In the year 600, the peoples who came to be known as ‘the Anglo-Saxons’ were ethnically diverse, politically fragmented and largely pagan; by 750 they had emerged as one of the major cultures of post-Roman Europe, with towns, a complex economy and a network of richly-endowed churches. The fusion of Germanic, Celtic and Mediterranean traditions produced a material culture of astonishing richness and originality, including such internationally famous works as the Sutton Hoo grave goods, the Ruthwell and Bewcastle crosses and the Lindisfarne Gospels. This is currently one of the liveliest areas of medieval history, as old discoveries are reassessed, and new ones (especially in the areas of economy and settlement) overturn accepted views. This course will afford students the exciting opportunity to trace the remarkable growth of English society and culture in response to external stimuli. This is the only paper in the Modern History School devoted to archaeology, and archaeology is defined in the widest sense, to include illuminated manuscripts, precious objects, coins, sculpture and buildings as well as sites and finds. 

The Byzantine Further Subject provides the only opportunity for historians to study in depth the dramatic transformation of the Near East at the end of the classical period. The scope of the subject is vast, encompassing as it does eight cultures and two seismic events. The twin civilized powers of classical antiquity, the Roman and Persian Empires, were both destroyed in the period, under the violent pressure of the Arab conquests and the massive influx of Slavs into the Balkans. These two old and two new cultures stand at the heart of the subject, but four other cultures are illuminated by the prescribed texts – the Coptic society of late Roman Egypt, the Syrian world of the Fertile Crescent, the fragmented society of Armenia, and the great nomad powers of the Eurasian steppes.

‘Carolingian Renaissance’ is a term of convenience used to describe the cultural, intellectual and religious awakening of Western Europe in the eighth century which in due course found its natural centre in the court school of Charlemagne and thence returned, in the ninth century and under fresh stimulus, to the churches and monasteries equipped to realize its implications. It thus gathers up what of Antiquity and Patristic learning had been preserved and hands it on, transmuted, to become the basis of European thinking about the aims of society until comparatively recent times. Its range is so great, and its implications so vast, that no set of prescribed texts could in practice cover it. The texts that have been chosen (all in English or French translation) illustrate some of its principal themes and some of the ways in which those themes were modified in the course of a century’s experiment. Firstly dealing with the directing force of Charlemagne and his advisers and, thereafter, of the widely differing interpretations placed on the royal programme by bishops, monks and others left to their own devices.

The Crusades were a central phenomenon of the High Middle Ages. The product of a western aristocratic society suffused by a martial culture and a militant religion, they reveal aspects of social relations, popular spirituality, techniques of waging war and attitudes to violence. They retain interest for a modern world to which Holy War and ideological justification of violence are no strangers. The aim of the Further Subject is twofold: (i) a full exploration of the dramatic events of the campaigns in the Near East, covering the experience as well as the motivations of crusaders and settlers; and (ii) an investigation of the interaction over a period of two centuries between western Christians and the indigenous populations, both Christian and Islamic, in and around the states and settlements established in the East. The subject embraces spectacular events and vivid personalities, including Saladin, one of the few Muslims to gain a reputation in medieval Europe, but the set texts also enable students to study broader themes: ideologies (Christian Holy War and Islamic Jihad), institutions (the ‘feudal’ structure of the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem or the Military Orders), military history (castles, siege warfare) as well as social and cultural encounters at this meeting point of the Mediterranean civilizations of the Middle Ages: Greek, Arabic, Jewish and Latin. In recent years the Crusades have attracted a wealth of new research and debate. Students thus have access to a rich and accessible secondary material against which to establish their own views.

This subject engages with Italian society in a period of extraordinary flux and creativity. As the city-communes came to the end of their period of dominance in Italian politics, several amongst them – including Florence, Siena and Padua, studied here – produced the most elaborate manifestations of civic pride and republican identity. These took the form not simply of governmental and financial institutions, but of newly created piazzas and town halls, statues and frescoes, church building and the elaboration of civic ceremony. In addition, the writing of history and of political and religious polemic contributed to current debate about the character and purpose of life in the cities – a debate which was conducted against a background of conflict and often extreme violence. All of these aspects of urban culture are represented amongst the various texts and images prescribed for the course. 

Linking many of these themes is the career and work of Dante, whose Comedy is both an extraordinary creative achievement and a sustained critique of contemporary society. The psychological realism introduced into literature by Dante’s vast panorama finds a miniature successor in Petrarch’s The Secret, the witty self-analysis of a Christian man of classical letters. The transformation of the visual arts which also occurred at this time is represented by Giotto, Duccio and their contemporaries, whose painting and sculpture is examined both with respect to its style and technique, and in relation to its patrons, setting and audience.

This subject offers candidates the possibility of studying and comparing themes in cultural history which are often considered apart. Its aim is to examine aspects of the civilizations of both the ‘Gothic’ North and ‘Renaissance’ South in fifteenth-century Europe. In the North, the Low Countries witnessed the emergence of an art of remarkable naturalism (represented by Jan van Eyck, Roger van der Weyden and Hans Memling). Meanwhile, the Italian peninsula saw the development of a more idealized vision of the world, beginning with the works of Masaccio and drawing increasingly on Greek and Roman antiquity for both subject-matter and inspiration. Beside these apparently divergent tendencies, some common ground existed between the two cultures: urban life, the rise of princely courts and households, mercantile and financial contacts, and important movements in devotional religion. One purpose of the subject is therefore to examine the relationship between the visual art of these regions and the societies from which it emerged. 

The Wars of the Roses were a prolonged period of political disorder and conflict in fifteenth-century England, stemming from the disastrous reign of Henry VI and issuing forth in a series of popular uprisings, magnate rebellions, battles, skirmishes and usurpations of the throne. They took place in a polity with strong central institutions and powerful civic values – and they were, in this sense, civil wars, fought by lords and commons alike over the demand for good government and the need to restore authority. Yet because this polity was also founded on structures of lordship, deriving from the ownership of land and perpetuated by habits of deference, chivalry and personal authority, the Wars were also conflicts between families and friends, and were equally concerned with property, territory and local power. What lay behind the assertive behaviour of such ‘over mighty subjects’ as Richard of York and Warwick the Kingmaker? What led to the usurpations of Edward IV, Richard III and Henry VII, and why did only two of them succeed? How did politicians, thinkers and ordinary people respond to the experience of civil war? How much impact did the limited fighting – estimated at only 13 weeks of actual campaigning – really have? And how was this fighting managed? The English were used to sending small semi-professional armies to France: how did they raise troops and conduct campaigns when the enemy was other Englishmen, and the aim not conquest, but political advantage? As far as government is concerned, many historians have argued for a strengthening of royal power during the 1470s, 80s and 90s, but it remains unclear what caused this strengthening, or how it fits with the many challenges and set-backs experienced by the kings of these decades.

The period for study, a golden one in English literary achievement, was one in which major poets and dramatists were involved in or preoccupied with political events. The Further Subject invites candidates to explore the relationship between literary developments and political ones. The following authors have been selected for study: More, Skelton, Wyatt, Surrey, Sidney, Spenser, Marlowe, Shakespeare (for whom the set texts are taken from his English and Roman history plays), Bacon, Jonson, Middleton, Massinger, Milton, Marvell. Candidates are encouraged to consider the lives and influences, as well as the writings, of these men, and to relate the writings to their historical contexts. They are also encouraged to read more widely in the literature of the period and to consider the historical changes which the literature of the period illuminates or reflects. Among the themes of the subject are: the Court; humanism; nobility, honour and service; biography; literature and the nation; the relationship between Christian and classical values; early Stuart monarchy and the masque; the development of the history play; the relationship of the drama to politics and to Puritanism; the responses of writers to the Puritan Revolution. 

Towards  the  middle  of  the  sixteenth  century,  Portugal  and  Spain  had  established  world empires encompassing lands from Africa to America and Asia. During the following century, the  multiple  connections  they  made  among  many  different  places  fostered  unparalleled transformations in culture and society around the globe, yet these were far from levelling out the  variety  of  local  conditions.  This  Further  Subject  allows  students  to  explore  such  a multifaceted process through primary sources running from travel and missionary accounts to  chronicles,  judicial  records,  paintings  and  art  objects.  The  paper  focuses  on  a  range  of 
topics, including the mutual attraction of the Iberian empires and the degree of their political integration during the union of the crowns of Portugal and Spain under the Habsburg dynasty (1580-1640),  their  reaction  to  the  simultaneous  challenge  posed  by  new  maritime  powers from Northern Europe, long-distance mobility of individuals and groups, cultural and religious encounters,  the  spread  of  informal  communities  on  the  fringes  of  empires  and  the  rise  of mestizo societies within them, the emergence of creole elites and indigenous agency before the Iberian rule, the global proliferation of the slave trade and processes of racialisation, and the overall effect on cultural production and models of consumption.

Over the last fifteen years or so, scholars have increasingly recognised the importance of  the  global  connections  that  the  Iberian  exploration established  across  the  early  modern world.  This  new  understanding  cannot  be  reduced  to  the  more  conventional  history  of empires or long-distance economic  exchanges.  Rather  it emphasises  the cross-cultural interactions shaping the new composite societies that emerged within and on the fringes of the Portuguese and Spanish empires over the course of time, and it will pay special attention to  traditionally  marginalised  actors.  Across  Africa to  America  and  Asia,  the  study  of  the multiple  outcomes  resulting  from  characteristic  which,  at  least  to  the  mid-seventeenth century, were common to both Portuguese and Spanish societies is proving to be one of the most productive fields in early modern global history. Combining the big picture with the local level of detail, this new Further Subject is meant to enable students to come into contact with the exciting dynamics that marked the Iberian global century.

This paper explores the complex intersections between ideas about gender and religion in early modern England though a range of primary sources, including sermons, pamphlets, plays, and petitions, written by both women and men.  During a century of religious change, in which Catholicism gave way to a competing plethora of protestantisms, conventional notions of gender roles became destabilised and took new forms.  Ideas about spiritual equality between the sexes and the sanctity of individual conscience existed in tension with the patriarchal values of the new religion and gendered ideals of godliness which seemed to place men and women firmly in their respective places. The rise of print and the impacts of national politics on individual lives and communities encouraged some women to intervene in debates traditionally associated with men and masculinity, while both men and women during the civil wars experimented with radical religious forms which challenged patriarchal structures and assumptions. This paper examines not only theoretical debates and prescriptive literature, but also the messy realities of daily life, for instance by looking at court records of marital desertion and abuse.

Female authors and the ways in which they accepted or challenged patriarchy will play an important role in this paper.  However, the study of gender goes beyond the traditional male/female binary.  Gender can also be thought about in relation to the body – how it was scrutinised, placed within a gendered order, and analogised with idealised political and religious hierarchies; and how disorderly bodies were related to the workings of the Devil.  The theme of gender can likewise be explored through the lens of the emotions, as puritan spirituality emphasised both the need for moderation and self-control while at the same time inculcating in believers emotional states which could oscillate between elation and despair.  Feminine emotionality could be criticised in some contexts, but was treated as a sign of salvation in others; and even held up as a standard for men to emulate.  Students will be encouraged to think not only about the ways in which processes of religious change affected gendered identities and agency, but also how the study of gender can deepen our understanding of early modern religion itself.

The advent of the electronic age has encouraged historians to reflect critically on the communication and information technologies of past centuries. The early modern period is known as the age of a previous media revolution, when the rise of the print industry led to the dissemination of texts on an unprecedented scale, playing an important role in major contemporary upheavals, such as the Reformation and the Scientific Revolution. Yet as we are learning today, media revolutions are never a simple transformation from one medium to another. In the same way, script remained crucial during the centuries that followed Gutenberg’s invention. Even in the fields or spheres of activity most associated with the new technology, such as literature, script continued to exist alongside print, complementing rather than being relegated to the sidelines. In many others, and especially in the practical undertakings of everyday life, manuscript writing never ceased to be the major non-oral medium for early modern communication and information.

This paper explores the materials, forms, and purposes of script between 1550 and 1750 in order to reconstruct the experience of writing in the early modern period. It explores writing practices in the British Isles, Europe, and the New World as well as the flow of information between West and East. Writing has always been a manual labour, and especially so in the age of the quill pen and of home-made ink. We will examine the materials, implements, and surfaces of script and how they shaped its outputs. Who had access to the technology of writing in the early modern period? We will interrogate the practices of ordinary writers as well as professional practitioners such as scribes and notaries. We will study a variety of forms, from the sophisticated tools of the learned, through correspondence and other instruments of everyday life, to the political and social power of petitions. Finally, we will look at the afterlife of writings, in the practices of record-keeping and archiving, in order to understand how contemporaries dealt with the first crisis of information overload.

This course is intended for students who wish to combine an interest in the structures of courts and court culture  with  an  introduction  to  some  of  the  major  issues  and  methodological  challenges  involved  in studying  the  history  of  art  in  a  courtly  context.  The  study  of  courts  as  the  focus  of  political,  social  and cultural authority within the Early Modern state has been a dynamic and exciting area of historical enquiry in  the  last  few  decades.  No  less  important  has  been  the  impact  of  both  art  historical  and  historical scholarship in exploring the practical mechanisms of art patronage, the use of art by rulers and other elites to construct justifications for the legitimization of authority, and the respective role of artists, patrons and scholars in the formulation of ideological programmes within a court context. The course will seek to bring these two areas together by focusing on a number of specific courts and on wider issues connected with court patronage of the arts, the resources and aims of patrons, and the reactions of both courtly and non-courtly  elites  to  these  initiatives.  An  introductory  class  will  examine  some  of  the  historiographical  and methodological problems involved in studying courts and in coming to grips with what will be for some students  the  unfamiliar  context  of  art  historical  scholarship.  Subsequent  classes  will  look  at  a  range  of European courts including the papal court in Rome, the English court from the reign of Elizabeth I through the Stuarts, the Habsburg court in Brussels, and Louis XIV’s Versailles, while additional topics will include the  role  of  female  patrons,  the  place  of  collecting  in  court  patronage,  and  courts’  use  of  theatrical  and musical performances, as well as entries. The prescribed texts and documents will introduce students to the details of art commissions, inventories of collections, and correspondence between and amongst artists and elite patrons. 

The Further Subject offers students the opportunity to explore, within a comparative context, the  relationship  between  war  and  society  from  the  end  of  the  Thirty  Years  War  to  the conclusion of the Napoleonic Wars. This century and a half was marked by almost constant European conflict, fought across the globe and drawing on, and affecting the lives of, an ever-increasing number of people. The era also saw significant developments in the ways war was practised,  organised,  financed,  and  justified.  A  key  aim  of  the  course  is  to  suggest  ways  in which military history can be embedded within the wider framework of political, social, and cultural history, as well as within the context of the history of medicine and gender studies.  We  will  begin  with  the  lively  historiographical  debate  over  the  ‘military  revolution’, grappling with the role of the changing nature of warfare in the genesis of the modern state.  The course will provide an opportunity to examine how states sourced and resourced military manpower.  We will also consider private entrepreneurship, privateering, irregular warfare, the representation of the military in art and literature, the impact of disease on the waging of war, and the position of soldiers, sailors, veterans and prisoners of war within civil society. 

More  generally,  readings  will  investigate  the  extent  to  which  different  political  systems shaped  military  cultures  and  priorities,  and  will  think  about  the  ways  in  which  service  and combat  were experienced  by  military  personnel.    This  period  saw  the  development  of  the Prussian  model  of  an  Enlightenment  army,  the  evolution  of  revolutionary  ideas  about  the French nation in arms, and the global ascendency of British imperial force. We will evaluate the  nature  of  these  transformations.

"Sir, when a man is tired of London, he is tired of life: for there is in London all that life can afford".  Imbued with the spirit of Samuel Johnson's famous dictum, this course analyses eighteenth-century London's profound influence as an agent of change across a broad range of themes - social, economic, political, and cultural. As capital city, London has always played a significant role in national developments, but many historians have seen its impact in this era at its most fundamental, ushering in many of the recognizable features of modernity. A variety of vibrant and stimulating texts have been chosen to stimulate student thinking on London's influence on great transformations such as the rise of the public sphere, the dawn of empire and the birth of the financial City, which sources give voice to both the excitement and the concerns resulting from the capital's growth.  

The course is structured to enable close study of important developments within the capital. The eight classes will be structured along topographical lines to focus attention on key sites of change, taking a tour through the polite West End 'town', the courtly and parliamentary world of Westminster, the commercial-finance district of Exchange Alley; the burgeoning press of Fleet Street; the East End centres of manufacture and shipping; and the new suburban areas. The six tutorials would complement the classes by studying London's growth in more thematic terms, embracing such topics as social change, political culture, economic organisation, religious pluralism, and the imperial metropole. When combined, these approaches would enable students to gain a comprehensive overview of metropolitan change, and to locate it within broader contexts of urban and national development.  

This course examines the development of Britain’s empire through a focus on bodies, environments,  and  disease.    It  links  intellectual  theories  –  whether  of  political  or  medical authority – to the physical experience of Britain and its colonies, and analyses how theories of  racial  identity  and  difference  were  shaped  in  new  environmental  and  medical  contexts, particularly  the  colonial  tropics.    The  course  traces cultural  and  social  practices  of  British health and medicine as factors in Britain’s imperial growth and its increasingly global wars.   

Foreign and tropical environments such as India and the Caribbean presented challenges  as  well  as  opportunities  for  ambitious,  outspoken,  reforming,  enterprising,  and sometimes unscrupulous individuals.  At the same time, an urbanizing, commercializing and increasingly globalized Britain tested notions of masculinity and of Britishness itself.  Readings are therefore drawn from a range of writers who argue over ideas of luxury, degeneration, and how to secure the health of populations (in Britain, its armed forces, and in its colonies).  These readings thus also deal with fundamental conceptual issues such as racial difference, the roots of poverty, modern medical and political authority, and the relationship between domestic and foreign environments.  

An underlying theme of the course is modern forms of expertise – that is, who holds reliable  knowledge  about  bodies  and  about  foreign  and  exotic  environments,  and,  indeed how  concepts  such  as  the  foreign and  the  exotic  were  developed  and  argued.    Modern medicine  can be  seen  as  a  historical process  in which  traditional  authorities  – patients  and traditional medical authorities (both  female and  male,  British and  colonial indigenous practitioners)  –  were  de-skilled  of  their  bodily  expertise  in  favour  of  the  rise  of  modern, scientific medicine.  Alongside, the issue of ‘medicalization’ –  of  the  powerful  authority  of medical  ideas  in  society  as  a  whole  –  is  examined  in  historical  context.  

This course is organised around seven thematic bodies of literature that contribute to a wide array of perspectives on madness and mental healing from the ancient to the modern, and across the globe. The diversity of the materials presented will allow us to engage with a variety  of  expressions  of  ‘madness’  as  well  as  the  ways  in  which  mental  illness  has  been politicised,  resisted,  embraced,  or  dramatised.  As  each  week’s  materials  offer  a  new  set  of challenges,  we  will  also  consider  a  range  of  methodologies,  ethics,  and  positionalities.  The first two classes begin with an introduction to medieval and early modern texts in translation, allowing  for  a  foundational  discussion  of  the  broadest  religious,  mystical  and  melancholic interpretations  of  the  human  condition.  The  course,  while  not  a  strictly  chronological narrative,  moves  to  the  modern  history  of  psychiatry  and  related  fields.  Moving  beyond  a history  of  asylumdom,  we  work  through  an  increasingly  medicalised  approach  to  mental illness while interrogating power relations inherent in colonial occupations, and dynamics of race, gender and culture. The final classes engage with well-developed areas in the historiography  of  mental  illness  and  treatment.  We  will  work  with  visual  sources  from photography and artistic expressions, as well as a contemplation of the impact of the physical environment  of  hospitals  and  museums.  The  final  two  classes  engage  with  the  significant resistance  to  the  psychiatric  profession  prompted  by  the  anti-psychiatry  movement  and conclude with a discussion of the ways historians have attempted to uncover the voice of the psychiatric patient through a series of patient memoirs.

This Further Subject paper provides a survey of the representations and experiences of women of African ancestry in Britain, from the mid-eighteenth century to the late nineteenth century. Organized thematically over the period, the paper aims to explore the ways Black were depicted in popular and political British culture and how class and status intersected to shape the varying experiences of women in Britain throughout this period. Students will be introduced to a range of primary sources that document the presence of individual Black women in British history, such as newspapers, visual art, and ephemera. This paper will also engage in questions around historical production, archival fragments, along with other methodological challenges, that have made it difficult to find those racialized as Black easily within widely used archival sources. By contending with such questions, this paper will speak to wider discussions and concerns around the history of modern Britain, historical erasure, race, and belonging.

The tumultuous events of the last decade of the twentieth century and the first quarter of this one have shown vividly the enduring power and influence of nationalism. This Further Subject sets out to explore a central aspect of modern European history, and introduce students to seminal texts in the canon of political and social thought. Few political ideologies have exercised so long or so consistent an influence over the lives of contemporary Europeans as nationalism, making the search for its intellectual foundations - and the incongruities it spawned - all the more vital for an understanding of modern history, and of the European condition. The course traces the concept of nationalism to its modern origins and studies its evolution over the long nineteenth century. This was the crucial period when nationalism entered the mainstream of European politics and came to dominate the political agenda of the continent, as witnessed by the political unifications of Italy and Germany.

This is not a political history of the nineteenth century. Rather, its purpose is to trace the evolution of an ideology and the role of intellectuals and artists in shaping it. We will do this both by studying the founder-texts of some of its most influential exponents, and through an engagement with different forms of cultural expression, notably music, art and early cinema. The set texts include seminal theoretical works by Sieyès, Hegel, Madame de Stael, Mazzini, Renan and Treitschke, as well as less commonly read texts by a range of political practitioners and theorists such as the statesman Otto von Bismarck, the Italian priest Vincenzo Gioberti, the revolutionary socialist Moses Hess, the French historian Jules Michelet, and the pioneering first-wave feminist Fanny Lewald. We will consider what was politically distinctive about specific nationalist traditions and interrogate the classic opposition between the “civic” nationalism of France and the “ethnic” nationalism of the Germans. We will also explore the ways different nationalisms borrowed from (and reacted against) each other, as well as their imperial manifestations. In this way, the course stretches beyond the western European heartlands of France, Germany and Italy to address, for example, Algeria, the Habsburg lands, and the complex position of Europe’s Jews.

A continuing theme of the course is the shift of nationalist ideology from being the child of the revolutionary Left – culminating in the 1848 Revolutions – towards its identification with the Right and the forces of state authority by the end of the period. Crucially, we will explore the role of history and memory in the construction of nationhood – not just through the stirring narratives of seminal historians like Michelet and Treitschke, but also through iconic works of art. We will set the romantic painting of Delacroix, Friedrich and Schinkel against historicist works by Hayez, Oppenheim and Delaroche, consider how Verdi and Wagner’s most celebrated operas influenced political discourse, and explore monuments, song, and film as expressions of nationalist culture.

This subject aims to study the ideas and culture of the Victorians with some reference to their analytical content and social context. The topics covered range from progress and faith, through natural and social science, to fine art and gender. There are many common themes running through the texts, such as the tension between materialism and idealism, and between historical and positivist modes of thought. 

The set texts are grouped under headings which suggest the major issues to be explored.

1. Historical writings introduce the concept of ‘Whig’ history and the interaction between religious beliefs and the claims made for the value of the study of the past. 
2. Social and economic thought examines the attempt to advance beyond the apparently well-established principles of political economy towards a ‘general science of society’ or sociology.
3. The religious texts embrace the spectrum from Catholicism and natural religion to agnosticism and secularism. 
4. The section on art and society assesses the enormous influence of ‘cultural critics’, Carlyle, Ruskin, Matthew Arnold, and William Morris, whose perspectives were distinct from those of churchmen and sociologists. We are particularly fortunate in having a grand Ruskinian project – the University Museum – in Parks Road, and Ruskin’s own collection of drawings and watercolours, used in his teaching, in the Ashmolean Museum.
5. Education is important in raising directly the question of the role of women in Victorian culture, and shows how many of the intellectual developments of the period were reflected in the reform of the universities and public schools, and in the professionalization of study.
6. The scientific texts focus on Darwin and the impact of evolutionary thinking.

Starting with the second half of the Eighteenth Century, power relationships between peoples on earth, the growing and dramatic division between dominant nations and nations that were dominated, or even eliminated, and indeed the foundations of social inequalities, were increasingly seen by Western naturalists and intellectuals as inevitable features of the order of nature. Racial weakness was regarded as inscribed in the shape of human skulls, individual deficiencies in the traits of human faces. The attempt to ground political and social phenomena on the authority of nature preceded the advent of Darwinism in the 1860s. It could indeed be claimed that the immediate and chaotic spread of Social Darwinism within the Western world simply reflected the widespread presence of attitudes and beliefs for which Charles Darwin, often unwittingly, appeared to provide authoritative scientific evidence. Darwin himself, in the last analysis, shared many of the presuppositions of his self-appointed and at times extreme followers, and predicted that many peoples on earth would disappear as the inevitable, regrettable consequence of natural laws regulating the relationships between biological populations.

Yet, the “natural” triumph of the “civilizing” imperial western powers was not granted. Once again, the struggle for life and natural selection had to be called upon to express anxieties about the stability of the social order. The mounting aggressiveness of the “dangerous classes” and the fertility of the lower orders were jeopardizing the efforts of the “natural” elites that were responsible for civilization and imperial advances. The superior races had to exercise control over the less endowed ones, in the same way as the social elites had to carefully monitor demographic and political transformations that in the long term would endanger the survival of the race itself. Chronic illnesses, moral insensitivity, atavist aggressiveness had to be curbed through a rigid control of immigration and reproduction. Racial anthropology found its parallel in criminal anthropology and criminology. Crime was seen as a natural phenomenon for which, often, there was no cure. Individuals as well as crowds often showed the survival of traits that characterized previous stages in the development of society, or in the natural history of man. “Beastly behaviours” and “savage crimes” became expressions that summed up a widespread climate of opinion. The survival of nations depended on their capacity to steer the reproductive flow and to isolate and possibly eliminate the danger that lethal traits would further spread throughout society.

To some legislative bodies, such as the State of Indiana in 1907 and 1927, forced sterilisation appeared as a benign solution capable of stopping the spread of dangerous individual traits. To National Socialist political and scientific leaders in Germany, sterilization had to be accompanied by stronger measures, such as forced isolation and straightforward physical elimination. A strong State had to take strong measures to survive and to lead. Has the tragic lesson of negative eugenics during the 1930s and the early 1940s been learnt? A final class will be devoted to the periodic resurgence of attitudes appealing to the authority of nature and of science to explain complex social and historical phenomena. Is intelligence hereditary, geographically and socially distributed, and can “science” prescribe social norms and suggest political measures? 

This course offers an introduction to the modern history of the Middle East and North Africa, focusing on the social and political history of the Arab world in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. No prior knowledge of the region, of Arabic, or of Islamic history is required and all texts will be in English. Translations of texts not currently available in English will be provided and will be available through the Bodleian website of the History Faculty Library and/or on handouts. 

A recurrent focus of tension and conflict, and of often highly polemical political commentary, the Middle East presents students with the challenge of understanding a distinctive regional history that is important in its own right. It also offers students the opportunity to engage with major global themes: such as rapid and uneven economic and social change, the long-term impact of imperialism and nationalism, local conflicts with geopolitical implications, and the difficulties of adequately explaining ‘modernisation’ and its effects in a major part of the global South. The central themes of the region’s internal development in relation to pressures from outside forces will be examined through primary sources illustrating diplomatic, political, social, and—wherever possible—, cultural aspects of Arab history in this period.  

From the occupation of Algiers in 1830 through to the partition of the Ottoman empire in 1919, the Arab world struggled to come to terms with its changing position in a new imperial world order; the struggle to stablish state sovereignty and national self-determination would prove no easier in the twentieth century. Throughout this period, however, the course emphasises how Arab men and women, far from becoming merely ‘victims of history’, adapted to changing circumstances and articulated their aspirations. The region will be approached from its ‘peripheries’ in the Gulf and North Africa, beginning in the nineteenth century with the changing commercial and political relations between British India and the coasts of the Arabian peninsula, and between the states of the Maghrib and southern Europe, and concluding with the independence of the Gulf states in 1971. Along the way, we shall consider the internal transformation and eventual breakup of the Ottoman Empire, the intense European colonisation of North Africa and its more ‘indirect’ imperialism elsewhere, the emergence and ambiguities of Arab nationalism, the struggle over Israel and Palestine, and the ‘end of an era’ marked on one hand by the Suez war and the Algerian revolution, and on the other by the death of Nasser and the ‘Black September’ expulsion of the PLO from Jordan. 

The war between France and the German states in 1870-71 was one of the decisive events of the century.  Victory led to the founding of the German Empire under Prussian leadership, incorporating the annexed regions of Alsace-Lorraine.  Defeat led to the collapse of the French Second Empire, the founding of the Third Republic, and attempted revolutions in Paris and other major cities.  These revolutions – known as ‘Communes’ – were brutally repressed.  The effects reverberated around the world as new technologies made the movement of news and people easier.  Hence 1870-71 also witnessed revolts in the overseas French Empire, in Algeria and Martinique, while the transport of political prisoners to New Caledonia helped create the conditions for revolt there in 1878.  In this course we will explore the international and domestic politics that led to war.  We will look at the experience of combat as the war shifted from a dynastic clash to a ‘people’s war’.  The war culminated in the sieges of major urban centres such as Paris and Strasbourg, in which civilians, including women and children, were as implicated as combatants.  The shock of modern conflict, made tangible through the omnipresent media, would induce changes in military conduct, and it would also influence medical practice, humanitarian interventionism, and international attempts to place limits on warfare.  We will investigate the causes of revolution in the dense urban networks of Paris.  The Commune was experienced a radically liberating event by some, including many women.  It attracted international volunteers and inspired socialist and anarchist propagandists.  But others, and not only on the political right, saw it as a reign of terror.  We will consider the aftermaths of war and revolution, their commemoration and their oblivion, and how memory found expression in art, literature, monuments and pilgrimages.  The legacy of nationalism, revanchism and the status of the ‘lost territories’ helped pave the way for the First World War.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the extraordinary changes – as well as the core continuities – experienced by Africans over the last two hundred years.  Focusing primarily on sub-Saharan Africa, it aims to challenge some of the enduring misconceptions and stereotypes about Africa’s history, and foregrounds African agency and experience in the continent’s political, economic and social development since the early nineteenth century.  Sub-Saharan Africa is one of the most misunderstood and misrepresented regions in the modern world, its recent history often characterised as a catalogue of man-made and natural disaster, conflict, disorder and abject human misery.  Certainly, its nineteenth and twentieth centuries have been defined by conquest and subjugation at the hands of foreign invaders, the struggle for political and economic freedom and equity, and, in more recent times, the quest for stability and development.  Yet the modern history of sub-Saharan Africa is also one of human resilience and resistance, creative and innovative strategies of survival and adaptation, and courageous confrontation of seemingly insuperable challenges.  This module will explore all of this in depth.  The last two hundred years have seen some of the most dramatic change in sub-Saharan Africa’s long history, and the paper will trace such change through the transformative nineteenth century through to the partition of the continent and the imposition of colonial rule, through the colonial experience and processes of national liberation, to the present day problems of political instability and economic underdevelopment.  African initiatives and responses, as well as changing European colonial policy and attitudes toward Africa, will be at the heart of the analysis, and the paper seeks throughout to understand the deeper roots of the challenges now confronting Africa.

This paper explores key themes in Britain’s LGBTQ history over the past two hundred years and provides a grounding in queer historiographical debates, approaches and sources. We will examine different and changing understandings and experiences of sexual and gender identity and community, and consider how social, cultural, political and medical contexts have shaped and modulated them. We will trace the affects of transregional and transnational movements of ideas, people and (sub)cultures and consider the changing historical relationship between ‘queer’ and ‘normal’.  Instead of looking at identities and communities in isolation we work each week to think intersectionally. We thus consider how queer histories are entwined with, for example, histories of empire, modernity, class, gender, and racialisation.

Organised loosely chronologically to support our consideration of uneven change over time, the paper focuses on a different theme, approach and source base each week, with classes and tutorials between them addressing a series of substantive, methodological and conceptual questions. What happens, for example, when we use legal records, newspapers, oral histories, the built environment, literature, or film to piece together the queer past? How might our current understanding of sexual identity distort our vision of that past? What is to be gained by focussing on the local and the particular or on a singular urban or national context? What changes in our accounts when we look comparatively or take a long view? Most importantly, perhaps, how and to whom do these histories matter: is this a minority project or one which might give us broader insight into British society and culture? 

This paper explores the lives of those held in slavery in the USA, focussing on the antebellum era (c.1815-1861). It considers, thematically, the everyday experiences of those enslaved, seeking to evaluate how age and gender shaped day-to-day lives and modes of oppression. Topics include reproduction and childhood, families and communities, and patterns of labour, conceptualised broadly to encompass domestic chores as well as work imposed by enslavers. The paper investigates enslaved people’s solidarity and divisions, their attempts to assert their humanity despite enslavers’ power, people’s modes of everyday resistance, and their cultural and religious lives. It examines, though often challenging evidence, the exploitation of the enslaved through physical punishments, sexual violence, and various forms of enforced separation. Throughout, the paper centres primary evidence from enslaved people, offering tangible ways to overcome absences and limitations within slavery’s archive. It draws mostly on more recent historiographies arising from Black feminist epistemologies as foundational works.

An opportunity is offered in this subject to study the modern history of Japan. The prescribed texts are available in English or English translation and no knowledge of Japanese or previous study of Japanese history is expected. 

The course covers Japanese intellectual, cultural, social and political developments in wider world context from the late Tokugawa period to the post-Asia Pacific War period. Students will examine different types of sources for historical interpretation such as anime, children’s stories, woodblock prints, philosophy texts, literature, government documents, and private diaries. Within modest limits, candidates are free to pursue any interests they may have along particular lines of enquiry: e.g. the origins and nature of revolution; the changing status of women; the vernacular language movement; everyday practices of ordinary citizens in cities and rural areas; relations between human and animals or the natural environment; the impact of the two world wars: the Russo-Japanese War and the AsiaPacific War; the rise of anarchism and Marxism; religion and modernity; sex and the city, and so on. Lectures and classes are offered in Hilary term each year at the Oxford University Nissan Institute of Japanese Studies. In the examination, candidates will be required to answer at least one question relating to the prescribed texts. 

Economic development of the major regions of the world: Europe, Asia, the Americas, Africa, Oceania. The proximate sources of growth: population and human capital, physical capital and technology. The underlying sources of growth: first and second nature geography, institutions and the state. The consequences of growth: living standards, inequality and consumption. International transactions: real trade and factor flows, finance. Warfare and empire. Economic development of the major regions of the world: Europe, Asia, the Americas, Africa, Oceania. The proximate sources of growth: population and human capital, physical capital and technology. The underlying sources of growth: first and second nature geography, institutions and the state. The consequences of growth: living standards, inequality and consumption. International transactions: real trade and factor flows, finance. Warfare and empire.

This subject explores events and ideas in Ireland from the Post-Famine era to Partition, stressing social, cultural, military, ‘subversive’ and sex-relations history as well as conventional high politics. Topics covered include the revolutionary republican Fenian tradition; the Parliamentary Home Rule struggle; starvation, recovery, and the social revolution against aristocratic landlordism; the emergence of militant Unionism in Ulster; cultural revival creating a literature of global significance; the insurgent labour movement and the epic Dublin lockout struggle of 1913; the struggle for women’s rights in the new Ireland; the Anglo-Irish War leading to the creation of a new Irish state; and partition creating the successor entity of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. The Irish people in this period shared many concerns with those living in Great Britain but was also radically different in its social composition, abiding concerns, and ultimate aspirations. This paper speaks as much to broad European tendencies as it does to British Isles peculiarities. It considers both nationalism, in its Irish and British variants, and inter-nationalism in its unionist form. As an anti-imperialist pioneer, Ireland is of considerable significance for understanding succeeding events in the Global South.

At the end of 1914, most of the nations of Europe were locked in to a brutal struggle which tested their endurance to the utmost. In 1917 the United States entered the war and Russia collapsed into revolution. Both events raised new and utopian visions which profoundly influenced all of the combatants. Finally, in 1918, German representatives crossed the Allied lines and sued for an Armistice. Why did Germany lose the war? Were other outcomes possible? Early allied success? German victory? Compromise peace? Popular revolution throughout Europe?  

The First World War was a cultural trauma, which in certain respects is perceived as being ‘outside’ history, a massive human tragedy which defies normal explanation. Yet it is a good test case for thinking about decision making, the constraints on and the possibilities open to politicians and generals. This Further Subject is intended to reflect ‘total war’ with a ‘totalistic’ approach to historiography, one which examines and relates the spheres of political, military, economic and social history.  

The focus of the paper will be on the great battles. Were the battles the futile slaughter of popular myth or the very essence of industrial war? Was Verdun ‘a meaningless battle in a meaningless war’ or a true turning point in the twentieth century? Was Douglas Haig an incompetent butcher or one of the greatest generals in British History? Was the war in other theatres fundamentally different to that in the West? The paper will examine the writings of the military and political decision makers, often written as conscious apologias for their actions. It will also examine their contemporary critics. In addition, it will examine the writings of the subjects of these actions, the ordinary soldiers and civilians who had to live with the consequences. It will seek to examine the relationship between the two, how far did the decision makers have to act with the consent of their ‘victims’?  

The comparative perspective plays a valuable role in this exercise. Did the nations face variants on the same problem or substantially different problems? Were they pursuing similar strategies or fundamentally different ones? Were the generals the ‘donkeys’ of popular legend or genuinely creative figures (or a mixture of both)? Did anyone really win? To answer this, we should ask about the relationship between history and popular memory. Much of what we think we know about the war has been shaped by artistic representation: poetry, novels, film and painting. We should examine these sources critically to try to discover how far they aid our understanding and how far they hinder it. The film of ‘All Quiet on the Western Front’ and the poetry of Wilfred Owen have shaped our understanding of the war more than Haig’s diary or Ludendorff’s Memoirs, but should they? Few subjects raise larger questions about the critical examination of sources. Finally, did these years ‘make’ the Twentieth century with all its subsequent horrors? 

This course introduces the history of modern China since circa 1900. No previous knowledge of Chinese history is necessary and all the texts are in English. The first half of the course looks at the politics, society, and culture of China during a period when the country experienced a constant battering by war, foreign imperialism, and economic and social crises. As China became a republic after the 1911 Revolution, nationalism and anti-imperialism emerged as strong forces, and the Communist Party, which would eventually rule over a quarter of humanity, began its rise to power. The early twentieth century also saw the emergence of a mass popular culture (novels, films, cartoons), the growth of the modern city, changes in the position of women, and not least, the massive upheavals of the 1937-45 war against Japan, the legacies of which continue down to the present. We then consider the cultural materials—domestic and foreign—used to build new political and social orders following the establishment of the People’s Republic of China in 1949. Topics include the impacts of war, family life, the abolition of market culture, agricultural collectivization, the Cultural Revolution, and the reintegration of China into global markets and cultures following the death of Mao Zedong in 1976 and the initiation of market reforms by Deng Xiaoping. 

This Further Subject provides an opportunity to study the history of the Soviet Union from the later years of the ‘New Economic Policy’ to the outbreak of war with Germany. The course examines the establishment of the Stalinist regime, its changing policies and developments in Russian culture and society. Particular topics include political and social conflict in the late 1920s; the ‘Right’ and ‘Left’ oppositions; the consolidation of Stalin’s power; the origins of the ‘Great Terror’; industrialization; collectivization and the peasantry; the cultural intelligentsia; film, literature and music during the 1930s; propaganda; popular culture; women; the family; the Comintern and foreign policy. The primary material, all in English or in English translation, includes a wide range of sources, including official documents recently released from the Russian archives, memoirs and film. There is also a lively secondary literature. 

The purpose of this course is to give students an introduction to the culture, emotions and daily life of Europe from the final years of the Second World War to the end of the 1960s. The course is deliberately European, embracing both east and west, and encouraging students to make comparisons across the Iron Curtain. It also treats the politics and Cold War diplomacy of the period as the backdrop to the ways in which lives were impacted upon by the murderous events of the 1940s, by the social and economic changes of the post-war years, and by the new challenges of the 1960s. In recent years, this has been a very popular course option on the syllabus, and the tutors have recently revised the list of set texts to bring in some new works which place greater emphasis on patters on individual experience. The set texts are therefore deliberately subjective in character. They include novels such as Calvino’s description of the resistance in Italy, Kundera’s account of the Communist regime in Czechoslovakia and Koeppen’s evocation of the world of middle-class Germans coming to terms with the legacies of Nazism; as well as major films of the era, such as Godard’s A bout de souffle and Fellini’s La dolce vita. There are also memoirs (such as that by Kovaly on life in Communist Prague), works of critical engagement (such as de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex) and Holocaust memories (Steinberg’s Speak You Also). 

The United States never possessed a formal Empire. Still, the United States successfully spread their political values, consumer products, and technological advancements around the world, in doing so establishing an informal and yet robust sphere of global influence. This further subject introduces students to the different forms of so-called soft powers used by the United States during the first two decades of the Cold War to establish political, economic, and cultural influence abroad. It will familiarize students with the conceptual debates around soft power and the historiography on America and the World, one of the most vibrant trends in the field of American History.

Classes will introduce students to the history and historiography of America’s cultural influence around the world by zooming in on key themes such as humanitarianism, development, and consumerism. Tutorials will give students an opportunity to access these broader themes through primary source-based case studies such as the history of the peace corps, Coca-Cola, and the role of Jazz Ambassadors. The source material will encompass government documents, letters, and newspaper articles alongside TV clips and photographs. The paper encourages students to reflect on the very nature of imperial power, the interdependencies created by globalization, and the cultural history of the Cold War.

This paper has two foci: the history of Europe’s largest and most vibrant Jewish community in modern times; and the history of how that presence – and absence – has been narrated, commemorated, and contested in Poland from 1945 to the present. The near-total destruction of roughly three million Polish Jews, a thriving and extraordinarily diverse community representing some ten per cent of the Polish population, was without comparison anywhere in Europe: nowhere else did the upheavals of the twentieth century leave a more gaping absence, on such a staggering scale, as the Holocaust in Poland.

Yet while this is an inescapable part of the story, this is not a paper about the Holocaust. First, the paper follows the historical and ethical imperative of studying not just Jewish death, but Jewish life – including Jewish life in Poland after the Holocaust. Second, it eschews a ‘lachrymose’ view (S. Baron) in which East European Jews are cast as a backward, isolated, and persecuted minority teetering on ‘the edge of destruction’ (C. Heller). Avoiding a teleological lens, it stresses the rapidly evolving contexts of Jewish life in Poland and sees Polish Jewry as both deeply embedded in Polish society and broadly shaped by the wider currents of a transnational modernity. Third, this paper is about Jews and their neighbours; it concerns both Polish and Jewish history, suggesting that neither can be fully understood without the other. It also addresses a broader European politics of memory, for which the presence (or absence) of minorities and questions of guilt or complicity in episodes of mass violence remain central.

This course invites you to consider the usefulness of film as a way into key historical and historiographical debates in 20th century Britain. Over the course of the century cinema-going emerged as the most popular demotic leisure activity - its appeal cutting across divisions of class, gender, age and region. Over the course of the century, moreover, film became one of the key sites at which to reflect on and make sense of processes of social, cultural and political change in a period of massive upheaval. Taking this as a starting point, we invite you to consider the historical meanings and significance of a series of genres or moments of filmmaking in Britain from the First World War to the present day. These include war and film, the documentary movement of the 1930s, Ealing and Carry On comedies and narratives of Imperial adventure. Conceptualizing British film in its broadest transnational and Imperial context, we thus consider the ways in which the course aims to get you to think critically about key issues of methodology and epistemology involved in using film as historical source - production, plot, visuality, music - as well as issues of audience and reception. In so doing we aim to move beyond a treatment of film as either a free-floating text or a 'mirror for England' in order to situate it at a particular historical moment.

The Women’s Liberation Movement – or second-wave feminism as it is often known – involved thousands of women across Britain in an exhilarating, radical and sometimes revolutionary attempt to transform both personal and public life. Their aim was to liberate women, and the strategies they used ranged from creating new forms of communal living to disrupting the Miss World contest to invading nuclear weapons bases. This course explores the aims, experiences and achievements of the Women’s Liberation Movement. We will examine the wide-ranging debates, the sometimes heated controversies, the struggles of different groups – including black women, working-class women and lesbians, all of whom were central to the movement – and the ways these diverse women sought to create sisterhood and change the world.

This subject deals with the transformation of systematic political thinking in the west from sublimated theology and jurisprudence into an autonomous discipline. The process was primarily one of interpreting recently rediscovered texts from the ancient world. The first, and arguably the most important, of these were the authoritative sixth-century compilation of Roman law known as the Corpus Iuris Civilis and Aristotle’s major philosophical works. Both presented, or were taken to present, ready-made intellectual systems which could only with some ingenuity be reconciled with the teachings of the church, the realities of later medieval Europe, and with each other. A third strand was represented primarily by writers of Latin prose, notably Cicero and Seneca, most of whose works had not been lost during the early middle ages, but who began to be read in a new way by the scholars we term humanists. 

Between 1650 and 1800 political thought in Europe was transformed by the need to come to terms with the rise of commercial economies and the open, mobile societies which they created. At the same time many political thinkers were inspired by the contemporary revolution in the natural sciences to attempt to place the understanding of man and society on a similarly new footing. New theories of human nature and historical development were advanced and the scope of political thinking extended to include the workings of economy and society. Among the key issues to be confronted as a result were the role of divine providence in human history, the historical authority of the Bible, the scope for religious toleration, the rights and obligations of the individual in person and property, the moral consequences of commerce and luxury, and the value of civilization itself. 

The subject is studied in set texts by four authors and further texts by another six authors, all chosen for their intrinsic interest and because they illustrate the subject’s major themes and contrasts. The starting point is Hobbes’s Leviathan, whose rigorous attempt to place the understanding of man and society on a natural, scientific basis provided a constant reference point for later thinkers. By contrast, Vico’s New Science offers an extraordinarily imaginative historical account of how man became social. From the period of the Enlightenment, Rousseau’s Discourses on the Arts and Sciences, On the Origin of Inequality and On Political Economy present a radical critique of modern man and his civilization, while Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations and Theory of Moral Sentiments respectively expound the new discipline of political economy, and defend the moral values of modern society. The texts by Spinoza, Locke, Mandeville, Montesquieu, Herder and Kant enable you to reconstruct the debates which link the four set texts. The highly original thinking of Mandeville, for example, had a decisive impact on both Rousseau and Smith, while the moral and political philosophy of Kant provides a challenging climax to the paper as a whole.

This paper is organized around ideas and authors which form the basis of our thinking about politics and society today. More recent thinkers have sought to add to Marx and Weber (for example), but they have not gone decisively beyond them, and their work can only be understood as a development of what was said by their 19th and early 20th century forebears. We still live in a world dominated by thought-structures erected in the name of liberalism and socialism, and reports of Marx’s ‘death’ at the end of the Cold War have proved to be greatly exaggerated. 

Three principal themes run through the paper. First: what was liberalism? This was the era when it was laid down as a political theory by authors such as Hegel, de Tocqueville and Mill, and then later re-considered by Weber and Durkheim. But was there only one liberalism? And if not, what then?  Complementing this is consideration of Marx. As even his enemies conceded, he was a fabulously (or fiendishly) clever man, and the study of his writings within the context supplied by hegemonic liberalism and emergent socialism is a classic opportunity for the exercise of historical method detached from modern hindsight. The paper also takes in his intellectual legacy. Here Eduard Bernstein (the original “revisionist”) is our text, but the broader focus is on European socialism and their bourgeois-liberal opponents as they contested and absorbed Marx’s bequest. A third major theme is the introduction of the category of ‘social’ thought, as a complement and contrast to ‘political thought’. This was an epoch-making expansion (or division) of a traditional frame of reference going back to Aristotle, and it affected all thinkers in our period. Thus, the category of the ‘social’ produced not only ‘socialism’ but the liberal distinction between ‘the state’ and ‘civil society’, and the new discipline of ‘social science’ or ‘sociology’.  The last was of particular importance in French thought (Comte and Durkheim are both set authors), but it was also a major concern for J.S. Mill and Max Weber. Obvious underlying questions include: why did this innovation take place, and what did it mean?  But we might also ask: did political behaviour derive from social foundations or shape them? Was political science to be preferred to social science or vice versa? 

The course will make critical use of postcolonial theory, such as Orientalism and Subaltern Studies, to analyse the emergence, development and bitter contestation of ideas and visions of the Indian Nation between c.1800 and 2000. A variety of texts from influential novels, autobiography and short stories to official writing, histories, political thought and polemic will be studied; and the meaning of concepts such as ‘nation’, 'history’ and ‘writing’ will be examined in changing contexts. Themes to be explored in classes and tutorials include: the emergence of the peculiar notion of a static Indian past (the so-called Vedic Golden Age) in early nineteenth-century debates among British and Indian thinkers; the appropriation, rejection and repurposing of this notion by thinkers as diverse as Bankim Chandra, Rabindranath Tagore and MK Gandhi. The colonial vision of India, empire and identity will be examined in the novels of the Rudyard Kipling and EM Forster and compared with official theories of race, caste and religion propounded in censuses, maps and anthropological photography. The paradoxical place of women and ideas of gender in national imaginaries will be explored in literary and political texts, nationalist iconography and women’s autobiographical writing. The dramatically conflicting visions of Nehru and Gandhi will be explored alongside their reception and interpretation by innovative writers such as Raja Rao, Premchand and Rushdie. The course will also analyse the stringent critiques of anti-colonial ‘nationalisms’ in the work of the Subaltern Studies school of historians. Critical postcolonial and revisionist accounts of Partition with their focus on gender, violence and refugee experience will be explored through the different perspectives of memory studies, oral history and contemporary literature. The emergence of a radical-right ethno-nationalism in the 1980s and 1990s with its relationship to India’s embrace of a liberalised economy, consumerist society and mass media culture is a central theme. Finally, students will explore recent responses to ecological crisis on conceptions of South Asia and the Indian nation in the novels of Arundhati Roy and Amitav Ghosh, and also in postcolonial theory’s environmental turn and interest in the ‘Anthropocene’.  

Building upon the legacies of the 19th century, the further subject examines Mexico’s history from the Mexican  revolution  to  the end  of  the 20th  century.  The  focus  is  placed  on  investigating  two  central questions of the Mexican 20th century: How did a popular revolution mutate into a “successful” authoritarian state? How to explain the formation of an extremely inequitable capitalist regime after the revolutionary process? In debating these questions, the further subject will analyse major social, economic and political achievements of the post-revolutionary regime (unparalleled levels of economic growth, political stability and social reforms), as well as its conflicts and constrains.