This course surveys the history of Europe from the era of New World "discovery" to the beginnings of the First World War. Students will consider the meaning of Europe as a geographical, political, religious, economic, and cultural space. They will examine how conquest and commerce on a global scale shaped the internal history of Europe . They will learn how Asia, Africa, and the Americas helped to remake the demography, epidemiology, landscape, technology, and consumer culture of European countries.
Students will learn how new technologies revolutionised European weaponry, transportation, and industrial production, with effects that reverberated abroad and helped to make European war into a global phenomenon. They will learn about internecine European religious conflicts and grapple with the rise of centralised states under divine-right monarchs. They will consider the meaning and moral limits of the Enlightenment as a European-wide development, at the apex of the slave trade.
The course draws to a close with the rise of scientific racism, the carving up of Africa and Asia by European powers, and ends as imperial rivalry, brinksmanship, nationalism, and the modernisation of war—all semester-long themes—trigger the Great War of 1914.
