Reading (seminar):

This week, we will consider a particular historiographical controversy in transnational

history the secondary literature on the brain-washing terror of 1950s-70s Anglo-
American psychiatry and intelligence, sparked by communist Chinas entry into the
Korean War.

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 Timothy Melley, Brain Warfare: The Covert Sphere, Terrorism, and the Legacy
of the Cold War, in Grey Room 45 (Fall 2011), pp 18-41.

If you have time, please look at the other articles in this special issue, and try to
familiarize yourself with the basic history of the Korean War and its aftermath. The
Coldest Winter and Brothers at War are good guides.

Explore also the resources on this excellent research website, hosted by Birkbeck:

http://www.bbk.ac.uk/hiddenpersuaders/

For example:

http://www.bbk.ac.uk/hiddenpersuaders/blog/hunter-origins-of-brainwashing/

To get a flavor of discussion of brain-washing in the US media of the 1950s, try doing a
keyword search in, say, the New York Times.

This is the locus classicus of US CIA-funded scaremongering about brain-washing:

Edward Hunter, Brain-washing in Red China: The Calculated Destruction of Mens Minds

Recommended Reading:

Timothy Melley, The Covert Sphere (book)

John Marks, Search for the Manchurian Candidate: the CIA and mind control
Susan Carruthers, Cold War Captives
Matthew W Dunne, A Cold War State of Mind: Brainwashing and Postwar American
Society
Charles Young, Name, rank and serial number: exploiting Korean War POWs at home
and abroad
Erik Linstrum, Ruling Minds: Psychiatry in the British Empire (2009)
Tony Ballantyne, Antoinette Burton and Rosalind O' Hanlon, Bodies in Contact:
Rethinking Colonial Encounters in World History
Jock McCulloch, Colonial Psychiatry and the African Mind
Richard C. Keller, Colonial Madness in British and French North Africa
R. Keller, Geographies of Power, Legacies of Mistrust: Colonial Medicine in the
Global Present Historical Geography, 34, 2006.
Frantz Fanon, Medicine and Colonialism in A Dying Colonialism (1965)
M.Epprecht, The Making of "African Sexuality": Early Sources, Current
Debates, History Compass, 2010 Moodle
S. Gilman, Black Bodies, White Bodies: Towards an Iconography of Female
Sexuality in late Nineteenth Century Art, Medicine and Literature', Critical Inquiry,
1985.
H. Deacon, Madness, Race, and Moral Treatment: Robben Island Lunatic Asylum,
Cape Colony, 1846 1890, History of Psychiatry, 7, 1996 e-Journal
R.Keller, Madness and Colonization: Psychiatry in the British and French
Empires, 1800-1962 in Journal of Social History, 35, 2, 2001e-Journal
M. Vaughan, 'Idioms of Madness: Zomba Lunatic Asylum, Nyasaland, in the
Colonial Period', Journal of Southern African Studies, vol 9, no. 2, 1981?e-Journal

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 M. Vaughan, Curing Their Ills: Colonial Power and African Illness, chapter 5
M. Vaughan chapter in S. Marks and D. Engels (eds), Contesting Colonial Hegemonies

Week 7 (20 November 2017): Scale and Everyday Life

PLEASE NOTE: THIS DATE IS THE DEADLINE FOR SUBMISSION OF ESSAY

OUTLINE FOR THE CORE COURSE ESSAY

Required Reading (lecture):

J. Brewer, Microhistory and the Histories of Everyday Life, Cultural and Social
History 7.1 (2010)

Required Reading (seminar):

AHR conversation: On transnational history, American Historical Review, 111
(December 2006), 1440-1464.
[http://www.historycooperative.org/journals/ahr/111.5/introduction.html]

Recommended Reading:
John Brewer, Microhistory and the histories of everyday life, Cultural and social
history 7.1 (2010). [http://www.cas.uni-
muenchen.de/publikationen/e_series/cas-eseries_nr5.pdf]
William Cronon, The uses of environmental history, Environmental History Review
17 (1993): 1-22
[http://www.williamcronon.net/writing/Cronon_Uses_of_Environmental_Hist
ory_EHR_Fall_1993.pdf]
Kren Wigen, Oceans of History: Introduction, American Historical Review, 111
(June 2006): 717-21 [available online at www.historycooperative.org]

Week 8 (27 November 2017): Categories

Required Reading (lecture):

John Tosh, The Pursuit of History (2015; 6th edn), pp. 229-253 (ch. 10: Gender
history and postcolonial history)

Required Reading (seminar):

Eileen Boris and Angelique Janssens (eds.) Complicating categories: gender, class, race
and ethnicity (CUP, 2004) introduction.

Recommended Reading:
Ann Laura Stoler, Rethinking colonial categories: European communities and thr
Boundaries of rule, Comparative studies in society and history, vol. 31, no 1, 1989.
Frantz Fanon, The woman of colour and the white man and The man of colour
and the white woman in Frantz Fanon, The Fanon Reader, London, 2006) ch. 3-4.
Joan W. Scott, "Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis," American
Historical Review, December 1986, Vol.91, No.5.

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 Michael Weiner, Discourses of race, nation and empire in pre-1945 Japan, Ethnic
and Racial Studies 18:3 (1995): 433-456.

Week 9 (4 December 2017): Readers and Audiences

YOU WILL HAVE RECEIVED FEEDBACK ON YOUR ESSAY OUTLINE BY

THIS DATE

Required Reading (lecture):

Ludmilla Jordanova, History in Practice (London, 2000) Chapter 6 (Public
History).

Required Reading (seminar):

Gordon S. Wood, "In Defense of Academic History Writing," AHA Perspectives
April 2010.
[http://www.historians.org/perspectives/issues/2010/1004/1004art1. Cfm]

Recommended Reading:
Roy Rosenzweig, Can History be Open Source? Wikipedia and the Future of the
Past, in The Journal of American History 93 (2006), pp.117-146.
[http://chnm.gmu.edu/resources/essays/d/42 ]

Week 10 (11 December 2017): Writing History

Required Reading (lecture):

John Tosh, The Pursuit of History, Chapter 6: Writing and Interpretation, (Pearson
Longman, 5th edition, 2010).
A. Sachs, Letters to a Tenured Historian, Rethinking History, 14 (2010), pp. 5-38.

No seminar: Individual meetings to discuss essay