HIS10500 Global Environmental History

Academic Year 2022/2023

This module is the spring trimester core for the Single Subject History pathway. It is taught as a weekly two-hour workshop, which combines short mini-lectures with student-led discussion and activities. As the module progresses, we will focus on testing new ideas in conversation, collaboratively reading and analysing secondary and primary sources, and gaining skills and confidence in the classroom. Collectively, we will explore how history works at a global scale, using the environment as our focus of analysis. We will think about humankind’s relationship with the planet across time, and assess how environmental history adds to our understanding of more ‘conventional’ histories of communities, societies, nations, empires and continents.

How have humans interacted with nature, both physically and intellectually, and in turn, how have climate, animals, plants and landscape impacted human activity in ways that very often transcend national boundaries? How have states and populations sought at different times to exploit resources, land, water, commodities and energy? And how has this human-nature relationship contributed to broader social, political, economic and intellectual developments? Beginning in the late fifteenth century with the Columbian Exchange, but focusing for the most part on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, we will critically examine the global expansion of empires, the development of resource frontiers, economic growth and the shift to fossil fuels, the impact of urbanisation and the role of the environment in modern warfare. The final part of the course considers the period of the ‘Great Acceleration’ in the second half of the twentieth century, focusing on rapid population growth, political ideology, environmentalism, climate change and the perils of capitalism. In doing so, we will explore some of the key themes in our shared past: empire, race, industrialisation, labour, warfare, totalitarianism, revolution and decolonisation, and consider the ecological roots of the modern world.