What is globalization? What is empire? What are the relationships between them? Globalization, one of the most widely-used concepts today, is often taken out of the historical contexts out of which it arose. This course analyzes its connections with European imperial projects (British, French, German and Russian) of “world making” and the types of connections--economic, political and cultural--that they fostered. The connections between globalization, the forging of the world economy and the histories of capitalism are a central focus of the course. The goal is to seek to understand the types of globalization active today, including the creation of a world based on global inequality and environmental degradation in which older colonial relationships of power (vis a vis the global south, for example) continue to hold sway. In other words, through a historical analysis of globalization and empire the course explores processes of economic and political transformation that created the modern present.

Methodologically the course is an introduction to the field(s) of transnational and global history.