Fall 2026
History of Globalisation since 1300
Dates: September 08, 2026 – December 22, 2026Day/Time: Thursday 10:10 AM - 12:40 PM EDT
Level: 300-Level
Certificate: Global Humanities, Global Studies
Global Humanities certificate requirement: Global story- and history-telling (stories and storytelling traditions). Global thought (philosophical traditions).
Global Studies certificate requirement: Introductory course on international relations, globalization, global affairs.
Instructor: Victor Apryshchenko, Bard College
This course is not a survey of "world history" as a totalizing narrative. Rather, it is an analytical study of how connections between different parts of the world have been formed, structured, facilitated, and disrupted throughout history. The longue durée approach examines global connectivity by tracing the emergence, transformation, and breakdown of transregional linkages, from the Mongol Empire’s transcontinental networks to contemporary forms of global interdependence. Rather than presenting the world as a unified historical field, the course focuses on the infrastructures, forces, and barriers that have shaped interactions between regions, including trade routes, imperial governance, military expansion, ecological systems, ideological regimes, technological mediation, and cultural translation. Drawing on world-systems theory and global history approaches, the course asks how earlier forms of connectivity produced enduring patterns of integration, hierarchy, dependency, and fragmentation that continue to structure the modern world. Through a comparative study of empires, including the Persian, Ottoman, British, Russian, and Soviet, the course analyzes the shifting dynamics between the core and the periphery, the mechanisms of governance, the legal and cultural frameworks, and the role of administration, gender, and knowledge production in enabling or constraining global linkages. From the Black Death’s restructuring of Eurasian exchanges to contemporary pandemics, the course examines recurring cycles of connection and rupture. Extending into the 20th and 21st centuries, the course explores how colonialism, decolonization, the Cold War, transnational corporations, and digital infrastructures reconfigured global relations rather than simply "globalizing" the world. Decolonization is examined as both the dismantling of imperial systems and the reorganization of global inequalities and dependencies. The course also explores the role of international institutions
Credits: 4 US / 8 ECTS