FOUN 098: The Modern World-System
Taught: Fall 2012
We live in a world that is, at once, increasingly integrated and fragmented. Even as forces such as global capitalism and new technologies claim to bring us closer together, fragmentation along regional, state, ethnic, religious, and other lines emphasize difference and conflict. This contemporary reality, as well as competing explanations for it, is regularly trumpeted from the pages of newspapers and magazines, internet sites, and airwaves. Yet how did the world become this way? Is this “global” space we live in new? If not, where did it come from? How has its history shaped its present?
In providing provisional explorations of these questions, this course invites you to think about our contemporary “condition” from a different perspective—a historical one. It seeks to provide a set of frameworks not to reconstruct world history as a seamless flow of “one-damn-thing-after-another” events, but rather as a set of linked processes that unfold unevenly over time and space and, in doing so, have produced a modern world-system.
The notion of a modern world-system, at its broadest, suggests that the history of the present can be best explained by looking at the way a set of broad processes—the emergence of states and empires, the rise of capitalism, and others—have constituted a more or less interconnected (and coherent) set of political- economic and socio-cultural conditions over the past 400 years. Understanding the interactions that take place within the modern world-system provides a critical way to explain the conditions that shaped historical events such as the “colonial encounter.” It also provides a way to begin to grasp how history has framed the ways that people differently engage with and understand the world in the present.
This course, then, will explore the modern world-system as a system in formation over a broad time frame. Looking at key moments of transition—from the rise of capitalism to contemporary economic liberalization—it will provide you with a set of tools to reimagine the relationship between the history, the local, and the global. The course makes no claim to be comprehensive in this outlook—to do so would be the work of multiple lifetimes (or gross oversimplification). Rather, it invites you into a conversation about the world we live in, its pasts, and its possible futures.
We live in a world that is, at once, increasingly integrated and fragmented. Even as forces such as global capitalism and new technologies claim to bring us closer together, fragmentation along regional, state, ethnic, religious, and other lines emphasize difference and conflict. This contemporary reality, as well as competing explanations for it, is regularly trumpeted from the pages of newspapers and magazines, internet sites, and airwaves. Yet how did the world become this way? Is this “global” space we live in new? If not, where did it come from? How has its history shaped its present?
In providing provisional explorations of these questions, this course invites you to think about our contemporary “condition” from a different perspective—a historical one. It seeks to provide a set of frameworks not to reconstruct world history as a seamless flow of “one-damn-thing-after-another” events, but rather as a set of linked processes that unfold unevenly over time and space and, in doing so, have produced a modern world-system.
The notion of a modern world-system, at its broadest, suggests that the history of the present can be best explained by looking at the way a set of broad processes—the emergence of states and empires, the rise of capitalism, and others—have constituted a more or less interconnected (and coherent) set of political- economic and socio-cultural conditions over the past 400 years. Understanding the interactions that take place within the modern world-system provides a critical way to explain the conditions that shaped historical events such as the “colonial encounter.” It also provides a way to begin to grasp how history has framed the ways that people differently engage with and understand the world in the present.
This course, then, will explore the modern world-system as a system in formation over a broad time frame. Looking at key moments of transition—from the rise of capitalism to contemporary economic liberalization—it will provide you with a set of tools to reimagine the relationship between the history, the local, and the global. The course makes no claim to be comprehensive in this outlook—to do so would be the work of multiple lifetimes (or gross oversimplification). Rather, it invites you into a conversation about the world we live in, its pasts, and its possible futures.
