HIS32510 The Anthropocene: Exploring global environmental history

Academic Year 2020/2021

This module explores key themes and methods in environmental history during the Anthropocene - the period in which humans have had a significant impact on the earth’s ecosystems and ecologies. It considers global perspectives on the relationship between humankind and the physical world in the modern age, and assesses how these topics fit within more conventional histories of communities, societies, nations, empires and continents. Using the natural world and its resources as a focal point, we will examine how humans have interacted with nature, both physically and intellectually, and in turn, how the environment has impacted human activity in ways that very often transcend national boundaries. How have states and populations sought at different times to exploit resources, animals, 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, consider trade and flows of materials across the globe, before moving to think about economic growth and the shift to fossil fuels, the impact of urbanisation and the role of the environment in modern warfare. The final third of the course considers the period of the ‘Great Acceleration’ in the second half of the twentieth century, focusing on rapid population growth, the changing role of political ideology, the rise of environmentalism, climate change and the perils of capitalism. In doing so, we will explore some of the key processes in the formation of the modern world: imperialism, industrialisation, warfare, urbanisation, population growth, revolution and decolonisation.