History and International Relations (Placement Year)

This module aims to provide you with a solid introduction to the discipline of history at the beginning of your Part-II studies. The module, accordingly, explores the discipline at large, including: its characteristic practices, methods, and traditions; its use of different source materials; and its relation not just to the past, but also to the present and the future. The module includes three thematic blocks. The first section (Contexts of History) provides an overview of different types of historical scholarship, focusing on the methods, theories and intellectual tendencies that characterise them. The second section (Sources and Evidence) examines the use and application of different types of sources as evidence in historical research. The third section (History in Public) considers the public role and function of the discipline, as well as the challenges that historians have faced in the public spotlight, and, finally, the role that the study of history can play in your future.

HIST251 is designed to make you more aware of the processes you have to follow to define a research topic for yourself, whether an essay question or a dissertation; locate it in its field; test its viability; and scope available sources. To help you prepare for your dissertation, you will construct detailed research proposals; conduct a feasibility study; present your preliminary findings; and respond to feedback from professional historians. It is taught through lectures in the Lent Term; a Dissertation Conference early in the Summer Term; consultation sessions in the Lent and Summer Terms; and Moodle-supported independent learning. The lectures introduce you to the variety of geographical and temporal possibilities for your dissertation; support your engagement with primary and secondary sources; emphasise the significance of titles; and discuss how to hone your research proposals and prepare for the months of independent research ahead. The Dissertation Conference (held over two days) enhances the relevant skills you will need to conduct independent research. Staff offer a range of skills sessions and Third Year students share their experiences of writing a dissertation.

This course invites you to explore the history of an object that is of crucial importance to our ideas about both human health, and human identity – the mind. A Global History of the Mind will give you the opportunity to explore how societies across a wide range of time and places have sought to understand, cure, and control the mind. Drawing on materials and case studies from around from world, whether modern-day Polynesia or the medieval Middle East, this offers a truly global perspective on the history of the mind.

At the same time, the course encourages you to explore the connections between changing ideas about mental health and sickness to broader questions about human identity – most notably those concerning race, gender, and the potential loss of human distinctiveness in a world where artificial intelligence is possible. Unlike traditional courses on mental health, which almost invariably focus on the emergence and spread of western psychiatry, this course offers a decentered perspective. We will examine the mind from a wide range of disciplinary perspectives, bringing together philosophy, medicine, religion, race, gender, and social control. In so doing, we will explore questions of urgent relevance to our own society – most notably the ways in which ideas about the mind have featured in the racialization and gendering of people through systems of patriarchy and colonialism. In addition, this course will use case studies from history to give you the resources to consider and question modern ideas about the mind and its role in society.

Finally, this course draws on an innovative series of podcasts entitled Metaphors of the Mind (https://cargocollective.com/mind-metaphors). As well as writing and a research project, this course will help you develop the skills to put together your own podcast on the history of the mind.

The module gives a broad thematic overview of the history of Britain in the twentieth century. Twentieth-century British history is largely a story of change. The impact of democratisation, war, economic decline, the loss of empire, and internal fragmentation has resulted in a nation seemingly in constant flux, often unsure of its identity and its values.

In this module you will explore the patterns of social, economic, cultural and political change which have most affected the lives of the British since 1900. The overarching themes are the formation and reformation of identities based on class, gender, race, empire, nation, and the dual process by which the British were integrated into the state as citizens, and into the market as consumers. Throughout the module, as well as being introduced to the key historiographical debates, you will be encouraged to explore the subject through an eclectic mix of primary sources, including film, television, cartoons, posters, press reports, and advertisements.

This course offers a new introduction to a formative and exciting period in Mediterranean history after the fall of Rome and the rise of the Arabs. The main focus is on the central Mediterranean, especially Sicily and southern Italy, which was the rich prize for competing empires of the region: the contracting Byzantine empire and the expanding Muslim empire in North Africa. The course covers about 500 years of history through the medium of a range of sources, including archaeological finds, and rare documentary sources, which will be studied in translation.

This module focuses on the international relations of one of the most influential actors in world politics: China. The course explores the key question of when and how China’s actions conform with – and diverge from – various international relations (IR) theories. This offers students a twofold payoff. Students gain a broad understanding of how China’s foreign policies are made, its relations with its neighbours in East Asia, with international organizations, and with other global powers including Britain. At the same time, students gain a deeper, more concrete understanding of the uses and limitations of IR theory in explaining global politics.

The module describes and analyses the modern politics of the Gulf in a number of ways. It offers a country-by-country analysis of the countries overlooking the Persian Gulf: Saudi Arabia, Iran, Iraq, Bahrain, the UAE, Kuwait, Oman and Qatar. It also applies the main approaches in understanding each country such as institutionalism (formal, descriptive analysis of institutions such as parliament, executive and legislative), structuralism (relations between these units of the political system), functionalism (how these units functionalise or de-functionalise such as relations between the president and the supreme leader in Iran), political culture (public opinion, receptiveness of politics, socialisation through interest groups, and historical approach (patterns of history, development of Gulf states from the Ottoman Empire, British occupation all the way to independence and moving closer to the US).

Are you interested in environmental history? Are you curious about the forces that have shaped and continue to shape the perception and management of protected landscapes around the world? Then this 15-credit module is for you. Over the 10 weeks of this module, we’ll explore the long history of human interactions with the natural world, from the Agricultural Revolution to the Industrial Revolution to the Environmental Revolution. For the most part, though, we’ll focus on examining the forces that have influenced human perceptions of the environment from later seventeenth century onwards. In this context, we’ll trace the histories of iconic protected landscapes in different parts of the world, including national parks and world heritage sites, such as Yosemite, the English Lake District and Uluru-Kata Tjuta. In tracing the histories of these and other landscapes, we’ll delve into a range of important questions. Addressing these questions may involve: examining the role of colonialism and conquest in shaping such landscapes; interrogating the relation of protected landscapes to the emergence of ideas about national memory and identity; considering issues of access, responsibility and ownership, as well as the threats climate change poses for protected landscapes that are at risk. No prior knowledge of environmental history is assumed or required. Specific case studies may change from year to year. The module may involve field trips.

The period from around 1500 to 1750 saw enormous change. The population of England and Wales nearly doubled, leading to inflation and poverty as well as commercial expansion. Urbanization increased, spectacularly so in the case of London, which grew to become by 1700 the largest capital in Europe. At the same time literacy and education developed and a print culture rapidly expanded. This was a period of religious reformation, which affected not only the lives of individuals but the culture of governance and the fabric of local communities.

By the end of the period, England had emerged from being a backwater state to a rising world power, which brought about a new set of cultural and social challenges. Hierarchies of gender and status, however, remained pervasive throughout, and in some ways became even more pronounced. The module examines these central themes during a very important and formative period in English history.

During the 16th century, Europe witnessed some of the most important developments in the shaping of the modern world. Although you will learn about these events, the module will focus on the broader historical processes through which you can understand them. At the same time, you will engage with the methodologies and debates that historians of the present-day find most interesting, critically appraising their strategies for assessing patterns of historical change and continuity.

You will therefore examine the work of environmental historians, asking whether transformations in society and the economy can be explained by changes in climate. The module will also ask whether colonial expansion led people to develop new ideas about racial and cultural difference, while at the same time trying to understand how newly colonized people tried to navigate their way through new hierarchies and relationships.

In addition, it will ask whether long-standing questions about transformations in religious life, popular culture, and the centralization of government can be enriched by approaching them through the prism of new approaches. When you study the body, health, and disease, for instance, you’ll discuss the unexpected role of medical expertise in the development of a renewed form of Catholicism at the end of the 16th century. Meanwhile, focusing on the history of printed news may enable you to understand why rumours and religious bigotry spread so rapidly during the Reformation and Wars of Religion.

This module focuses on the politics and international relations of the European Union. This includes a focus on the political systems of key EU member states (especially Germany, France and Poland) and the wider dynamics of European integration. The module will also offer an account of the activities of the various European institutions in Brussels, Strasbourg and Luxembourg (Council, Commission, Parliament, Court of Justice).

Religions as involving the control of symbolic and sometimes coercive power, thereby intersecting with politics, International relations and philosophy. Religions as involving values expressed in norms, laws, and institutions which exercise social and political power,

locally and globally. The crucial impact of religious identities, practices, values, arguments and multidimensional ways of life on politics, international relations and philosophical thought. Religions as diverse traditions in different regions of the world undergoing global changes in different ways. Globalisation of religion and its interweaving with social, political and philosophical developments

History students at Lancaster University are offered the chance to take part in work placements in the heritage sector, with our partners ranging from prominent multi-site organisations, such as the National Trust, to small independent museums. We also work with local authority archives and heritage charities. All second-year History Students are eligible to apply for an accredited placement that counts towards your degree. Reasonable travel expenses are covered, and in some circumstances we can pay for overnight accommodation near the placement location. It is worth noting that voluntary placements in a wide variety of settings are organised by the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences: you can undertake one of these in addition to your degree studies but it won’t be assessed, unlike the placements available through HIST299.

This module gives you the opportunity to find out what it is really like to work in a museum, archive, stately home or other heritage setting whilst developing your skillset and enhancing your employability. You will work on a project that will have a real impact in some aspect of the work of the heritage organisation, and gain a range of insights into the challenges faced by the sector.

Students who have completed this module have gone on to be accepted onto highly competitive postgraduate training in Museums Studies, Archival Studies and also teacher training. One student, who was placed with the National Trust at Sizergh Castle, said: “I recommend both HIST299 and this placement, particularly to students who want to get practical experience of using historical skills.”

This module explores US foreign policy from the end of the Second World War through to the end of the Cold War, focusing particularly on role played by the presidents who held office during this period. The decades following the Second World War saw the United States emerge as the single most powerful and influential state in modern history. The core aim of the module is to understand how the individuals who held the office of president in this era sought to project US economic, military and ideational power. This will entail considering how the personal backgrounds, political beliefs, and other personal characteristics of the presidents in power during this period affected the application of US foreign policy, allowing students to engage with innovative approaches to the study of history that take into account factors such as emotions, friendship and health on broader historical processes. In order to analyse US foreign policy from the perspective of individual presidents we will use a variety of academic sources by historians and political scientists, as well as primary sources.

By what means was Indian independence seized from the British Empire in 1947? This module explores opposition to British rule in India from the end of the nineteenth century until 1947 when colonial India was divided to create the nation states of India and Pakistan. In particular, we will explore the modes of resistance that emerged from the Indian freedom struggle and in particular, the role of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi. Gandhi transformed the Indian National Congress, an organization that had been founded in 1885 as a loyal and moderate organization. Gandhi created a mass movement that challenged the colonial state in extraordinary ways. British rule in India gradually lost credibility and struggled to find the means of maintaining control in the face of massive resistance to its right to govern India.

You will explore Gandhi’s philosophies of personal restraint and political resistance to the injustices of the colonial state. You will also trace the emergence of religious politics in India during this period and the increasing pace of communal conflict, in particular Hindu-Muslim antagonism. What was the role of the colonial state in firing communal anxiety? Did Gandhi’s political ideas allay or encourage the conflation of political action and religious identity? The course ends with the partition of India, the largest migration in history and a process in which over one million people lost their lives, and the event that led, in 1948, to Gandhi’s assassination by a Hindu fundamentalist.

The module will introduce students to International Political Economy (IPE): the study of the interaction of economics and politics at the international level. It aims to discuss the political economy of the evolution of world capitalist by focusing on central questions, issues, and events that have shaped it. It examines the relevance and validity of different and competing approaches in the IPE, including, classical and neoclassical economics, historical materialism, critical approaches. We also examine key issues and concepts, such as globalisation, international trade, gender and race in global production, role of multinational corporations, and unevenness between and within countries.

The aim of this course is look at the main political and economic trends and security concerns of the Asia Pacific. The term, ‘Asia Pacific’ is a contested term but here it refers primarily to countries from both South Asia and East Asia. The course will introduce students to issues/debates in Asian politics and cover topics like Asian nationalism, Asian democracy, Asian regionalism, Asian bureaucracy and governance, gender and sexuality in Asia, Asian values and Asian security. The course takes a strong case studies approach and every lecture will be backed by a single case study from the region.

The module explores the main theoretical foundations to International Relations, including realism, liberalism, constructivism and critical IR (Marxism, Feminism, Postcolonialism). It explores the development of International Relations (IR) theory in the 20th and 21st centuries and examine it in the light of major historical developments and contemporary events. The module aims at providing the students with the necessary skills and background knowledge to engage critically with the world that we live in. To do so, the module pays special attention to the unequal power relations and Western dominance in the study of IR and politics, and to how they have become embedded into our institutions, theories and methods. The module will also introduce students to theories and debates in human and environmental sustainability.

HIST215: Introduction to Latin Translation for Undergraduates

This is a special intensive course for students who have little or no previous knowledge of Latin. The course concentrates on the basics of Latin Grammar and vocabulary as used in the Medieval period. However, it will also be very useful for students of the Roman and Renaissance periods. By the end of the course, students should be able to read sources such as title deeds, court rolls, government records, wills, and inscriptions.

Of all intellectual and ideological concepts in the modern world, few are as contested and powerful as human rights. At their most influential, concerns for the protection of human rights have been used to justify international conflict and widespread military intervention in order to save the lives of thousands of people. Yet human rights critics argue that they are a form of cultural imperialism that limits the sovereignty of local populations. How has an ethical and moral concern for individual lives come to be so divisive? Why after years of supporting the establishment of international human rights law do many governments now pledge to scrap their own human rights acts?

This module will examine the history of human rights, putting their development into a broad historical context. It will chart the development of rights discourses from the pre-modern era through to the present, assessing the influence that the enlightenment, imperialism and war have had on their construction. It will offer students the opportunity to explore differing aspects of the history of human rights. Indicative topics include:

• Codifying and Quantifying Rights: 1776, 1789, 1948
• The Universality of Human Rights
• Human Rights and Humanitarianism, 1807-2001
• Decolonisation and Self-Determination, 1945-1991
• Gendered rights
• Capital punishment in the nineteenth and twentieth century
• Responding to Genocide: The Holocaust, Bangladesh, Srebrenica
• Amnesty International, 1961-2001
• Helsinki Watch/Human Rights Watch, 1975-2001

Perhaps more formative for the modern British state than any before or since, the years 1660 to 1720 saw Britain’s territorial boundaries and infrastructure forged; with constitutional monarchy, expanding state bureaucracy, and political parties as its principal tenets. During the same period, political power in England changed hands; new political personnel operated within novel political institutions and voiced innovative political economies. Making of Modern Britain will also challenge participants to analyse and debate formative changes to British literature, commerce, art, and architecture, as well as to discuss the changed relationship between Britain and the world during this period. Participants will therefore receive a broad understanding of late seventeenth and early eighteenth century British history; they will also develop expertise in the following subfields: cultural, art, political, parliamentary, global, economic, constitutional, gender, and business history.

The social and cultural consequences of the Norman Conquest of England were deep and enduring. A foreign, Francophone regime displaced the native élites: many of the former rulers, women as well as men, fled the kingdom. Enlisting in the Varangian Guard, some Englishmen even went as far as Byzantium and the Crimea. The new regime was inclusive in so far as it was eager to recruit foreigners of all kinds - Frenchmen, Bretons, Lotharingians, Italians, Spaniards, and even Jews - as long as they were serviceable and loyal; but racist in so far as it strove to deny persons of English descent access to high office. The English were denigrated as barbarians and peasants, but because the Conquest was not followed by sustained settlement from the Continent, many natives clung on in sub-altern positions, just below the foreigners who held the highest offices and the best estates. The English were also far from being the only victims: the regime also continued the later Anglo-Saxon state’s efforts to subjugate Wales and northern Britain. A wide-ranging introduction to the history of Norman England and the debates that it has inspired, this course allows you to consider the history and effects of this transformative event.

What does it mean to be Roman on the edge of the Roman Empire? How can we write the history of people who have left very little written trace of themselves? This module explores these questions through an in-depth look at the history from the 1st century BCE to the 5th century CE of a single Roman province: Britain. You will learn to use a wide range of evidence, including not only Roman historians like Tacitus, but also archaeological evidence, stone inscriptions, and wooden documents like the Vindolanda Tablets, to reconstruct the nature of Romano-British society. How can we use pottery evidence to reconstruct Britain’s economic connections to the continent? How can Iron Age coins give us insight into the political machinations that led to Britain’s 1st century CE conquest by the Romans? Broader topics will include the effects of Roman imperialism on conquered peoples, the place of migration and ethnic diversity in Roman Britain, and the role historical trends such as post-colonialism and globalization have played in our understanding of life in the Roman provinces. The module may also include field trips to Roman sites and museum collections.

After a brief survey of the main events leading to the declaration of war and the invasion of Poland, this module allows you to explore resistance and collaboration in countries that were first occupied in 1940, namely, Norway, Denmark, Belgium, Holland and the Netherlands. The transition between active collaboration to increasing resistance is next traced through Vichy France. The module then moves to the Eastern and Mediterranean fronts where the resistance was more effectively organized. The countries studied in this segment include Yugoslavia, Greece, and the USSR (Belarus, Russia, Baltics and Ukraine).

Lastly, you’ll examine countries that were first part of the Axis and eventually switched sides from 1943 onwards (Italy, Hungary, Bulgaria and Romania). Special attention will be given to the treatment of Jews, the Holocaust and the difficulties of coming to terms with what remains a contested past. Besides political documents, you will engage with photography, posters, films, documentaries and personal memoirs.

This module seeks to identify and analyse violent and non-violent conflict behaviour as well as the structural mechanisms that are required to seek peace. It examines various theoretical positions in this regard and their application in managing, preventing, and transforming conflicts into situations and outcomes that are more peaceful. This module looks at both top down and bottom-up approaches to peace enforcement and peacebuilding in ongoing conflict locations as well as in many post-conflict settings. During the course of the module, we interrogate various intervention strategies such as: the place of non-violence in peace activism, the concept of just war in imposing a resolution, the role that women play in peacebuilding, global institutions that facilitate peacekeeping, inter-faith debate and dialogue that contribute to addressing religious extremism and radicalism. The overriding question that we examine in the course of this module, is transition from a belligerent world to a more peaceful and harmonious one through cosmopolitan responsibility. The module ends by exploring the ways that seek to reaffirm the ideal of peace in an increasingly volatile and fractured international society.

This module explores efforts to facilitate peace in the contemporary Middle East. Following the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, the Middle East has endured a range of serious challenges to the ordering of political life across a number of different states, with serious repercussions for people and their daily lives. Focussing on a range of contemporary challenges including (but not limited to) the rise of sectarianism, geopolitical tensions, the struggle over political participation, and popular protest, the module asks how these issues can be addressed drawing on approaches found in Peace Studies and Political Theory.

In the few years that have passed, the Middle East has experienced momentous changes. Most notable of these changes are the so-called ‘‘Arab Spring’’ uprisings, which started in late 2010, and the following consequences of these uprisings on the international relations of the region. Topics include the early emergence of Arab states, origins and sustainability of authoritarian regimes, state types and personality cult, masculinity and constructions of identity and belonging, women’s movements, social mobilization and the Arab uprisings. The course offers students from a variety of backgrounds the opportunity to engage with the most important themes in the study of the politics of the Middle East and to locate and contextualise them within wider debates and scholarship of international politics.

The module equips students with the skills they need to carry out independent research in politics. In doing so, it prepares students for their final year dissertations and significantly improves their employability by developing skills that are highly valued by employers. Students will learn how to come up with an original research question and will learn to employ one of the research methods taught on the course to answer their question. The course is designed to provide an accessible introduction to both qualitative and quantitative research methods. In the first part of the course, students will have the opportunity to use a large dataset on politics and explore the relationship between variables such as political ideology, class, voting behaviour and many more. They will learn how to analyse data and test for statistically significant relationships between variables using various regression methods. In the second part of the course, students will learn about three major approaches to qualitative research. They will learn how to conduct standard and elite interviews, how to analyse the discourse of political actors, and how to conduct case studies. At the end of the module, students will be asked to design their own piece of research and use one of the methods taught on the course to answer their research question.

This module gives a broad thematic overview of the history of Germany in the twentieth century. Few country’s histories have been more tumultuous over the past two centuries than that of Germany. Rapid industrialisation, varied federal traditions, revolutions, the launching of and defeat in two world wars, responsibility for war crimes and genocide on an unparalleled scale, foreign occupation and re-education, and political division for four decades have made German history, and the ways in which Germans have remembered it, contentious and of broad public concern. In few countries have visions of the nation's history been so varied and contested, and few peoples have created and faced such challenges when confronting their 'transient' or 'shattered' past.

In order to provide a thematic focus, this module will examine in particular the reasons for the rise of National Socialism, the character of National Socialism, and the difficulties of the Federal Republic of Germany to deal with its difficult and contentious past, that is the attempt at 'coming to terms with the past' (Vergangenheitsbewltigung).

This module examines the domestic and the external sphere of Russian politics. At the end of the module students will better understand some doctrines of Russian politics and its wide-ranging effects on Russia’s engagement with the EU, the US, NATO, countries in the former Soviet space and the Middle East. It assesses Russia’s response to the Arab Spring and its engagement in the conflict in Syria.

The course introduces students to Russia, an actor which gained presence and influence over several issue areas and regions. It prepares students for more extensive analyses of conceptualising Russia as an actor in their future studies.

This module examines the role of satire in British culture between the Restoration and the Victoria era. Satire is a rich and varied mode of cultural representation. It has an ancient pedigree, and it can be found cross-culturally and trans-historically. In this module we’ll consider this broader context, including ancient satirical art and literature, but we’ll mainly focus on the different sorts of satires that characterised British culture between the reigns of Charles II and Queen Victoria. In tackling this nearly 250-year period, our aim will be to explore how satirical materials functioned as media for expressing social, cultural and political ideas, and we’ll consider the light these materials shed on their historical contexts. Topics considered will likely include courtly culture, imperial expansion, urbanisation and industrial change. We shall also pay particular attention to how satire was used to establish and reinforce ideas about class, race and sexual identity and about normative and appropriate behaviour, and we’ll reflect on the degree to which attitudes towards humour and obscenity changed over time.

In this module, you will explore the simultaneous rise of slavery and freedom in North America between 1620 and 1800. You will first examine the colonization of Massachusetts by Puritan migrants, and see how their liberty was constrained by gender relations, market dependency, and religious orthodoxy. Viewing the southern colonies in comparative perspective, you will explore the reasons why tobacco and rice planters transitioned from employing white indentured servants to enslaving Africans, and the racial codes that they developed to justify their decisions. You will understand how slave-holding American colonists could espouse discourses of liberty during the American Revolution, and the differing outcomes of the Revolution for Patriots, Loyalists, enslaved people, and Native Americans. You will conclude by studying the rapid expansion of slavery into the Deep South and the settlement of the trans-Appalachian frontier by free settlers after the Revolution. You will thus see how the United States—the “Empire of Liberty”—was forged in both slavery and freedom, creating a divided nation at the beginning of the nineteenth century.

For some the free-market economy has produced the greatest levels of freedom ever experienced by human society while other see it as the source of social ills, poverty and crisis. How can we reconcile the needs of the masses, or the demos, with those of a profit-driven economy? Can the state balance the two? Can the state intervene in the economy without undermining it? How should the state respond to demands for greater equality? Do we need more state or more market? The module examines the various answers that have been given to these questions by historical figures within the tradition of political economy. It introduces students to the main political economy approaches to the relationship between the state the market and raises some key issues regarding the state’s governance of the market economy. The module draws from liberal and critical state theories of the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries and discerns their implications for understanding main challenges facing the modern state today. The main themes scrutinised by the module are: (a) the theoretical evolution of liberal and critical approaches to the state; (b) the relationship between the state and the economy, (c) the relationship between liberalism and democracy; (d) the state management of market and democratic imperatives.

The course will allow you to study the Cold War in Europe, from its emergence in the immediate post-war period to the fall of the Berlin Wall and the disintegration of the Soviet Union. You will be encouraged to question the rapid breakdown of the alliance between the victorious powers of the Second World War and how this could lead to the division of Europe into two blocs; to understand and put the role of the superpowers into perspective by studying also the role of medium and small European powers, and thereby show the room for manoeuvre that existed within the blocs; to analyse how the nuclearisation of the Cold War eventually led to a ‘long peace’ in Europe; and to assess how the East-West struggle was eventually overcome. During the lectures and seminars, you will have the opportunity to engage with the vast and diverse historiography of the Cold War in Europe; study the conflict at the political, diplomatic, military, economic, and cultural levels; and focus on themes ranging from the Origins of the East-West struggle in Europe to the challenges to authority in the Eastern bloc and the end of the Cold War.

This course explores the period known colloquially as the English Civil War and the Interregnum, bounded by the traditionally-accepted dates that allow for a discussion of the causes of war and the final collapse of constitutional experimentation. It will look at the controversies which have whipped up successive generations of historians; at the birth of a republic in England; the role of Scotland and Ireland, the rise of the gutter press, and the birth of modern political campaigning; (in)famous characters such as ‘Freeborn’ John Lilburne and the radical preacher Praise-God Barebones; ask if Oliver Cromwell was a dictator, a king or a saviour; and explore the trial and execution of a king whom many believed was the Lord’s anointed and the fount of all justice.

HIST282: The Historian in the Digital Age

This course will provide an introduction to the rapidly developing field of Digital History. It starts from the assumption that the student has only basic IT skills. It introduces them to a range of software tools and approaches, and the issues and challenges of using them properly in historical research. These will be applied to a wide range of historical sources and topics. The course is taught using a combination of lectures and workshop sessions held in an IT lab. By the end of the course the students will have a range of practical skills in topics such as spreadsheets, databases, and managing texts. As well as providing the student with an understanding of new ways in which historians are researching their discipline, these skills can be applied to other courses taken by the student, such as their dissertation, and provide transferrable skills that will help with their employability.

This module combines a lecture series that offers an overview of the history of the United States in the 19th century with a closely linked set of seminars that focus on the construction of race, class and gender difference over the same period. This combination allows students to explore an important thematic aspect of world history (the construction of race, class and gender difference) while simultaneously providing grounding for further study and research into the history of the United States in the 19th and/or 20th centuries.

The module builds upon skills that you gained in Part I and, in particular, will explore the history of the United States, from the passage and implementation of the US Constitution (1789) to the conclusion of the Civil War (1865). The module is particularly focused on the culture and politics of race, class and gender in the rapidly industrialising and expanding nation.

Seminars meet fortnightly and are structured around primary readings and recommended secondary texts that offer critical and historical insight into the topics under consideration.

This module combines a lecture series that offers an overview of the history of the United States in the 20th century with a closely linked set of seminars that focus on the construction of race, class and gender difference in over the same period. This combination allows students to explore an important thematic aspect of world history (the construction of race, class and gender difference) while simultaneously providing grounding for further study and research into the history of the United States.

The module builds upon skills that you gained in Part I and, in particular, will explore the history of the United States from the end of the Civil War (1865) to the fall of the Berlin Wall (1989). The module is particularly focused on the culture and politics of race, class and gender.

This module allows you to explore the story of the German Kingdom from the mid-ninth century until the early twelfth. Formed amid the collapse of the Carolingian Empire, it came close to collapse in the early tenth century, yet it was saved by the Magyar crisis, emerging triumphant under the leadership of a new and charismatic dynasty, the Liudolfings. They refounded the kingdom, turning it into the most dynamic state in tenth-century Europe. The vast empire they created - the so-called ‘Holy Roman Empire’ - would endure until 1804 when it was finally suppressed by Napoleon Buonaparte; but in the mid-eleventh century the power of its monarchs was hollowed out by a savage crisis from which the realm would never entirely recover - a devastating civil war that lasted five decades, from the mid-1070s until 1122. This stunning narrative raises many questions. Why did it all go ‘right’? Why did it then go so ‘wrong’? This dramatic story provides fundamental insights into the nature of the medieval kingdom, its capacities and its limitations.

Islam is deeply set in world history and the roots of many debates and issues in the modern Middle East can be traced back over a long period. This module provides an introduction to many such questions by offering an overview of the political, cultural, religious and social history of the main Islamic lands of the Arabian Peninsula, Egypt, Syria and Iraq/Iran covering roughly the first five centuries from the time of the Prophet Muhammad to the Crusades.

You’ll develop an understanding of the diversity and fluidity of both Muslim identity and the nature and priorities of the early and developing Islamic community, and you’ll also engage with key debate regarding the source material on the period, both literary and artistic.

In particular you’ll explore Islam's place in Late Antiquity; the rise and fall of the caliphal dynasties of the Umayyads and Abbasids; the evolution of political and religious authority; the cultural and political position of non-Arab converts to Islam; the impact of non-Muslim influence on politico-religious debate in Islam, as well as sectarianism and the rise and fall of key dynasties in North Africa, Egypt, Syria and Iraq.

This is a critical introduction to the underlying themes of development in the global South, such as debt, aid, inequality, migration; and how the state, the economy, national social movements and powerful external actors, including international NGOs, interact with each other. It begins by looking at how neoliberalism came to dominant development thinking and practice in institutions like the World Bank from the late 1970s onwards and its impact on development and then provides in-depth case-studies of recent alternative development models in Latin America and Syria. This course helps to broaden students’ understanding of Politics and International Relations away from a Western focus on the UK, Europe and the US in preparation for third-year modules such as PPR.336: The Global Politics of Africa.

The Vietnam War remains the only war that the United States has definitively lost in its 240-year history. This course explores the political, social, and cultural effects that the fighting in Southeast Asia triggered back home on American soil, specifically between the years 1964 and 1975. Utilising a range of sources from memoirs to music, films to television coverage, you will gain a greater understanding of the forces that shaped ‘the Sixties’ and why the Vietnam War deeply affected American society for decades to come. We will engage with the presidencies of Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon, while exploring the anti-war movement, female and Black American involvement in the war, and how veterans fared when they came home to the United States. The module, of course, will not eschew the war itself, and the first lectures will ground you in the key figures, decisions, battles, and massacres that led to a conflict which killed an estimated two million Vietnamese civilians, and 58,000 American soldiers.

The Roman Empire stretched from Britain to modern-day Syria, from Morocco to Romania. How did Rome control an empire which ranged from the societies of the Mediterranean basin to those of Arabia and temperate northern Europe? How did the peoples of these regions adapt to, or indeed resist, ‘becoming Roman’? This module will give you a thorough foundation in the history of the Roman Empire from the first emperor Augustus in the first century BCE to late antiquity and the rise of Christianity in the 4th century CE. You will study the immense social, economic, and religious changes that occurred across Europe and the Near East in this period, as well as the political and military history of the Empire. You will confront the challenges of writing Roman history from textual sources that are often fragmentary, or have political and rhetorical agenda which are alien to us today. You will also learn to integrate material evidence, from coins and inscriptions to archaeology, into your understanding of the Roman Empire.

Between 1500 and 1865, Europeans embarked twelve and a half million captive Africans on slave ships for transportation to the Americas, the largest forced trans-oceanic migration in human history. In this module, you will study the slave trade in the context of broader trends in Atlantic history. You will first see how slavery diminished in Europe during the late Middle Ages, just as Europeans began to systematically explore the Atlantic basin. You will then study the rapid expansion of the trade after Columbus’ voyages, as Europeans enslaved increasing numbers of Africans to work in the fields, mines, and ports of the Americas. Focusing on the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, you will look closely at how the trade operated, and how Africans experienced their enslavement. You will also study north-west England’s connections to the slave trade by investigating how Liverpool and Lancaster merchants outfitted slave ships and profited by the trade, and the slave trade’ influence on industrialization in Lancashire. In the concluding section of the module, you will see how the slave trade was abolished in the early nineteenth century, and the persistence of a clandestine trade until the end of the American Civil War.

Who were the Victorians? Sometimes they are credited with inventing modern Britain, with the industrial revolution, urbanisation, democratisation, the transport network, and the law and order system listed among their achievements. Yet at the same time, they exhibited attitudes to gender, sexuality, race, politics, and poverty which would be considered shocking and disgraceful by modern standards.

This module introduces you to a fascinating and contradictory period in British history. You will discover nineteenth-century Britain by exploring its most important and contentious spaces, such as the factory, the workhouse, the prison, the city, the railway carriage, and the home. You will find out what life was really like in the long nineteenth century by studying a range of primary sources, including novels, press reports, paintings, cartoons, and autobiographies.

Why can't women pull the trigger? Why are men who refuse to fight labelled cowards? The experience of total war in the twentieth century has had major implications for understandings of both masculinity and femininity in war and in peace. In this module you’ll examine the experience of war on both the home and the battlefronts in Britain and learn how war both confirmed and challenged existing gender constructions.

Through an examination of gender roles in war and the representations of these in cartoons, films and posters, you’ll explore how war impacted on understandings of gender identities in the twentieth century, with a particular focus on the First and Second World Wars. Themes include industrial and military contributions to the war effort, the relationship between the Home Front and the Battle Front, social change, as well as the combat taboo. In seminars you’ll contrast the expectations of men and women at war with actual practices by those conforming to or transgressing conventional gender roles.

This course explores the problems of founding a new society in the Americas during the earliest years of English adventurism. Virginia was the founding point of the presence of English people in North America; and the first Africans in English-speaking America. The course begins, chronologically, with the earliest voyages to the North American mainland, the adventurism of Sir Walter Raleigh and the settlements on Roanoke Island and Chesapeake, the relationship with the Powhatan Confederacy, and the Lost Colony. It then moves its attention to the Virginia Company and the settlement of Jamestown, and explores the different experiments by successive governors - John Smith and Sir Thomas Dale in particular - to build a stable and workable community. It looks at the introduction of tobacco, the switch towards a plantation economy and society using slave labour, and the fall of the Company. Finally, it explores the problems of proprietary government, and ends with the governorship of Sir William Berkeley and the rebellion for ‘liberty’ under Nathaniel Bacon, which marked the enslavement of indigenes and Africans.

The aim of this course is to provide students with a critical understanding of the history, politics, and geography of war from the 20th century to the present. Students will explore how advances in weaponry, aviation, and information technologies have changed the nature of warfare and the possibilities for waging it. Students will additionally take special focus on the emergence and evolution of ‘geopolitics’ as an intellectual counterpart to the study of war. Throughout students will confront political and philosophical questions posed by the study of war.

You will spend your third year working in a graduate-level placement role. This is an opportunity to gain experience in an industry or sector that you might be considering working in once you graduate.

Our Careers and Placements Team will support you during your placement with online contact and learning resources.

You will undertake a work-based learning module during your placement year which will enable you to reflect on the value of the placement experience and to consider what impact it has on your future career plans.

The gods are encountered at every turn in the Roman Empire, but seldom in the same way or in the same places. This module explores the immense diversity of religious experience, practice, and belief in the Roman world in order to understand religion’s role in the shaping of society and identity across the Empire. You will learn to use a broad range of archaeological, epigraphic, iconographic and literary evidence to reconstruct the lived experience of religion in the Roman Empire, from gods worshiped by German soldiers on the rain-swept Romano-British frontier, to domestic shrines in the kitchens of Pompeii, to the great Greco-Roman pilgrimage sanctuaries of Asia Minor. How can we use site plans to think about the experience of moving through a sanctuary? How do animal bones and pottery assemblages allow us to reconstruct the dynamics of religious sacrifice and ritual feasting? What insights do first-person accounts of encountering gods through dreams and visions by authors such as Aelius Aristides or Cicero give into personal relationships with the divine? Through detailed analysis of primary material and in-depth engagement with modern scholarship on Roman religion, we will explore the complex role played by divine cults, sacred spaces, and religious identities in the construction of society across the vast geographic and chronological span of the Empire. You will also have the opportunity to take part in a field trip to sites and museums on Hadrian's Wall, to experience a range of temple locations and material evidence for Roman religion in person.

This module explores the origins of modern ‘consumer society’ in Britain, introducing you to an exciting and innovative field of historical research.

In the hundred years from the abolition of advertising tax in 1853 to the birth of commercial television in the 1950s, advertising became a ubiquitous feature of modern capitalism. You will examine the causes and consequences of this process of commercialisation using a variety of primary sources, from press reports and cartoons, to business archives, social surveys, and, of course, the advertisements themselves.

You will explore the changing relationship between people and their possessions, the impact of new retail environments like the department store and the supermarket, how advertising shaped modern gender identities, and how the Co-operative movement pioneered ethical consumerism. Advertising is political, and you will also see how it helped Britain win two world wars and market the Empire to its own people. You will learn how advertisements work by designing your own advertising campaign in a particular historical context. You’ll never look at shops or advertisements in the same way again.

This course provides a historical and thematic introduction to the issues facing Africa in the international system today. The course is divided into two sections. The first section explores the historical incorporation of the continent into the emerging international system centred on Europe from the sixteenth to the twentieth century. It focuses on the impact of colonialism and independence in terms of the economy, the state and the politics of race and the implications these have for the region’s prospects for democracy and development today. The second section looks at key contemporary issues and agents shaping the continent. The latter includes ‘top-down’ actors such as the Chinese state, as well as grassroots actors such as unionised South African workers.

On 6 January 2021, the US Congress was attacked in a chaotic offensive of fire and fury that led to five deaths and countless injuries. After decades of gradual polarisation, the United States – the preeminent world power and self-proclaimed beacon of democracy – was coming apart in dramatic fashion as the world looked on. Three weeks later, the US Capitol witnessed the arrival of a new president and heard an inaugural address which focused on the need for unity and warned of democracy’s fragility.

This course will examine the reasons why, and the extent to which, American society, culture, and politics polarised in the years since 1960. To do so, it will examine a wide range of issues, such as: race relations, gender and sexuality, socioeconomic policy, media, the ‘culture wars’, the modern American presidency, and political polarisation between Democrats and Republicans.

This module presents an unprecedentedly vivid picture of the lived experience of Europeans, Africans and indigenous Americans over a three-million square mile area (Carolina to the Equator; central America to Bermuda) in which Britons settled an area smaller than Yorkshire.

Though you are unlikely to have much knowledge of the place or period when you start the module, though students who have taken The English Civil War and Virginia will have encountered some of the issues. The course is popular with History Majors and also has resonances with Politics and with English Literature. The interests of each year’s students can be accommodated. You will also have access to a unique collection of (digital) facsimiles of printed and archive sources. You will study the roots of the colonial process but can adopt modern techniques of analysis and presentation such as web-authorship, databases, palaeography (handwriting). You will write traditional essays but also create an individual project tailored in consultation with the tutor to fit your research interests, way of working, opportunity to showcase or learn new skills, and ways of presentation. You will be plunging into a fascinating period and place, asking challenging questions of the human experience and learning valuable transferable skills.

This module investigates the development of World War II into a ‘civil conflict’ during Europe’s occupation by Axis forces. We will engage with a broad range of primary sources to investigate individual and collective attitudes, taking into consideration political and religious beliefs, as well as Europe’s fraught relationship with the plight of its Jews. The module will elucidate the motifs for the conflicting memorialization of resistance and collaboration especially in France, Poland and the USSR.

The module starts with an investigation into the relationship between history and photojournalism, followed by film and propaganda in Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany and its subsequent deployment in the UK and the USA. We then explore the trajectories of these sources, as well as letters written by civilians about to be executed, in constructing the ‘foundational narrative’ of Gaullist France as a ‘nation of resisters’, eventually leading to its counter-image as a ‘nation of collaborators’, or what Rousso calls ‘Vichy Syndrome’. Next, we research Soviet sources made available after Khrushchev’s Thaw or during Glasnost, including Baltermants’ photographs and the testimonies of Soviet Jews collected by Grossman and Ehrenburg. The last segment of the module charts the Holocaust ‘boom’, and the subsequent focus on Jewish victimization, Gentile rescuers, survival and resistance. This segment uses Levi’s ‘grey zone’ to read testimonies, such as those in Lanzmann’s Shoah, which follows Hilberg’s division into ‘perpetrators, victims and bystanders’. The module deploys theoretical tools from collective memory, post-memory, bio-politics and cultural history.

This course presents a detailed analysis of the major developments in British foreign policy since 1945. It explains these developments within a global context, offering rival interpretations of Britain’s changing role and status – issues whose importance has been underlined by the debates surrounding the 2016 ‘Brexit’ referendum. The major themes include: the consequences of Britain’s participation in the Second World War; the retreat from Empire after 1945; the ‘special relationship’ with the United States; and the prolonged attempt to redefine Britain’s global role in the context of perceived economic and geopolitical decline.

China’s rise has reshaped world politics and the global economy. In this seminar-based course, students will become familiar with different approaches to understanding China and its place in the world, critically evaluating the opportunities and challenges for both. We will consider China's relation to the world from eight distinct but overlapping perspectives: politics, place, people, economy, culture, media, foreign policy and intellectual thought. The weekly student-led tutorials will explore key issues including the party-state and its techniques of governance; China’s urban and rural geography and contested territory; Chinese nationalism and ethnicities; the PRC economy and its prospects; traditional and contemporary Chinese culture(s); the implications of the Internet for China’s society, economy and politics; the CCP’s foreign policy and its influence on the outside world; and the emerging 'Chinese school' of International Relations theory.

This course provides an introduction to US Foreign Policy. The United States plays an important role in the international system. As one of the largest, wealthiest, and most militarily capable states, its foreign policy has a profound influence on the international system. Therefore, to fully comprehend international relations and world events, one needs to understand US foreign policy. The course examines how US foreign policy is made and conducted by studying the historical development of US foreign policy, the institutions and processes involved in the foreign policymaking process, how the US projects power in the international system, and contemporary challenges and issues in US foreign policy.

Soviet history is often told through the prism of totalitarian oppression, but beneath layers of state control a vibrant dissident movement was active. Whilst they were far from an homogenous group, their presence and sustained activism in the later decades of Soviet history raises broader questions about the communist superpower. What influence could political dissidents have on the world around them? How did they exert influence in a regime that wanted them silenced? What role did they, or could they play in the Cold War?

In this module, you will explore the breadth, depth, and complexity of the Soviet dissident movement and analyse the impact that they had on the wider world. You will explore the nature of political life in the Soviet Union, ranging from the punishment of the labour camp system under Joseph Stalin, the use and abuse of psychiatry under Nikita Khrushchev, and the silencing of the shestidesiatniki under Leonid Brezhnev. This module will also consider the role dissidents played in the collapse of the Soviet regime under Mikhail Gorbachev, and the contemporary parallels with dissidents such as Anna Politkovskaya and Pussy Riot in Vladimir Putin’s Russia. By focusing on the domestic enemies of the Soviet state, this module will allow you to explore in detail how totalitarian governments function, what activists and intellectuals can do to change this, and the role played by the international community in supporting these dissidents. Alongside this, it will address broader issues such as political dissent, human rights and international relations amongst others.

Indicative topics include:

Samizdat, Natalya Gorbanevskaya and the Chronicle of Current Events

Psikhushki and psychiatric abuse

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and the ‘Slavophiles’

Andrei Sakharov and the ‘Westernisers’

Vladimir Bukovsky and the ‘non-conformists’

The KGB and state intimidation

The Refuseniks and Soviet Jewry movements

Religious Persecution and Keston College

The Helsinki Accords and the move towards human rights

Amnesty International and the Soviet Union

Pussy Riot and Pyotr Pavlensky

This module uses case studies from across the world to provide an insight into the role and relevance of decolonisation in the contemporary world, by examining the legacies of slavery, racism, colonialism and empire. The emphasis is on foregrounding the voices and experiences of citizens and communities from the Global South and unpacking the role that western European nations have played and continue to play in politics, economics and state-society relations in large parts of the post-colonial world. By using critical pedagogy and an interdisciplinary lens, the module highlights how various identities of race, class, gender, ethnicity, sexuality and religion intersect in different historical contexts to produce diverse outcomes. These outcomes are examined in relation to various current and emerging themes ranging from climate change and sustainable development to migration, borders and human rights to artificial intelligence, security, geopolitics and social justice.

The invasion of Ukraine has highlighted the crude realities of war and the crucial importance of military strategy. This module introduces students to this core aspect of International Relations. The module will examine the changing character of war as well as the strategic permanencies via a careful examination of strategic principles applied to various domains (land, air, sea, outer space, cyber space). We will elucidate and operationalize key concepts such as airpower, seapower, nuclear deterrence, escalation, manoeuvre, ruse, hybrid warfare, etc. You will gain the necessary skills to critically assess the choices and decisions made by states and their military commanders during war, and to devise rational solutions to address the risks inherent to the current turbulent geopolitical context.

The Dissertation is a module that progresses from the methodological understandings acquired in Second-Year courses.

You will write a 10,000-word dissertation exploring a challenging historical problem. While, in many cases, we expect that the topic chosen will arise from courses you are studying, it should also be possible to accommodate topics which do not have a direct bearing on your taught courses. The aim is to give you the opportunity to work in depth on a topic of your choice, and to gain the satisfaction of working independently and of making a subject your own. Research for dissertations will usually combine work on secondary literature with the use of primary sources (in translation where necessary). You are expected to demonstrate knowledge of the wider historical context of the subject being explored by including a critical review of relevant published work and to show an awareness of the limitations of primary sources used.

PPR.399 provides an opportunity for students to choose a topic related to some aspect of Politics and International Relations, Philosophy and Religious Studies which particularly interests them, and to pursue it in depth. The topic may be related to work that is being done on a formally taught course, or it may be less directly linked to course work. The intention is that students will develop their research skills, and their ability to work at length under their own direction.

Students write a dissertation of 9,000-10,000 words. They are expected to start thinking seriously about the dissertation towards the end of the Lent term of their second year, and to submit a provisional topic by the end of that term. Work should be well advanced by Christmas in the third year. The completed dissertation must be submitted at the start of Summer Term in the third year. To help students prepare for work on the dissertation, there will be an introductory talk on topics relating to doing one's own research and planning and writing a dissertation. A course handout will be available setting out in more detail the requirements for the dissertation and giving full details of lectures, supervision arrangements and assessment.

The aim of this module is to allow students to pursue independent in-depth studies of a topic of their choice, within the scope of their scheme of study. The topic will be formulated in dialogue with one or more external collaborator(s) and may be related to work that is being done on a formally taught course, or it may be less directly linked to course work. Students will develop their employability and research skills, and their ability to work independently at length under their own direction with input from external collaborators and an academic supervisor. The external collaboration will enhance students’ ability to reflect on the impact of academic work. One option is to incorporate work done through the Richardson Institute Internship Programme, but students may also discuss other forms of collaboration with their supervisor.

Students are expected to start thinking seriously about the dissertation towards the end of the Lent term of the second year, and to submit a provisional topic by the end of that term. Work should begin during the Summer term of the second year and a draft plan must be approved by the end of the Summer term. Work should be well advanced by Christmas in the third year. The completed dissertation must be submitted at the start of Summer Term in the third year. To help students prepare for work on the dissertation, there will be an introductory talk on topics relating to doing one’s own research and planning and writing a dissertation. A course handout will be available setting out in more detail the requirements for the dissertation and giving full details of lectures, supervision arrangements and assessment.

The aim of this module is to allow you to pursue independent in-depth studies of a topic of your choice, within the scope of your scheme of study. The topic may be related to work that is being done on a formally taught course, or it may be less directly linked to course work. You will have the opportunity to develop your employability and research skills, and your ability to work independently at length under your own direction with input from an academic supervisor. The fieldwork element will give you the chance to enhance your ability to reflect on the impact of academic work. One option is to incorporate a study trip typically organised by the University, via the Global Experience office, but you may also discuss other forms of field studies with your supervisor. The completed dissertation is usually submitted at the start of Summer Term in the third year. To help you prepare for work on the dissertation, typically there is an introductory talk in second year on topics relating to doing one’s own research and planning and writing a dissertation.

On the 17 July 1936, a group of Spanish generals launched a military coup against Spain’s democratically elected Second Republic. The following three years would witness a bitter struggle to determine the future of the Spanish nation. Ending just months before Germany’s invasion of Poland in September 1939, the Spanish Civil War has since been dubbed a ‘dress rehearsal’ for the Second World War. On the rebel side, General Francisco Franco enlisted the help of Hitler and Mussolini to defeat his domestic opponents. Meanwhile, the Republic was supported by Soviet Russia. Yet the Civil War was also a Spanish conflict with important local dimensions. Republican Spain enjoyed a rich culture of mass politics, and Spanish socialists, communists, anarchists, liberals and feminists fought to the last against Franco’s reactionary coalition of ‘Nationalists’. Following his victory in April 1939, Franco would outlive his international fascist allies by several decades, and the difficult legacies of the war remain keenly present within modern-day Spanish politics and society. Drawing on a large range of sources, including autobiographies, oral histories, novels, films, songs, and political speeches, students taking this module will gain an in-depth knowledge on the domestic and international origins, outcomes, and legacies of the Spanish Civil War.

Indicative topics will typically include:

• The origins of the Civil War: The Second Spanish Republic, 1931-1936
• Republican militias, including anarchist and communist factions
• The Army of Africa: Legionnaires and Moroccan Regulars
• Militiawomen, the Sección Femenina and gender on both sides
• Diplomacy, non-intervention, and the International Brigades
• Fascists abroad: Hitler and Mussolini
• The aftermath of war: victors, vanquished, and repression in Franco’s New State
• Legacies and historical memory of the Civil War

This module explores British foreign policy and the country's broader engagement with the wider world throughout the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Framed against broad debates concerning the decline of British power during this period, the module will explore the central themes that defined Britain's overseas policy in this era, including the impact of the World Wars, the loss of Empire, the 'special relationship' with the United States, and European integration. In exploring these themes, the module will consider how people from a variety of different perspectives (British and foreign, politicians, journalists, novelists, activists) conceived of Britain's world-role since the First World War. In order to incorporate this variety of perspectives, students will draw on a large range of sources, including newspaper articles, novels, poetry and films, as well as traditional archival sources like official government documents, diaries and memoirs.

The thirteenth century began with a rebellion that sought to cast a tyrant from the throne of England, followed after fifty years by a revolution, in which a party of barons and bishops backed by a vast popular following seized power from the king and set up a council to govern in his stead: a move that was utterly radical. This period has been hailed as the foundation of the enlightened democracy we enjoy today – but the reality is far darker. This was a world in which religious leaders had the power to punish kings, where rebels fought as sworn crusaders, and where people willingly went to their deaths for a political cause believing themselves martyrs. This world was not democratic, but theocratic.

In this module you will explore the major events of the period, in England and across Christendom, from the making of Magna Carta and the Fourth Lateran Council, to the Albigensian Crusade, the seizure of power in 1258, and the bloody Battle of Evesham that brought the end of England's First Revolution. You will meet the people who shaped this world – from powerful queens like Blanche of Castile and Eleanor of Provence, to leading knight William Marshal and the masterful pope Innocent III, from tyrannical and hapless kings to the churchmen who defied them and were recognised as saints, and from Simon de Montfort, the revolution's charismatic and brutal leader, to the low-born men and women who flocked to his banner. You will be able to uncover their stories through their letters, testimonies, and eye-witness accounts, and a wealth of other primary sources.

Through a range of topics, you will be able to explore your particular interests – whether in the religious, military, political or social aspects of this period – and consider the big questions arising from this course: what can move women and men, poor and rich, to risk their livelihoods, to take life and give their own to decide who ruled the realm?

The labelling of the Second World War as the People’s War in Britain draws attention to the importance of the men and women who waged it. With the blurring of the Home and Battle Fronts, the conventional gender contract in which men fight to protect the vulnerable at home and women keep the home fires burning was challenged, not least by the revolutionary act of conscripting women to the war effort.

In this module you will examine how the Second World War was experienced by a wide spectrum of British men and women, some of whom identified with the war effort, some of whom were deliberately excluded, or chose to challenge gender conventions in their choice of role. You’ll consider different categorisations of experience (military/civilian; home front/ battle front; male/female) and explore whether there was a hierarchy of service and subsequently of remembrance. Were gender roles in Britain really transformed by the exigencies of war? Through a wide range of written and visual sources, including autobiographical materials, poems, photographs, films, parliamentary minutes, newspapers, posters and cartoons, we will seek to understand individual and collective experiences of the war, and their gendered dimensions.

Today the claim that God designed everything in the universe has given way to the theory of evolution. The usual story of this change is one of conflict between science and religion. This module, however, will challenge the popular narrative.

Focusing on the period 1450-1800, we will reconsider the rise and fall of the idea that nature was the work of a divine intelligent designer. As well as trying to understand why the design argument became so important in the early modern period, we will seek to understand why it fell out of favour during the 18th century – long before the theory of evolution.

But we will not simply be studying the history of ideas. To understand the role of design in early modern science, we will study a wide range of disciplines and practices – from intellectual disciplines like philosophy, rhetoric and theology, to material practices including chemistry, architectural design, archaeology, and art.

When Europeans first landed in Jamaica, they thought that they had arrived in paradise: a sun-kissed tropical island covered with virgin rainforests, dramatic mountains, and exotic flora and fauna. By the early nineteenth century, colonization had fundamentally transformed this supposedly pristine island. This module explores how this process occurred. You will study the numerous ways that colonists exploited the Jamaican environment: the clear-cutting of forests to make way for monoculture plantations; the importation of plants and animals to replace decimated native species; and the extraction and exhaustion of natural resources. You will simultaneously examine enslaved Africans' and Native Americans' environmental perspectives and see how both groups used Jamaica’s mountains and surviving forests to resist the violent process of colonization. We will conclude by examining the colonists’ growing awareness that they had transformed Jamaica’s climate and natural world, just as the island’s economy was fundamentally changed through emancipation. You will thus emerge from this module with a detailed understanding of the natural history of Jamaica—one of the most fascinating places in the Early Modern Atlantic World—and the exciting field of environmental history more broadly.

This course will examine some of the core philosophical questions raised by warfare and conflict. We will look at the ethics of war and killing, but also at more neglected philosophical issues in this area, and non-Western approaches as well as classic texts in the Western tradition.

We will do so by examining some of the central dilemmas faced by soldiers, policy makers and non-combatants, in the form of a weekly question for discussion. These questions include: Can war be beautiful? When, if ever, should we go to war? What counts as legitimate action in war? What, if anything, do we owe to our enemies? Is soldiering a good life? What does technological development mean for warfare? What should a responsible citizen do when their country is, or looks about to be, at war? Who has the epistemic authority to speak about war? Is war always tragic?

The emergence and consolidation of world capitalism has been marked by its uneven character in terms of development. This uneven development has created a polarisation between the Global North mainly consisting of advanced Western capitalist countries, and the Global South mainly consisting of underdeveloped/developing countries in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. This module focuses on the historical roots, present pillars, and empirical issues of the global interaction and integration regarding the making of the Global South. It traces the colonial and post-colonial history, politics, and power relations through which societies of the Global South have been integrated with the profoundly unequal, gendered, and racialised process of development of capitalist relations on a world scale.

This course examines the changing character of war and security in a time of rapid and disruptive technological and geopolitical change. The course combines analysis of contemporary policy documents with the interdisciplinary insights of intellectuals that have examined how war has changed in the modern age. Students are introduced to a range of concepts that are currently significant in the policy debates about the future of war – concepts such as ambiguous war, the gray zone, the third offset strategy and the three block war. While the course is grounded in broader debates from social and political thought about war and modernity, it explores a range of evolving and inter-related case studies that are central to understanding how war is changing: cybersecurity/artificial intelligence; cities and urban war; drones and the future of robotics; climate change and ecological insecurity. Each year we try to bring a guest lecturer from the Ministry of Defence or the FCO to discuss questions relevant to the course – and to discuss how the course can be relevant to a broad range of careers.

The English East India Company (founded 1600) was the most famous corporation in world history: its business connecting the British Isles across the Atlantic, Indian, and Pacific Oceans. It was a protagonist of globalisation. Its longevity - from Elizabeth to Victoria - provides a common thread with which to illuminate the broader English/British story and the separate histories of the territories with which the Company engaged. Historians have debated what the Company represented. It did much to stimulate global trade, but was it a private business in the modern sense? It ruled British territory on behalf of the British state, but was it a state in its own right? This course encourages you to engage with these (and other) large and important questions and digest the high-quality literature that the Company has rightly attracted. But the core of this class will be the challenge and joy of digesting the remarkable corpus of documents and writings that the Company issued or provoked from well-known political economists like Karl Marx and Adam Smith, to managers like Elizabeth Dalyson and non-European writers such as Mirza Abu Taleb Khan. You will be introduced to translated Persian documents, the correspondence of Company factors in Japan, charters, board room minutes, pamphlets, and histories and will explore art and architecture in the cities it did so much to develop. You will gain a broad understanding of seventeenth-, eighteenth-, and nineteenth-century British, Indian, and global history; and develop expertise in cultural, art, political, parliamentary, global, economic, constitutional, gender, and business history.

Global capitalism is at crossroads. It faces a deepening crisis in the world of work, its engine of growth is sputtering out while the climate emergency is aggravating. For some the 2008 recession, COVID-19 and the 2022 cost-of living of crisis offered tragic glimpses of the world that is to come if radical change is not pursued. How can we govern a world characterised by perpetual emergencies and chronic economic crises? Can capitalism be reformed? What does it take to address inequality, precarity or biodiversity collapse? What are the challenges and constraints faced by governments today? The module offers an opportunity to discuss these questions by examining a range of political economy approaches to the study of global capitalism. In doing so the module analyses the most important transformations of the past 50 years that radically transformed the global economy and the issues they raise for economic policy. It examines the constraints, limits and opportunities facing the governance of the global economic order and explores the governing dilemmas that arise in the era of so-called late capitalism.

The Norman conquests in the central Mediterranean ended Muslim political power in Sicily, formed a single kingdom in 1130, and divided Christian Europe from Muslim Africa. The Norman Sicilian kingship that emerged was like no other in Europe: an absolutist, sacral monarchy that conspicuously made use of the Byzantine, Islamic and Latinate arts as well as the kingdom’s three languages – Latin, Greek and Arabic –in inscriptions and chancery documents. In this unique Special Subject module you will gain a detailed knowledge of the history of Sicily and the south Italian peninsula through the medium of Arabic, Latin and Greek narrative sources and charters. These will be studied in translation. Many have never been published. You will trace the region's complex transition to a unified kingdom after the Norman Conquest, focusing in particular on the subsequent development of authority and society on the island of Sicily in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. You will be engaging with the formative history of the Latin West, as well as the political, religious, economic and social dynamics of the Byzantine and Islamic worlds. The course will provide a detailed introduction to the Norman kingdom for those wishing to delve deeper into one of the most spectacular and unusual kingdoms of pre-modern Europe.

Many writers have described the years of unprecedented historical change that surrounded the turn of the twentieth century as a time of 'cultural crisis'. This interdisciplinary module in US cultural history explores that so-called crisis through the close reading and analysis of a variety of important written and visual texts, including fiction and non-fiction, architecture and urban design, painting, photography and cinema. Course themes include: technology and culture, labour and capital, imperialism and the 'myth of the west', immigration and urbanisation, celebrity and consumer culture, reform politics, the Great War, and cultural modernism.

The module aims to provide students with an in-depth knowledge of the different facets of contemporary Asian conflicts and how international organisations such as the UN, and how Western and Asian governments have attempted to deal with these challenges in recent times. Conceptually, the course will examine the principles of state failure; terrorism, ‘New Wars’, the New Security Agenda, Islamism, nationalism and sub nationalism, international conflict prevention; peace keeping and global governance. Empirically, the course will focus on conflict zones in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Indian Kashmir, the Indian northeast, Chinese Xinjiang and Tibet. Thus, the aim of this module is to provide students with an overview of the security of a region which is now of tremendous global importance.

The Vikings inspired both fear and fascination in medieval times, and they continue to exercise a powerful hold on the modern imagination. In this Special Subject you will explore the Viking Age in the Irish Sea region and the Isles. The course ranges from the first Viking raids to the creation of the kingdom of Man and the Isles, a ‘sea-kingdom’ that encompassed numerous islands. The course offers you the chance to develop a sophisticated understanding of textual sources as well as non-textual material. You will gain a grasp of political history, and you will also have the opportunity to study the economy, culture, ethnicity and gender. The field is flourishing, and exciting new finds such as the Galloway Hoard continue to refresh our understanding of the period. You will have access to plenty of secondary literature, and there is scope for developing original interpretations by studying the primary material.

There will be some focus on the prolific evidence from north-west England, including artefacts in local museums and impressive stone monuments. You may have the chance to participate in a field trip to a site or museum (you should set aside approximately £35.00 for local transport). The local evidence will be set in the broader context of Britain, Ireland, the Isle of Man and the North Atlantic.

This course aims to provide students with specialist and critical understanding of the relationship between war and communication. Students will learn how advances in communication technology have not only changed how wars are fought on the battlefield, but how war itself is communicated to various publics across the globe. Students will consider the origin and development of ‘psychological warfare’, its challenge to traditional civil-military relations, and the emergence of the ‘war of ideas’ in the international arena. Students will consider how the rise of digital social media has again changed the nature of contemporary war.