History and Politics BA

History core module:

History Workshop

What does it take to be a historian? In this module, you will study the process of historical research, learning discipline-specific methods and essential study and writing skills through close engagement with a historical text (usually a work of narrative non-fiction) linked to your tutor's research interests. You will develop skills in critical reading, historiography, essay writing, bibliographic techniques, and reflection.

The assessment for this module is aimed at giving you a strong foundation in the skills you will need throughout your degree and beyond: critical reading and writing, bibliographic techniques, and the ability to reflect on and articulate your skills as a historian.

20 credits

History option module examples:

Empire: From the Ancient World to the Middle Ages

Covering the period from the 4th century BC to the 15th century AD, this module invites students to explore the ancient and medieval worlds through the lens of 'empire'. It provides an introduction to ancient and medieval types of empire, their contacts with and legacies to each other, and the connectedness between East and West in this period. Using a wealth of primary evidence and drawing on corresponding historiographical debates, students explore what it meant to live in ancient and medieval empires, what kind of social, cultural and religious encounters they engendered, and whether there was any space for resistance.

20 credits

Land of Liberty? Rights in the USA, 1776-2016

In 1776, the Declaration of Independence proclaimed that men were created with 'certain unalienable rights'. Yet the new United States denied those rights to large swathes of its people. Examining themes which resonate powerfully today, this module explores American history as a struggle over how rights have been defined and debated, expanded and contracted, and secured and denied. Linking the history of ideas to the efforts of ordinary people, we will look at debates over liberty and slavery, democracy and disenfranchisement, capital and labour, integration and
segregation, gender and sexuality, nationalism and internationalism, and conservatism and liberalism.

20 credits

Paths from Antiquity to Modernity

The aim of this module is to introduce you to the broad structures of Western history from the end of the Roman Empire to the present day. It provides students intending to take History Single or Dual Honours degree modules with a common framework for the more detailed modules that you will be studying at Levels Two and Three. At the same time, it provides non-historians with a fundamental appraisal of the shape of the past, to which courses in other departments will readily relate. Our aim is to equip you with an understanding of the periodisation of western history and of the major transitions in the process of modernisation. In the process, you will become more critically aware of the essential conceptual tools that modern historians readily use to analyse the past. The module aims to provide the essential training in the skills and methods needed for University level historical study.

20 credits

The 'Disenchantment' of Early Modern Europe, c. 1570-1770

This module explores the fundamental shifts in mental attitudes and public behaviour that occurred in Europe between the age of the Reformation and the age of the Enlightenment. The central focus of the course will be the examination of the supernatural - religious beliefs, but also witchcraft and magic. You will explore the changing ways in which beliefs impinged on people's lives at various social levels. You will also have an opportunity to study the impact on people's world views of such changes as rising literacy, urbanisation, state formation and new discoveries about the natural world. All these will be investigated in the institutional contexts of state and church and the ways in which they sought to channel and mould beliefs and behaviour. This module enables you to understand how the early modern period is distinctive from and links medieval and later modern historical studies.

20 credits

The Making of the Twentieth Century

This module considers the twentieth century as a time that transformed the social and political order in the world, calling into question the role of the European powers in global contexts, and dramatically reorienting the relationship between states and societies. You will engage with case studies representing key themes in twentieth-century global history: imperialism and the processes of decolonisation; the challenges of building the postcolonial nation; revolutions and the emergence of new states; war, genocide and conflict; and the institutions of international order.

In addressing these themes, The Making of the Twentieth Century has a particular aim of counteracting prevailing tendencies towards Eurocentrism.  You will gain a considerable body of knowledge on the histories of Asia, Africa and Latin America especially.  At the same time, emphasis is placed on the empirical and theoretical grounds upon which competing interpretations rest in order to encourage you to develop critical awareness of the character of historical analysis.  More generally, this module aims to develop analytical, conceptual and literary skills through class discussion and written assignments.  Communication skills will also be emphasised in weekly seminars that will allow specific issues to be discussed in more depth, often with reference to primary source material.  Above all, the module seeks to stimulate an interest in history and an appreciation of cultural diversity.

20 credits

The Transformation of the United Kingdom, 1800 to the Present

This module explores the central political, social, economic, cultural and diplomatic developments that have transformed Britain since 1800. Unlike most of its European neighbours, Britain did not experience dramatic moments of revolution, constitution-building, invasion or military defeat; indeed the belief that the nation was set on a course of gradual evolutionary progress was central to many versions of British identity. This course examines how, when and why change occurred in Britain. Key themes include the transition to mass democracy; the impact of industrialisation; shifts in social relationships based on class, gender and ethnicity; and the rise and fall of Britain as an imperial power.

20 credits

Politics core module:

Analysing Politics

This module is about (1) politics, and (2) how to analyse it. More specifically, it involves (1) understanding how power and truth operate in the contemporary world; and (2) discovering different ways to research these dynamics so as to build compelling and rigorous accounts of the political worlds that we find ourselves a part of. Students will learn through a combination of lectures, seminars, and independent study; and will be assessed on the basis of an essay and online multiple-choice tests.

20 credits

Politics option module examples:

British Politics

This module will introduce students to key concepts and debates in British politics through an examination of post-1976 British political history. Each lecture will take as its starting-point one day in recent British history and will describe what happened on that day and what happened as a result of that day. Each of the seminars will then follow that discussion: paying particular attention to concepts and ideas within the study of politics which can help us make sense of those events.

20 credits

Gender and the World

This module aims to interrogate the role of gender and sex in shaping world politics. To do this, it asks how notions of masculinity and femininity shape our institutions, how gender might influence the political problems we prioritise and whose voices are taken seriously in developing responses to these problems. 

Students will answer these questions through the study of the politicisation of sex, the relationship between gender and violence, how current practices of gender are shaped by colonialism and a range of other timely topics that shape the world today. 

The module will allow students to develop an understanding of different approaches to gender, be introduced to key concepts from feminism and queer theory, learn to apply these ideas practically to a set of case studies and debate what the future of gender is in world politics. 

20 credits

Introduction to Global Political Economy

This module provides an introduction to global political economy (GPE). It covers key mainstream and critical theories and considers critically what GPE is. Following this, the main focus will be on sketching the outlines of the global economy (past and present) by considering particular commodities. This provides a novel way to introduce the student to the major processes of global trade, finance and production. It also considers the political economy of race, class and gender as core theoretical themes that interweave the empirical examination of the global political economy, from roughly 1500 through to the 21st century.

20 credits

Introduction to Western Political Thought

This module provides an introduction to key themes and thinkers in Western political thought. It explores the different meanings of the nature of politics and the political in this tradition. One key theme will be the relation between human nature and politics. This will be explored through a series of deep conflicts between reason and desire, the state and individual, and the public and private. These conflicts are examined through the different visions of politics of a selection of ancient and early modern thinkers. The module will also engage with critiques of the canon of Western political thought itself, in particular from a postcolonial perspective.

20 credits

Planet Politics

From the atmosphere to Antarctic ice sheets, the Earth has been fundamentally transformed by human activity: we now inhabit a ‘human planet’. At the same time, from mining and agriculture to modern patterns of resource consumption, humankind has become dependent on the very activities that have caused these transformations. 

Far from being automatic or inevitable, these transformations are deeply political on multiple levels – in their causes, in their consequences, and in the many arguments and differences over how to respond to them. 

This module will introduce students to some of this ‘Planet Politics’. It will consider questions such as: 

Are we on the verge of a planetary ecological crisis? 

Is capitalism the problem, or the solution? 

Are there just too many people? 

Is meaningful international environmental cooperation possible? 

What are the vested interests obstructing change? What forms of social resistance are appropriate? 

What is ‘environmental justice’? 

Examining both key environmental and resource issues and the main approaches to studying them, the module asks some of the biggest questions about life: how should we live, and what should we do?

20 credits

Political Violence

This module will provide students with an introduction to political violence and begins by engaging with debates over the conceptualisation of violence, and when violence should be understood as “political”.  It will then introduce students to debates over the causes and consequences of violence through an examination of specific topics, which may include:

histories of violence

terrorism

interstate war

settler-colonial violence

structural violence

slow violence

gender based violence

war ecologies

the politics of violence prevention

violent resistance

attempts to regulate violence.  



We will explore these themes by asking how violence is refracted through race, gender, ethnicity, and other forms of social difference. Students will have the opportunity to explore these topics through specific examples and develop the necessary skills to apply them in practice. 

The module will allow students to develop an understanding of the key theories, concepts, issues and themes in the study of political violence by:

understanding the debates on the conceptualisation of “violence” and what makes violence “political”

developing skills in critical analysis, writing, and presentation

developing the ability to apply theories and issues to specific cases of political violence

20 credits

Race and Racism in World Politics

Through historical and contemporary case studies, students will study how our world today has been shaped by historical events, many of which continue to inform current relations. We will discover how discourses around race, ethnicity, gender and class construct realities today, determining who rules and who is ruled, who lives and who dies. 

The module will give students a theoretical toolkit, including approaches from the majority world, enabling them to appreciate power and the political significance of silences in accounts of the global and political.

We will learn about the historical production of the idea of race; how it configured the world in particular ways; how race mandated the colonial project. However, the module will also go beyond race to think about colonialism and the identities that operate in conjunction with race including class, ethnicity, and gender, and how they can determine what type of life people can live or whether they can live at all. For example, they determine whether a child has the right to security, or has to risk losing life in the Mediterranean escaping violence at home. 

Students will also learn about resistance and efforts to construct a different and more just world. Through rich historical and contemporary case studies, students will learn how to connect theories to understand current affairs, drawing on thinkers from various backgrounds to counter some of the dominant narratives within international relations.

20 credits

The World's Wicked Problems

This module will introduce students to key international relations concepts and discussions. Students will be able to understand, analyse and reflect on some of  the most pressing issues in the international arena including: 

migration

climate change

poverty and global inequalities

sexual violence 

armed conflict 

This introductory module will equip students with the tools to continue engaging with more in-depth theoretical and empirical international relations discussions as they progress through their studies.

20 credits

History core modules:

20 credits each. Dual students will choose one of two core modules.

Historians and History

This course will introduce students to the most influential 'schools' of historical practice in operation in the second half of the twentieth century and which remain influential today. These include Marxism, the Annales school, quantitative history, history from below, feminist and gender history, and postmodernism, as well as English empiricism. Lectures will provide an overview of each approach, and discuss the historical context in which it emerged. In seminars, students will be taught to assess critically the opportunities and limitations of each approach.

20 credits

The Uses of History

This module explores the theory and practice of public history by providing students with the opportunity to communicate their scholarly work to an audience beyond the boundaries of our discipline. Students will articulate an aspect of their own historical interests to a non-academic audience and evaluate the use of history outside academic settings. The course will engage in debate about important questions facing historians in the present, and consider ideas about the role and purposes of History as an academic subject.

20 credits

History option module examples:

Option modules are 20 credits each. Dual honours students will normally take two modules from across our options and document options.

A Protestant Nation? Religion, Politics and Culture in England 1560-1640

On the accession of Elizabeth I, England became an officially Protestant country but the Church, State and laypeople did not necessarily agree about the nature of changes needed to accommodate the new religion. On the level of national government policy, we shall explore what governments expected from their subjects and how they attempted to secure religious conformity during the reigns of Elizabeth I, James I and Charles I. How far did anti-Catholicism define English identity in this period? Did authorities at the national and local levels disagree about how severely religious minorities should be treated?

20 credits

Asian Britain: Travel, Migration, Diaspora

It has been estimated that, by the early twenty-first century, more than 25 million peoples of Indian, Pakistani and Bangladeshi descent were living in Europe, North America, Africa and Southeast Asia. This module aims to historicise this diaspora by examining how and why South Asians have criss-crossed the globe in increasing numbers from the nineteenth century: for pilgrimage, trade, service, indenture, learning, diplomacy, politics, performance, mission and employment. The focus will be on different experiences of travel, migration and settlement in Britain in the high and late colonial period (1858-1947) that anticipated mass migration in the post-war era.

20 credits

Becoming America, 1690-1763

This module investigates the proposition that modern America took shape in the period 1690-1763, prior to and, as we will consider, in many ways productive of the transformation often associated with the era of the American Revolution. The module will consider primary sources and associated secondary debates relating to five key themes: ethnic diversity and religious pluralism, geographic dispersal, the growth of domestic and international market economies, the emergence of popular, partisan politics, and the reconfiguration of notions of power, authority, and control. The module considers longstanding and emerging historiographical debates, including but not limited to the prevalence and manifestations of monarchical versus liberal political culture, anglicisation and colonial consumption, and geography/regionalism and periodization in colonial American history.

20 credits

Byzantine Intersectionality: Gender, Race and Power in the Medieval Mediterranean, c.500-1300

How did race and gender appear before modernity? How similar were they to how race and gender appear to us today? And can the tools of intersectionality, an approach developed by the critical race theorist Kimberlé Crenshaw that thinks of different kinds of identities as deeply intertwined in structuring our lives, help us understand the medieval world? These questions sit at the heart of this module, which will guide you through the Byzantine world, the survivor of the Roman empire in the East, stretching from the Balkans to Syria, but with a particular focus on the manifold ways in which this world and its power hierarchies were structured by complex ideas about gender and race. From castrated men, or eunichs, sleeping at the foot of the emperor's bed, to saints assigned female at birth who decided to spend their lives as men in male monasteries, this course will ask us to reconsider the assumptions we make about gender and race today, by tracing both how far they have come from the medieval period, and how far they have deviated from it. It will both start and conclude with some bigger historiographical questions: does the existence of race and gender in the past, the realities of racial and sexual hierarchy, offer us an origins story or an opportunity for liberation today?

20 credits

Decolonisation: The End of Empire & the Future of the World

The world was transformed in the twentieth century. A world of empires and colonies became a world of independent states. In this module we analyse this global transformation. Why did it happen - and how? How much really changed? For people around the globe - from imperial rulers in Europe to anti-colonial nationalists in the 'third world' - the crumbling of European empires was an opportunity to shape the future of their own communities and of the world. Sometimes negotiated, often violent, these hard-fought struggles over the future created the world we live in today.

20 credits

Empire, Sexuality and the Family in Modern Europe

The last two centuries have witnessed the dramatic transformation of family life and sexuality across Europe. The experience of empire, both at home and in overseas colonies, played an essential role in that transformation. This module considers how empire shaped European debates about and experiences with sexuality and the family, including questions about race, religion, gender, marriage, childhood and family structures. We will examine developments on the ground both in the metropole and in colonies. Not least, we shall explore the shadow of empire in twentieth-century policies on and debates about sexuality and family life, from National Socialist eugenics laws to international human rights debates about protecting families and children of refugees. In doing so, we will connect a rich body of historical writing about the family, sexuality, gender, law and empire.

20 credits

From the Pharaohs to Alexander the Great: The Battle for the Ancient World

This module examines the ongoing battle for dominance in the ancient Near East between the Egyptians, Assyrians, Babylonians, Persians, and Greeks. From the outset of the Iron Age (around 1000 BCE) until Alexander the Great swept in from Macedonia to conquer the whole of the known world in 330 BCE, four empires rose and fell in the area now known as the Middle East. In the midst of all these powers lived ancient Israel—the small yet strategically located society that produced the texts known as the Old Testament. The module explores the key political, military, religious, economic, and social events that shaped these empires, shifted the balance of power between them, shaped their sacred texts, and made parts of these societies iconic symbols of the ancient world.

20 credits

From World War to Cold War: Europe 1945-1968

This module examines the social and cultural character of Europe after the personal and political traumas of the 1930s and 1940s, focusing on developments in France, Italy and West Germany. Its purpose is to provide a stimulating and wide-ranging introduction to a key aspect of post-1945 European history, encouraging students to consider the history of post-war Western Europe as a unity, and highlighting the similarities between states. Similarly, it deliberately transgresses the boundaries between political, economic, social and cultural history. Topics will include the end of World War II, consumption and affluence, debates about Americanisation, and the changing nature of politics and society during the 1960s.

20 credits

Gender and Sexuality in Modern Britain, 1850 to the Present

Through lectures and seminars, this course offers an overview of the history of gender and sexuality in Modern Britain. We will examine political, social, cultural and economic change from the perspective of gender relations and constructions of gender, as well as shifting understandings of sex and sexual politics from the Victorian period of alleged sexual repression to moments of liberation resulting from two (or more) so-called 'sexual revolutions' in the 20th century. We are interested, in equal measure, how women and men experienced, negotiated, and reacted to these changes in gender norms and sexual mores.

20 credits

Gender and the Georgians: Sex and Society in Britain 1714-1837

Eighteenth-century Britain witnessed great change: historians have argued for a 'revolution' in industry, the 'birth of a consumer society' and the emergence of a 'public sphere' of political debate; global trade expanded, towns grew, and new Enlightenment ideas flourished. In this context, gender identities and roles were redefined, understandings of the body debated, and notions of masculinity and femininity contested. This module explores these ideas about gender, and how they informed people's experiences, from polite fashions to the criminal underworld, bluestocking sobriety to drunkenness in gentlemen's clubs, and from 'subcultures' of homosexuality to the first 'feminists'

20 credits

Gender, Race and Class in Nazi Germany 1933-1945

This module analyses German society from 1933 to 1945 from the perspective of gender, race and class. We will examine the dynamics of inclusion and exclusion under the Nazi dictatorship through the lens of the agency of ‘Aryan’ women and men, the persecution of ‘racially’ defined minorities and by probing into the connections between social class and both consent and popular dissent. While racial categories were pivotal for Nazi policy, their application and their outcomes intersected with issues of gender and class, whether in the forced sterilization of (mostly) women, or in labour market policies that limited gainful employment of women. Through the focus on gender, race and class as dimensions of policy, collective agency and experiences in Germany from 1933 to 1945, the module will offer an introduction into key aspects of the Nazi dictatorship and its dynamics.

20 credits

Holy Russia, Soviet Empire: Nation, Religion, and Identity in the 20th Century

This module explores the twentieth-century history of Russia, the Soviet Union, and its successor states. Rather than approaching this turbulent period in history by focusing on the rise and fall of different political leaders (as is often the case in survey courses), we instead approach this subject through the prism of nation, religion and identity. The course probes the following questions: What did the 'Russian revolution mean for the multi-national empire created by the Romanovs? How far did the communist party manage to create a 'Soviet' identity, and on what was this based? Did the Bolsheviks attempt to create an atheist society succeed? And what happened to 'Soviet' identity when communist leaders began to lose their grip on power in the final decades of the twentieth century?

20 credits

Imperial Germany, 1871-1918

The aim of this module is to introduce students to the study of Imperial Germany and its position in the controversial interpretations of the 'peculiarities' of Modern German History, ie the structural continuities leading the the rise of National Socialism and its seizure of power in 1933. The module will cover topis crucial for an understanding of these debates, such as the party system and electoral culture, the structure and sociability of the middle class, the forms and impact of social militarization, and the emergence of radical nationalism. Particular attention will be paid to the confessional conflicts and identities and to the First World War

20 credits

Intoxicants in Early Modern England

The module looks at the uses and abuses of intoxicants in England during the later sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. This includes `old world' intoxicants, such as wine, beer, and ale, as well as `new world' commodities like tobacco, chocolate, coffee, and tea. The module introduces students to the economy of intoxication, and the importance of intoxicants to domestic trade and global expansion; to the role of intoxicants in medical practices; to the places, spaces, rituals, and conventions of consumption; and to importance of intoxicants to the early modern state and political culture.

20 credits

Life Worth Living

What does it mean for a life to go well? How does one live life well? What is a flourishing life? These questions have shaped intellectual endeavour for millennia. Life Worth Living explores approaches to these questions through engagement with diverse traditions/thinkers including classical Greek philosophy, Buddhism, Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Confucianism, Existentialism, Marx, and Nietzsche. The module includes historical analysis of these traditions, visits from individuals whose lives are shaped by them, fieldwork to discuss the ideas beyond the classroom, and assessments to help students develop their own vision of a life worth living.

20 credits

Looking East: British Perceptions of the Soviet Union from the Holodomor to the Early Cold War

In this module you will learn about how Britons perceived the Soviet Union during the Stalin era. You will examine the reasons why some Britons responded in adulatory fashion to the Soviet experiment, and why others saw a malignant force out to undermine Britain’s institutions and way of life. You will understand how the Soviet Union was represented across the media and in different cultural forms, and discover what this reveals about how Britons thought about themselves between the 1930s and 1950s; their hopes, fears, and introspection about their place in the world.The module covers key topics that act as landmarks in the chronology of British attitudes to the Soviet experiment, including the Holodomor (Ukrainian Terror-Famine), Stalin’s purges, the Nazi-Soviet Pact, the wartime alliance, and the start of the Cold War. The module also considers other less well-known episodes that influenced British perceptions: the Metropolitan-Vickers affair in 1933; the Russophobia of press outlets such as the Saturday Review (1933-1936); and Moscow Dynamo’s football tour in November 1945. These incidents will also be set against wider themes that influenced the reactions of Britons, notably the role of ‘fellow travellers’ and itinerant sceptics, international political dynamics (such as affinity for fascist alternatives), and cultural representations in literature and other media forms.

20 credits

Media and Popular Culture in Twentieth-Century Britain

This module will explore ways in which the press, the cinema, and radio and television broadcasting shaped politics, society and culture in twentieth century Britain. The first half of the module will examine the historical development of each of the major media forms and discuss the different types of content that they provided. The second half will explore a number of key issues, such as the impact of the media on the evolution of modern democracy, the media's role in reflecting and shaping identities such as class, gender and ethnicity, and the media's contribution to the emergence of a consumer society.

20 credits

Postcolonial France and Britain: Empire and its legacies since 1945

In 1942, Winston Churchill declared, 'I have not become the King's First Minister in order to preside over the liquidation of the British Empire'. However, between 1945-1960 a quarter of the world's inhabitants revolted against colonialism and colonial rule. So how did we get from Churchill's certainty that the Empire will endure to the emergence of 65 new sovereign states - and what were the consequences in Europe of that massive shift? 

This module looks at postwar Western Europe through an imperial lens, applying new perspectives from the field of postcolonial studies which argue that empire and metropole should not be examined separately. The module covers three main themes: the question of what empire and its loss meant to the colonisers; migration from former colonies to Europe and its consequences; and the memory, representation and historiography of empire. Focusing on Britain and France the module uses a wide range of sources and approaches to explore cultural, social and political aspects of post-colonial Europe.

You will learn what empire meant to Europeans in the twentieth century, and in what ways colonialism and its legacies have shaped the history of Europe since the end of formal imperial rule between 1945 and 1980.  Over the course of the semester we'll examine a variety of topics, beginning with an introduction to postcolonialism as a theory and a means of examining and understanding the world. We'll then start exploring how the colonial empires were perceived at the end of the Second World War. We'll look at the late-colonial state and new forms of colonial rule, including changing ideas about colonial governance, race and equality. Then we'll move to the failure of the late-colonial project: was the decision to withdraw from empire an orderly retreat? In particular, we'll focus on reactions to and debates about decolonisation in Algeria and Kenya in metropolitan societies. We'll examine the experiences of the Windrush generation, and questions of race relations, policing, and the emergence of racial discourses in politics and society.The focus here will be on the 1958-70s for the British case (Enoch Powell) and the 1960s in France with the emergence of the Front Nationale and the emergence of anti-racism campaigns and movements since 1968. We will finish our semester examining the 'second generation' with questions on ethnicity, difference and belonging through the concepts of 'post-colonial fracturing'. Through sport, culture and music we'll look at national identity - was the 1998 French world cup team a representation of multicultural France? We'll end the semester on the question of colonial nostalgia, former settler's repatriation to Europe, and the problems of commemoration in the French case.

20 credits

Religion in an Age of Terror: Ancient Texts and the Making of Modern Israel.

This module will look at the origins, growth and development of conflict and violence in the Abrahamic traditions (Judaism, Christianity and Islam), in order to provide a historical perspective on the roots of contemporary religious violence. The focus of the module will be a case-study on the conflict in Israel/Palestine (especially between 1947-67). Primary source analysis will be of the Bible/Quran (and related material), and the documents relating to the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948. Related topics will include: theories of religious violence; religious terrorism; politics and religion; and the roots of religious 'fundamentalism.'

20 credits

Shell-Shock to Prozac: Mental Health in Britain

This course charts the history of psychiatry and mental health in Britain. We start at the First World War, with the large-scale management of psychiatric casualties (shell-shock). We will look at the uptake of psychoanalysis in interwar Britain, contrasted with 'extreme' asylum treatments such as lobotomy and insulin coma therapy. We shall then gauge the impact of the National Health Service from 1948, the closure of the asylums, and the impact of new drug therapies (including the iconic Prozac). Finally we shall analyse the rise of patient activism, and the emergence of new 'epidemic' illnesses such as depression and self-harm.

20 credits

Slavery and Abolition in the United States

This module explores slavery and its critics in the United States. Focusing mostly on antebellum America - the three decades before the Civil War - we will move from the daily struggles over life and labour on the plantation to the place of slavery in national politics and international trade. Students will explore the character of the slave community, the relationship between master and slave, and debates over the rights and wrongs of the `Peculiar Institution'.

20 credits

The Battle for China's Future, 1839-1949

This module explores a century in which nationalists and imperialists fought over China. We will begin by looking at how the Qing empire, having expanded China's frontiers, confronted the 'semi-colonialism' of foreign powers and bloody domestic rebellions. After covering the Qing's fall in the 1911 Revolution, we will examine different designs for national integration on the part of warlords, reformers, and radicals, and consider the civil wars that followed. China's history in this period is sometimes told as a straightforward story of Eastern response to Western impact. But in introducing you to China before Communist rule, we will consider a more complex story of innovation, exchange, accommodation, and resistance, as the Middle Kingdom's dynastic rulers and their republican successors tried to meet foreign and domestic challenges, balance conservatism and modernization, and redraw their country's social, political, and geographic boundaries.

20 credits

The Export of England: Seventeenth Century Trade and Empire

This module considers the commercial and territorial expansion of seventeenth-century England. It examines how England's commerce was transformed from the largely bilateral cloth trade with Europe conducted by mercantile corporations, to a multilateral commerce conducted under several conditions (the 'navigation system, 'free trade', joint-stock companies). These changes coincided with the foundation of North American and West Indian colonies, building on earlier experiences in Ireland, and the course will consider their developing relations with the metropolis. Throughout, the focus will be on whether these changes were a consequence of deliberate 'mercantilist' state policies, or of the initiative of thousands of individuals.

20 credits

The Heretic, the Witch and the Inquisitor: The Medieval Inquisition from the Cathars to Joan of Arc

The Inquisition - an extraordinary court instituted by bishops from the 13th century to judge heretics and encourage their return to the Roman Church - marks an important development in medieval history and has played an essential role in modern perceptions of the Middle Ages. By focusing on some of the best known sources of the Inquisition, which have been important in recent historiography as well as contemporary fiction (The Name of the Rose), this module allows you to reflect on how a better understanding of the Middle Ages and a critical questioning of modern prejudices can benefit from each other.

The module focuses on two main source collections (which are available online in English translation): the inquisition record of Jacques Fournier, bishop of Pamiers in South France in the early 14th century, who became Pope Benedict XII, and the two trials of Joan of Arc, i.e., the accusation trial of 1431, at the end of which she was burned at the stake, and the rehabilitation trial of the 1450s that overturned the verdict of the first trial. It examines other forms and continuations of inquisition, such as the Spanish Inquisition (starting in 1478), the Roman Inquisition (which famously condemned Galileo in 1633), and the beginning of the witch-craze of the early modern period in late medieval Europe.

20 credits

The History of American Foreign Relations

George Washington famously warned against 'the insidious wiles of foreign influence' in his farewell address in 1796. But history has challenged any idea of the United States as a self-contained, bounded nation. Rather, the U.S. has played an active role in world affairs and has been profoundly shaped by events and people outside its borders. This course surveys the history of the U.S. in global context, beginning with America's first forays into overseas expansion in the late nineteenth century. We will cover both the major foreign policy moments and trends in U.S. history ;wars, government initiatives and interventions abroad, interstate diplomacy 'as well as the less formal encounters, migrations, and transnational exchanges that constitute American foreign relations. Primary and secondary source readings, lectures, and discussions will pay particular attention to the intersections between changes at home and developments abroad.

20 credits

The History of Terrorism

In the aftermath of 9/11 and 7/7, the rhetoric of the war on terror has been one of the most significant political vocabularies of the twenty-first century. Yet, terrorism is not a new phenomenon: the history of the modern world, particularly during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, has been marked by violent challenges to political authority by non-state actors. This module will consider in detail the phenomenon of terrorism in a historical setting, considering various manifestations (geographically, chronologically and ideologically) as well as the related areas of state terror and counter-terrorist strategies.

20 credits

The Making of Modern India, 1780-1965

Modern South Asian history has been an exceptionally fertile field of scholarly exploration, with many new insights and theoretical developments emerging from this field. This module will study the recent historiographical trends while looking closely at several historical developments during the period of British rule and the immediate post-colonial period. The module will be divided into four parts: the early colonial period, the late colonial period, the period of anti-colonial resistance or the national movement, and the post-colonial/Nehruvian era. The themes to be studied include: land/agrarian settlements, British expansionist policies, the revolt of 1857, the formation of caste identities, British famine policies, socio-religious reforms, Gandhian mass-mobilization, Islamic assertions, the national movement, Nehruvian socialism, partition of the subcontinent, and post-colonial legacies.

20 credits

The Northern Ireland 'Troubles' and Peace Process

This module introduces students to one of Europe's most recent - and deadly - intra-state conflicts. The 'Troubles' in Northern Ireland, c.1968-98, were marked by the persistence and seeming intractability of a conflict that contained national, ethnic and religious dimensions. With the paramilitary ceasefires in the 1990s, a new era opened; but difficulties remain in moving from an absence of violence to a genuine peace. Students will consider the conflict as a low-level civil war within the United Kingdom, as well as a dispute over sovereignty. The module covers the competing political and paramilitary groupings and various initiatives to enhance peace.

20 credits

Trumpism: An American Biography

Donald Trump's election, commentators claim, was unprecedented as well as unexpected: a break with more than two centuries of custom. Yet closer scrutiny of American history suggests Trump is no aberration. The module will interrogate the U.S. past to better understand the present, looking at the likes of populism as a political language, whiteness as a psychological wage, masculinity as a path to high office, protectionism as an economic policy, and deindustrialization as a political spur. By asking historical questions about the roots of Trump's rise, we will situate the American present in a complex and often painful past.

20 credits

Understanding the Aztecs: Life and death in early sixteenth-century Mexico

Since the devastating arrival of the Spanish conquistadors in 1519, the history of the Aztecs has been haunted by the spectre of human sacrifice. As bloody priests and brutal warriors, the Aztecs have peopled the pages of history, myth and fiction, their spectacular violence dominating perceptions of their culture and casting a veil over their unique way of life. But the Aztecs' island-capital of Tenochtitlan was not only a centre for ritual sacrifice, but also a sophisticated metropolis, home to a civilised society of highly educated individuals and close loving families. This module attempts to recover the complex and sometimes contradictory reality of the Aztec world by studying life in Tenochtitlan on the eve of the Spanish conquest. Central to the course will be the attempt to contextualize the role of human sacrifice and understand how the Aztecs were able to remain a very human and recognizable society, whilst living amongst so much violent bloodshed.

20 credits

Warriors, Saints and Heroes in early medieval Britain

This module explores patterns of power in early medieval Britain from the withdrawal of Roman authority in the fifth century through to the incursions of the Vikings in the ninth. We will focus on what would become England, though Wales and Scotland will also come into consideration. Central themes include the problem of where the Angles and Saxons came from, the relations between independent kingdoms, the role of the Church in reshaping ideas of royal power, the nature of heroic warrior culture, people's sense of their place in the wider world, and the changing distributions of power in their own society. We will explore a range of sources, ranging from archaeological excavations and coins to poetry, travel-writing and historical chronicles.

20 credits

History document option examples:

Document options are 20 credits each. Dual honours students have the option to take one document option module.

History document modules have a narrower focus than our standard option modules and usually cover a specific event, a movement, or a moment in time. They help you develop your skills in the use and analysis of primary sources which will be invaluable as you progress through your degree.

Appeasement, the Munich Crisis and the British People

The conduct of foreign policy in Britain in the late 1930s and the policy of appeasement in particular have been matters of sustained historiographical debate since 1945. This unit introduces students to some of the key sources pertinent to the discussion through a series of linked lecture workshops and seminars. These highlight the shifting debates between the 'Guilty Men' and the anti-appeasers, and the diplomatic perspective, but we also consider how the Press, the British public, men and women, and various political parties responded to the Crisis and understood their position as the Second World War loomed.

20 credits

Global Lives: South Asian Travel and Migration in the Age of Empire

By the early twenty-first century, more than 25 million peoples of Indian, Pakistani and Bangladeshi descent were living in Europe, North America, Africa and Southeast Asia. This module aims to historicise this diaspora by analysing letters, diaries, and travelogues. These sources reveal how and why South Asians have criss-crossed the globe in increasing numbers from the nineteenth century: for pilgrimage, trade, service, indenture, learning, diplomacy, politics, performance, mission and employment. The focus will be on different experiences of travel, migration and settlement in the high and late colonial period (1858-1947) that anticipated mass migration in the post-war era.

20 credits

Jane Groom's 'Extraordinary Scheme': Disability and the body in the Transatlantic World c. 1800-1900

This document option takes as a starting point Jane Groom's emigration scheme to send white, working-class, deaf people from London to Canada and establish a deaf colony in North America. The scheme is used as a springboard to think about issues of disability and the body in the nineteenth-century Transatlantic world. Topics covered include: institutionalisation, immigration restrictions, deaf separatist demands for a `Deaf State' in the USA, eugenics, and medical and social attitudes towards disability and the body. The course draws on a range of primary sources including: newspapers, memoirs, propaganda pamphlets, immigration legislation and medical and scientific treatises.

20 credits

Murder in the cathedral: the Becket Affair

On 29 December 1170, Thomas Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury, was brutally murdered in his cathedral by four knights of his King and one-time friend, Henry II. In the space of ten years, a close friendship had been ruined, and Thomas' stubbornness, flight to France, and untimely death created additional tensions for the English king. This document option investigates events surrounding Thomas' death and the emergence of his cult. It asks how a minor squabble became a continent-wide cause célèbre, forcing Henry into an act of ritual humiliation to clear his name while ensuring that Thomas' memory lived on.

20 credits

Russian Revolution 1917-18

This course will allow students to explore the Russian revolution, through a close study of sources from 1917-18. A tight focus on these years will enable students to grasp some of the complexity not only of political events in St Petersburg, but also of the social tensions and rifts across the whole of Russia. Through a close reading of primary sources, students will be able to reflect independently on how Soviet and Cold War narratives of the revolution can now be challenged. Sources will include propaganda posters and films, works of art, popular songs, graffiti, peasant petitions, and workers' letters.

20 credits

Tenochtitlan, City of Blood and Flowers: Aztec society in the early sixteenth century

This course will introduce students to the most influential 'schools' of historical practice in operation in the second half of the twentieth century and which remain influential today. These include Marxism, the Annales school, quantitative history, history from below, feminist and gender history, and postmodernism, as well as English empiricism. Lectures will provide an overview of each approach, and discuss the historical context in which it emerged. In seminars, students will be taught to assess critically the opportunities and limitations of each approach.

20 credits

The Easter Rising: Living, Fighting and Dying in 1916

The rebellion in Dublin at Easter 1916 was a moment of profound crisis. For a week, rebels occupied key buildings in central Dublin, having proclaimed an Irish republic. After their surrender, sixteen leaders of the rebellion were executed, inaugurating a new martyrology and prompting a wave of public sympathy. This document option will explore the broad range of perspectives on the Rising, including those of civilians, rebels, and those tasked with its suppression. Drawing on plentiful digital resources (memoirs, diaries, official inquiries, and witness statements), this document option will uncover what it was like to live through that landmark event.

20 credits

The Gunpowder Plot

The Gunpowder Plot provoked endless debate at the time and in following centuries over the precise nature of the plot, its objectives and the degree of government complicity. The answers to these questions lie in a rich but ambiguous body of primary sources written by the government and its apologists, by Catholics, and by other observers. This course will enable students to analyse all these types of source, and to address systematically the problems of source analysis and interpretation that they present, while building up a detailed understanding of the problematic position of Catholics in late Elizabethan and Jacobean England.

20 credits

The Irish Republican Brotherhood, 1858-85

Britain's 'Irish problem' has long roots. This document module examines one of the most important violent Irish organisations that challenged British sovereignty in Ireland. Founded in 1858, the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB) (or the Fenian movement, as it was also known) was a transatlantic movement dedicated to the overthrow of the British state in Ireland. Fuelled by hatred for the British after the dreadful Famine in Ireland of the 1840s, the Fenians constructed a sophisticated organisation that was part secret society, terrorist cell structure and propaganda machine. It was the early forerunner of the Irish Republican Army. This document option investigates aspects of Fenianism from a range of angles. Using sources written and produced by contemporaries, we will consider the dynamics of the IRB and its place within nineteenth-century Ireland.

20 credits

The Medieval Inquisition

The Inquisition - an extraordinary court instituted by bishops from the 13th century to judge heretics and encourage their return to the Roman Church - marks an important development in medieval history and has played an essential role in modern perceptions of the Middle Ages. By focusing on some of the best known sources of the Inquisition, which have been important in recent historiography as well as contemporary fiction (The Name of the Rose), this document option will help students reflect on how a better understanding of the Middle Ages and a critical questioning of modern prejudices can benefit from each other.

20 credits

The Myth of Venice

Historians typically debunk fabrications, but myths can themselves be the focus of historical study. During this module you will explore the Myth of Venice, its production, diffusion, and reception. On the one hand, Venice was celebrated as the ideal republican government, a bulwark in defence of Christendom, but it was also the city of state terror, secret police, and seductive 'oriental' luxury, famous for its libertine pleasures. The course also considers how these myths have endured and influenced the academic writing of Venetian history, as a city that was somehow unique and 'outside time'.

Across the module you will examine a wide variety of sources relating to the myth, and develop the skills required for their interpretation, including descriptions of the city by Venetians and foreigners; political tracts, histories and satire; paintings, sculpture and architecture; theatre and literature. (All sources are provided in English translation.) The close focus on a single city allows us to cover a broad period of time, from the leading centre of Mediterranean trade in the fifteenth century, to a growing sense of the city as a centre of tourism and idle pleasure in the eighteenth century, to the city as a symbol of a romantic past in the revolutionary era of the nineteenth century.

Throughout the module a lot of emphasis will be placed on interactive learning activities. During the lecture workshops, you will engage with materials through interactive exercises. In the seminars, you will be asked to take responsibility as part of a small team for leading the learning activities. As well as having the potential for being a lot of fun, this is also important for developing key transferable skills - my past students have commented how useful they found this for their development and how much they enjoyed doing it.

20 credits

The Putney Debates, October 1647

Following the first English civil war there was political stalemate over the post-war settlement. By late 1647 there were calls for revolutionary political change, not least at the famous Putney debates. They came at a crucial moment in the development of the revolution, and successive editors between 1891 and 2007 presented the records of the debates in varying contexts in order to reveal the fundamental significance of the revolution. This module explores the background to the debates at Putney, what was said, and also considers how different editions of the debates reflect the shifting significance attached to the English revolution.

20 credits

The Ten Commandments

This document option examines the Ten Commandments, perhaps the most well known 'legal' code in the world. Through the close study of key primary sources from the Hebrew Bible and the cultures that informed its writing, all readily available in modern English translation, the module explores the ancient Near Eastern context for these commands, the four texts in the Hebrew Bible that contend for the name Ten Commandments, and the role this text played in the political, social, economic, and ethical aspects of ancient life.

20 credits

The Welfare State in Britain, 1900-2015

Although 1948 is remembered as the birth of the British welfare state, the involvement of the government in the wellbeing of its citizens has a far longer history. In this unit, we will explore the gradual evolution of British welfare practice and policy from 1900 until the present day. We will analyze the shifting relationship between citizens and the state in modern Britain, drawing both on historiographical and primary sources. We will examine how debates about class, gender, race and immigration informed the nature and extent of welfare provision over the past hundred years. In doing so, we will set the birth, growth and decline of the British welfare state alongside debates about the nature of citizenship in modern Britain.

20 credits

Politics core module:

Political Analysis: Research Design and Data Analysis

This module provides students with an introduction to research design and methods for analysing of political phenomena. The module encourages students to reflect on how they conceptualise, design and analyse the political world. This involves exploring the relationship between theory and empirical political research. The module explores various techniques used in the analysis of empirical political research, with particular emphasis on the collection and analysis of quantitative data.

20 credits

Politics option module examples:

Africa in the World

Africa has long been treated as a marginal part of the world, both historically and in relation to contemporary global politics. This module aims to take this misconception away by exploring the crucial role that Africa plays in the current world order and the way it has historically evolved. 

Students will be introduced to the political, economic, socio-cultural, and military of Africa’s international relations and be familiarized with the key actors, institutions and processes involved. 

We will look at how the slave trade and colonialism have shaped the modern world order, the global reverberations of African independence movements and pan-Africanism, and how continuing unequal relations are expressed in, amongst others, the politics of debt and military intervention. 

The module will also analyse Africa’s relations to emerging global powers, such as China. To analyze these issues, the module will equip students with a range of theoretical and conceptual tools from the field of international relations, drawing to a considerable extent on the work of African thinkers.

20 credits

Chinese Politics

This module explores the political development of China from the end of the Qing Dynasty up to the present day. The core themes animating this module centre on China’s continuous quest for modernity, the transformation of domestic politics, economics, and society, and China’s changing position on the international stage. 

It covers a range of topics including:

the 1949 revolution and the Mao Zedong era

the post-1978 reform and opening-up era

recent changes under Xi Jinping

Students will be expected to think critically about the transformation of China, including the main forces that shaped it, as well as the domestic and global implications.

20 credits

Contemporary Security Challenges

This module examines a series of key contemporary challenges to international security. It addresses debates about the changing nature of security, analyses some of the causes of conflict and the development of new security threats, and assesses some of the ways in which states seek to manage these threats. A range of approaches are examined in order to provide students with a theoretically-informed but policy-relevant understanding of security-related issues in the twenty-first century.

20 credits

Human Rights, Power and Politics

The module introduces students to the big debates about human rights. It explores the achievements of the human rights agenda, as well as its failures. The module interrogates a number of important questions about the relationship between human rights and politics. How do human rights work in domestic and international politics? What are effective strategies for realising rights? What role do non-state actors play in the realisation of human rights? Finally, by focusing on the methodological and ethical challenges of researching and measuring human rights, the module makes space for equipping students for their own future research projects.

20 credits

Migration and World Politics

Migration has been receiving more attention in international politics. This module analyses migration using a world politics lens. It will provide students with the concepts and theories - as well as the historical, contextual and critical skills - needed to understand international migration from different perspectives. It will discuss migration and problematise migration concepts and categories such as forced migration (asylum and internal people displacement), statelessness and citizenship, border control/security, labour migration, migration diplomacy, family migration and environmental migration. It will also approach case studies including the Migration and Asylum Policy of the European Union, migration politics in Latin America and the USA-Mexico border among others.

20 credits

Oppression and Resistance

This module considers oppression and resistance from a variety of perspectives. Although the Enlightenment sought to liberate individuals from social/political domination, it failed to address many forms of oppression at home and was bound to European projects of colonialism. Addressing these forms of violence has been the major project of post-Enlightenment thought and global social movements. This module gives students the historical, theoretical and empirical tools to understand modern oppression and resistance. It explores: the legacy of the Enlightenment, feminism, sexuality, racism, post-colonial and decolonial thought, intersectionality, and social movement case studies such as Black Lives Matter and #MeToo.

20 credits

Tackling the World's Wicked Problems: theoretical tools and applications

Rising poverty and inequality within and between states, increased droughts, flooding and environmental degradation, armed civil conflicts and war, infectious diseases, gender based violence, institutionalized racism, food insecurity are just some of the pressing problems that the world faces today. 

What solutions are there? 

What sources of knowledge can we draw on to develop ways forward to tackle such problems? 

This module will present students with a variety of theoretical perspectives and tools, such as Postcolonialism, and Green Theory, that seek to address the various ‘wicked problems’. Students will be tasked with critically evaluating different International Relations theories and their applications, assessing their utility and ability to practically solve the most pressing problems in world politics. 

Global problems arguably require global solutions, and therefore global sources of knowledge. This module will also introduce students to ‘non-Western’ perspectives such as ‘Chinese IR’ and Ubuntu, in the process getting students to examine their ‘problem-solving’ capacities.

20 credits

The Left: Past, Present & Future

This module considers the past, present, and future of 'The Left'. From its origins in the French Revolution, this movement has struggled to balance equality, liberty and solidarity. Implementing these values has given rise to many different stands of leftist thought, leading to debates between radicals and proponents of meliorism. This module gives students the historical, theoretical and empirical tools to understand 'The Left' as a continuing project. Core topics include: defining 'The Left', its origins and theoretical development, its relation to political economy, as well as the current state of the left in the UK and around the world.

20 credits

The Making of The Modern Middle East

This module examines the major socio-economic and political dynamics that govern contemporary Middle East. 



Drawing on insights from anthropology, history, politics, political economy and gender studies this module explores key historical developments and political themes in the region and will provide students with historical and theoretical toolkits to analyse various political events in the Middle East. 

Students will learn how to:

use politics from below perspective

listen for multiple discourses and silences

contextualise voices and silences historically, politically, economically and geographically in wider regional and global power structures. 



The module will equip students with the conceptual and analytical skills to de-exceptionalise their understanding of Middle East politics.

20 credits

The Political Economy of Global Capitalism

This module will begin by providing students with an account of the major theoretical traditions which seek to interpret and explain the global political economy. These are liberalism and interdependence theory; mercantilism, nationalism and hegemonic stability theory; and marxism, dependency and world systems theory. It then explores different aspects of the contemporary global political economy - finance, development, trade and production - and ends by reviewing the intellectual debate about the meaning of globalisation.

20 credits

The Politics and Government of the European Union

This module will provide students with a working knowledge of European integration, and of the main institutions of the European Union, including the Council of Ministers, the Commission and the Parliament. The module consists of a series of lectures on the history and institutions of the European Union, and seminars to discuss issues raised in the lectures.

20 credits

History option module examples:

20 credits each.

Short Dissertation

The dissertation in History is an exercise of 7,500-8,500 words in which students explore an individually chosen topic involving problems and issues derived from a module taken at level two or level three. It is expected to consist of research at a high level where interpretation and analysis will be of importance. The balance between primary and secondary materials will depend on the topic and an availability of sources. In each case students work independently under the guidance of a supervisor.

20 credits

Making History Public

This core module is designed to allow students the opportunity to produce a piece of public history. It will equip students with the skills required to effectively communicate their scholarly research to a non-academic audience, and develop transferable skills beyond the traditional academic skills of a History degree. Drawing on any aspect of their experience as History undergraduates, students will design and produce an accessible digital artefact presenting a topic or theme of their choosing. Students will be supported by workshops and seminars to identify suitable topics and develop communication and digital skills central to public history, and will also be encouraged to bring their extra-curricular skills and interests to this module. A virtual exhibition will showcase student work to the whole History community. In addition, students will submit an interpretative written exercise, situating and explaining the artefact they have created and analysing their experience over the course of the module.

20 credits

History thematic module examples:

Thematic modules are 20 credits each. Dual honours students have the option to take one thematic module.

A Comparative History of Revolution

This module takes a comparative approach to the study of Revolution as a way to gain a better understanding of significant transformation of the social, economic and political landscapes of entire societies, to question underlying assumptions regarding values and legitimacy, as well as to understand and assess the vocabulary of revolution which has come to permeate political language. By comparing different case studies, students will have an opportunity to engage with the rich and stimulating historiography in this area and to formulate their own interpretations of a subject that touches on significant questions about change and power.

20 credits

Cities

This module explores key historiographical and theoretical approaches to the study of cities and the ways that historians can apply these ideas in practice. It adopts a comparative analysis that requires students to consider a range of cities from antiquity to the post-modern era. Students will have the opportunity to engage with the rich and stimulating interdisciplinary scholarship in this field, to pursue their own lines of research, and to formulate their own interpretations of a subject that is central to the nature of `civilization'.

20 credits

Decolonising History: Empires, Colonialism and Power

This module examines the rise and fall of empires as processes that shape our contemporary world. It considers the growth and governance of empires, decolonisation struggles, and the telling of imperial history from the perspective of colonised and coloniser. In approaching this history from multiple vantage points, this module asks: who held power, particularly over knowledge production, both during empire and after empire's end? Drawing upon diverse historiographical traditions, and examining a wide range of time periods and places, we will question the centrality of empires in the telling of global history. In doing so, we will bring the past to bear on contemporary debates about race, globalisation, migration, and decolonisation. This module is, above all, about what it means to decolonise history, society and the academy.

20 credits

Money, Power and Society

This module takes a comparative approach to the history of debt in societies across time. Students will have the opportunity to engage with and formulate their own interpretations of a subject that raises significant questions of historical and contemporary relevance: the nature of money; the ethics of lending and borrowing; markets, trust and institutions; the role of the state; globalization and finance capital. The module adopts an interdisciplinary approach, in which historical examples are related to theoretical perspectives from sociology, economics, anthropology and literary theory.

20 credits

The Family

The family is one of the most important forms of social relation across historical periods and places. But this seemingly 'natural' form of social organisation has a diverse history, as households and familial relationships were shaped by their cultural, economic, and political contexts. This module examines historical family structures and familial relations, from affection and care to authority and exclusion. We pay particular attention to gender and race, considering how intersecting identities shaped the family as we know it today. Drawing on anthropology, feminist history, and queer history, we also consider non-biological kinship: from 'chosen families' to surrogacy.

20 credits

History Special Subject examples:

Special subjects are 40 credits each. Dual honours students have the option to take one special subject.

Anarchy in the UK? Radicals, Democrats and Revolutionaries 1830-1886

This module examines the history of radical political culture in the United Kingdom from the Reform Act of 1832 to the Home Rule crisis of 1886. The re-imagining of the British state within radical political cultures is the chief focus, with particular emphasis on the democratic ideals projected from a variety of perspectives, liberal, socialist, republican, and Irish nationalist. There were many radical proposals to transform the British polity; from a desire to extend the franchise to republican activism, the many layers of radicalism in the United Kingdom will be assessed within wider political, cultural and intellectual contexts.

40 credits

Britain's Social Revolution: Welfare, State and Society, c. 1870-1914

This module introduces students to the powerful debates about and important reforms targeted at a variety of `social questions' which haunted Britain from the late nineteenth century until the First World War. It demonstrates how new forms of knowledge, ideas about social solidarity and political and social movements shaped how Britons addressed issues such as poverty, unemployment and public hygiene. By analysing a wide variety of primary sources, including visual sources, this module will examine competing visions about the future of the nation and, in particular, what role the state should play in determining that future. 

20 credits

Cannibals and Christians: Mexico and Spain, c.1492-1600

This module examines the extraordinary clash of cultures which occurred following the 'discovery' of America, and the reciprocal relationship which developed between Europe and the 'New World' in the sixteenth century. Focusing on the sixteenth-century discovery, conquest and settlement of Central and South America, especially Mexico, the module will address such themes as the nature of the encounter, the intellectual and cultural impact, trade and exchange, migration, evangelisation and empire. The module addresses the encounter from a wide range of perspectives, evaluating the encounter from the viewpoint of sailors, conquistadors, priests, historians, explorers, missionaries, administrators and the indigenous people themselves.

40 credits

Capitalism and Identity in 19th-century Britain

How did people see themselves and the world in nineteenth-century Britain? The module emphasises the way local transformations and struggles were linked to global processes: emergence of class identities, shifting ideas about gender roles, and discourses of racial, religious and scientific superiority in a globalising world. We will study a broad range of primary sources, including textual, material and visual culture: from rival models of change and their popular reception; to the way identity was bound up with new consumer goods and fashions; to visual representations of empire and the impact of humanity upon the environment.

40 credits

Emotions and identity in Britain: from 'stiff upper lips' to 'snowflakes'

This module introduces students to an exciting area of social and cultural history: the emotions. In the early twentieth century, Britain confronted the emotional disorders of warfare, the repressed and sexualised emotions of Freudian theory, and the prevailing culture of 'stiff upper lip'. Today our emotions are everywhere, poured out on social media: we are endlessly exhorted to talk about and investigate our emotional states, wants, drives and needs. This shift has been spectacular and far-reaching, involving psychology, welfare, education and empire. This course helps students to understand how this has happened - and how our emotions are now an integral part of gender, racial and sexual identities in Britain.

40 credits

Fascism and Anti-Fascism in Britain, 1923-1945

This module examines three inter-related issues in order to assess the impact of fascism in Britain between the wars. Making full use of one of the best archives for this purpose in the country held here in the Special Collection of the University Library, first we examine the political organization, the ideas and the culture of 'native' British fascism from its inception in 1923 to the Second World War. Second, we move on to explore active and ideological resistance to British fascist and racist organisations by a loose coalition of Communists, Socialists, Liberals and even Conservatives, as well as the resistance mounted by those religious and ethnic groups most affected by fascist racial provocation and violence. Third, we will consider how contemporary interpretations of fascism, and formal and more informal relations with the European dictatorships, contributed to the National Government's policy of appeasement on the one hand, and, on the other hand, to the greater definition of what was quintessentially 'British' about Britain's war aims with the outbreak of World War Two. We will approach these topics by analysing primary source material, including political pamphlets and propaganda, newspapers, public records, memoirs, oral testimonies, visual material, film and recordings, and novels.

40 credits

Food and Drink in South Asia

The food and drink of South Asia, or ‘Indian cuisine’, has become a mainstay of the British diet - with chicken tikka masala hailed as a national dish and chai available in every café.  To satiate that hunger (and thirst), this module focuses on the edible commodities, culinary cultures and gastronomic politics of South Asia in historical perspective. A most basic quality of food and drink is its necessity for survival: we all need it to live and so it should underscore our shared humanity across time and place. And yet, despite this - or perhaps more rightly because of it - food and drink has become an important means of offering historical insight into different societies and cultures around the globe and throughout time. In this module, we cover the Mughal period to Indian independence with an emphasis on the high colonial period (1858-1947). Taking food and drink as an object and organiser of historical enquiry enables us to consider such themes as: ritualised acts of food and wine consumption linked to kingship; the significance of foodstuffs to imperial trade; the impact of British colonialism on food processes, governance and practices; famine and hunger; the symbolic value of food and alcohol to socio-religious reform and Indian nationalism; class, domesticity and table manners; caste and dietary exclusion; diet, health and medicine; appetite and eating in cultural production; food as a marker of national, regional, communitarian and sectarian identities; agricultural revolutions and post/colonial change; and the globalisation of ‘Indian’ food. Thematic approaches will be balanced with sessions examining the histories of individual foodstuffs and dishes: from grains, dals, chillies and meat to chai, paan and toddy. Through these topics, students will be introduced to a broad array of historical scholarship addressing the preparation, consumption and distribution of food and drink in South Asia. They will also engage with some unique primary evidence in the form of cookbooks, autobiographies, travelogues, domestic manuals, novels and women’s magazines - complete with advertisements and recipes. Fancy a curry?

40 credits

Forced into Being: How Involuntary Migration Created Ancient Israel

Religious conflict and migration shape the Middle East now, just as they have for nearly 3000 years. Case in point: ancient Israel and its sacred texts-known widely as the Old Testament-are the product of a rather small satellite nation whose primary experiences included subjugation by larger military powers, resistance against the potential influence of foreign religious practices, and forced migration from its land that resulted in life among unfamiliar peoples. Indeed, the Old Testament is a collection of texts written by involuntary migrants to involuntary migrants, often about involuntary migration. This special subject examines how the migratory experiences of this relatively small society shaped some of the most important religious texts in history, which are sacred to Judaism, Christianity, and Islam and remain influential factors in the international conflicts of the 21st century Middle East.

20 credits

France in Africa, Africa in France: experiencing colonialism, anticolonialism, and postcolonialism

This module examines the rise and fall of French imperial rule in Africa, and its legacies and afterlives, from the end of the 19th century to the contemporary post-colonial era. By 1918, French imperial power in Africa had reached its zenith. Yet the next fifty years were characterised by contradiction, decline, and conflict, as the certainties of the ‘age of empire’ were challenged. It will explore the ideas that underpinned French imperialism; the effects of imperialism on colonised societies; challenges to imperial rule; the complex relationship between French republican ideals and imperialism; movements of people and ideas from Africa to metropolitan France; and the persistent and important legacies of empire in the post-colonial era. Through these topics students will engage with questions of how race, gender, and class were navigated in the Francophone world, drawing on source material which allows for a ‘bottom-up’ approach to draw out the voices of the people under study. Our range of primary sources represent the widest range of perspectives including African and French voices, women and men, the metropole and colony. Secondary literature will be used to contextualise the these sources and allow students to engage with the latest historiographical debates and scholarship being generated by this rapidly expanding field of enquiry. All texts will be provided in English.

40 credits

Humanitarianism, Internationalism and the British Empire, 1900-2000

What is humanitarianism? How has it shaped, and been shaped by, beliefs about Britain's role in the world? Why, in the eyes of politicians and the public, did British interests, and the interests of 'humanity' so often coincide?The unit analyses British humanitarianismfrom 1900 to 2000. We situate British humanitarianism within the history of the Empire, globalization, U.S. ascendancy, and Cold War tensions. We consider traditionally disenfranchised groups - women, children and imperial subjects - as objects and agents of humanitarian interventions, and ask whether humanitarianism can be considered as 'political' both in the past and in the present.

40 credits

Humour and Laughter in Eighteenth-Century Britain

Laughter is fundamental to human experience. Yet, the things we see fit to laugh at and how that laughter is thought about, tolerated, suppressed or celebrated, have all varied with time, place and culture with compelling possibilities for historians. Eighteenth-century Britain was a golden age of humour, brimming with bawdy jestbooks and a surfeit of satirical texts and images. It even witnessed the invention of caricature as we know it. The module explores this comic material-and ideas about it-to investigate fundamental shifts in manners, morality and political participation in the period, and the historiographical debates surrounding them.

40 credits

Makers of a New World: Merchants, Scholars and Commoners in Late Medieval Europe

Between 1350 and 1450, many of the foundations of the Europe as we know it and the world has experienced it were laid by specific groups of people: merchants who established capitalist market economy and, at the same time, shaped the appearance of their cities through patronage and the promotion of new artistic models; scholars who reconsidered past evidence and the meaning of the past through the 'rediscovery' of the Classics; and commoners that developed individual and collective ways of getting their voices heard in politics and religion.The module builds on new scholarship on the late medieval period and, to an extent, the early modern period and extra-European history to engage critically with developments that have more traditionally been referenced as the Renaissance, Humanism, the Waning of the Middle Ages, and approached as transition, crisis, transformation or, more specifically, through notions including the 'disanchantment', the birth of the 'nation-state' and 'European expansion'.

40 credits

Mao and the Making of Twentieth-Century China

In 2015, citizens in Henan Province erected a 120-foot gold statue of Mao Zedong, which was swiftly torn down on government orders. Why does Mao still provoke such strong feelings? To some he is a monster: history's greatest mass murderer. But recently historians have painted a richer picture of Mao's China, trying to understand its social character, political culture, and role in Cold War rivalries. Focusing on the origins, character, and legacy of Maoist rule, and devoting most of our attention to the period between the declaration of the People's Republic in 1949 and Mao's death in 1976, we will use translated primary sources, a rich visual culture, and a burgeoning scholarly literature to explore Maoist thought and its critics; major upheavals like the Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution; and everyday life under 'Communism with Chinese characteristics'.

40 credits

Merchants, Mariners and Migrants: The English Overseas, 1570-1624

The period c.1570-1624 saw a reorientation of England's global position, as increasing numbers of English people began to venture into unfamiliar regions. This course charts the nature and significance of their travels. We will encounter merchants in Europe, the Ottoman Empire and the far east, settlers and conquerors in Ireland and America, explorers in the frozen seas of the far north, and pirates in Spanish America. The latter part of the course focuses on the foundation of England's first 'successful' American colony, Jamestown. Throughout, we consider the motives driving these ventures, and the complex nature of the encounters that ensued.

40 credits

Nomadland: The Peoples of the Steppe, 600-1000

Nomads are the dark matter of history. Choosing neither to produce written sources, nor found cities which are the usual target of archaeology, they defy the typical means of investigation of the historian. Yet their political impact – from the Huns of Attila to the Mongols of Ghengis Khan – was vast. Fear of the nomad other, framed in terms of barbarism, is one of the defining literary themes of the settled civilisations who were their neighbours. This fear had a huge impact on settled society: the Great Wall of China was built to keep nomads out.This course asks how we can look beyond the fearsome, caricatured image produced by sedentary authors to reconstruct the politics, mentalities, and lifestyles of these crucial agents of pre-modern history. To do so, we will focus on the varied experiences of the nomadic peoples who emerged in the aftermath of the disintegrations of the great Turkic Khaganate in the seventh century. The Khaganate stretched over the vast, flat, grasslands of the Steppe, from China to Hungary and its successors settled regions across modern day Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Russia, Ukraine and the Balkans. These new peoples and their cultural and political choices fundamentally transformed the region, and had a profound impact on the great empires around them, namely Byzantines, Sassanian Iranians, and the Islamic caliphate.Throughout, we will use material culture and sources written originally in Greek, Arabic, Armenian and Slavonic (all available in modern English translation), to ask: how do we write a history of a people who chose not to write? 

40 credits

Permissive Britain? Social and Cultural Change 1956-74

This module explores British society and culture as the nation moved from an era of austerity to one of unprecedented affluence. Key topics include the impact of affluence on class and gender relationships, the emergence of a national youth culture, changes and continuities in sexual behaviour, and debates about immigration and race. The unit encourages students to assess the significance of reforming legislation that relaxed the censorship regime, decriminalised homosexuality, enabled easier access to abortion, liberalised the divorce system and abolished capital punishment, examining the arguments of those who resisted, as well as those who championed the 'permissive society'.

40 credits

Popes, Caliphs, Emperors, ca. 1130-1215

The Crusades are known as religious wars, in search of the earthly and heavenly Jerusalem. Yet they were only part of the complex interactions between peoples of different politics, religions, and cultures in the medieval Mediterranean basin. Using sources including histories, letters, buildings, art and mosaics, this module will examine how religion intertwined with medieval politics, culture and society. From Iberia to Jerusalem, and from Italy to Africa, we will investigate religion's role in expressing political power and in the everyday life of the people who lived there. How was religious authority received, understood, and contested by contemporaries?

40 credits

Reconstructing America, 1863-1877

Reconstruction -- the years in which the defeated South was occupied by Union troops -- has generated intense historical debate on topics ranging from slavery, economic production and race relations to the conquest of the West, social conflict and the reformation of cities and their people. This module will critically explore old and new approaches to the period while examining an array of primary sources. Through analysing satirical cartoons, congressional investigations into the Ku Klux Klan, and the testimonies of people formerly enslaved, we will consider why America's experiment with biracial democracy and activist government gave way so quickly to segregation and political retrenchment.

40 credits

Red Continent: Socialism in Twentieth Century Africa

When we think about the history of 'socialism', we might first consider Marx and Mao, Lenin and the Soviet Union, even Castro and Cuba. Africa rarely features in these conversations. Yet no fewer than 35 African countries claimed to be 'socialist' at some point in the late twentieth century. There was little consensus as to what 'socialism' meant in Africa, however. To some, it was a homegrown ideology, with its origins in 'traditional' village life. To others, it was a set of imported theories that could propel anticolonial liberation struggles. Critics alleged that Africa's socialists were simply pawns of Cold War superpowers. Socialism's proponents responded that they were building a new future after empire - a vision which had evaporated by the end of the century, but increasingly of interest to historians today.

Rather than seek an encyclopaedic understanding of socialism in every African country, this special subject module combines in-depth studies of key cases with the study of broader, transnational themes. We will examine the political thought of major thinkers, including pan-Africanists among the diaspora, anticolonial leaders, and public intellectuals. We will assess the 'African socialist' project in Tanzania and the military dictatorship in Ethiopia which preached Marxist revolution. Yet no leader or government controlled the meaning of socialism, as their visions were challenged by students, workers, and women's activists. Locating African socialism in a global context, we will follow the transnational journeys of these figures as they forged relationships with Cold War actors and contributed to the radical project of the Third World. 

The thematic classes will trace connections and divergences between these socialist experiences in Africa. We will investigate the role that the media played in communicating socialism. We will understand how artists, directors, and novelists all engaged with the ideas of socialism. The module will take us into the villages, to see how rural communities responded to state-making projects which were imposed from national capitals. Then we will explore the concrete design of Africa's 'socialist cities' and the livelihoods of the men and women who lived among them. Finally, we will gain an understanding of life in post-socialist Africa and ask 'what's left of the African left?' 

In this module, students will work with a wide range of primary source material. This includes excerpts from the work of major African intellectuals, like Kwame Nkrumah, Léopold Senghor, and Julius Nyerere. Students will examine how these ideas were put into practice (or not) through material drawn from government archives and diplomatic cables. Moving beyond the vision of the state, we will also analyse student magazines, film, poetry, fiction, street photography and architecture. All source material and secondary reading will be provided in English, either as original or in translation. 

40 credits

Resistance & Liberation in South Africa: Gandhi to Mandela

This module analyses resistance to segregation, apartheid, and white supremacy in South Africa. Drawing upon memoirs, oral histories, novels, films, speeches, news reporting, online databases, and document collections, we begin with the non-violent campaigns led by Mohandas Gandhi in the 1900s against the segregation of Indians in South Africa, and end with Nelson Mandela's election as president in the country's first non-racial democratic elections in 1994. We will explore the inspirations, nature, and effects of a wide range of forms of political, social, and cultural resistance by opponents of white supremacy - from ordinary people to elite politicians - both inside South Africa and around the world.

40 credits

Revolution, Dictatorship and Democracy in Latin America, 1944-90

This special subject uses the three themes of revolution, dictatorship and democracy to examine the history of Latin America in the second half of the twentieth century. Beginning with Guatemalan Revolution (1944-54), this module explores key events over the next four decades, including the Cuban Revolution of 1959, the rise of anticommunist dictatorships across the region in the 1960s and 1970s, the Nicaraguan Revolution of 1979, and the 'Third Wave' of democratisation that swept the region in the 1980s. Throughout, we will identify and analyse regional trends in Latin American history while remaining attentive to national dynamics. In particular, this module will focus on two subregions of Latin America: the Southern Cone (especially Chile, Argentina and Brazil) and Central America (especially Nicaragua, Guatemala and El Salvador). Primary sources will include government documents, speeches, visual sources and other cultural outputs, including song, poems, and testimonials. This mix of different sources will allow students to consider the ways in which gender, race, and class all shaped how different Latin Americans experienced the second half of the twentieth century.

40 credits

Slavery in the American South, 1789-1861

By 1861, some four million African Americans were enslaved in the American south. This module explores the lives of these enslaved people. We examine the roles, relationships, and experiences of enslaved men, women, and children, through themes such as social and cultural life, work, the family, community and conflict, truancy, escape, and violence. Drawing on a wide range of primary sources - from the perspectives of enslaved and formerly enslaved people, as well as their enslavers - we focus in particular upon the varied ways in which African Americans resisted both their enslavers and their enslavement.

40 credits

Stalinism and De-Stalinisation, 1929-1962

This module explores Soviet history from 1929 - when Stalin's fiftieth birthday was celebrated across the Soviet Union and he was heralded as Lenin's great successor - to the early 1960s when his body was removed from the Red Square Mausoleum under cover of darkness, and his legacy reassessed. It examines the rise, reign and - posthumous - fall of the Soviet leader and the nature of the new world he sought to create. The module will explore not only the ideological and political dilemmas of the ruling elite, but also the diverse experience of ordinary citizens who faced both new opportunities and new ordeals during a period of radical transformation.

40 credits

The Holocaust: The Destruction of European Jewry

The aim of this course is to introduce students to the various debates on the origins and execution of the 'final solution' in Nazi occupied Europe during the Second World War.

40 credits

The Irish Revolution, 1912-1923

This module explores Ireland's revolutionary decade, from the Ulster Crisis of 1912 to the end of the Civil War in 1923. That period saw the demise of the Home Rule ideal, the rise of republicanism and the partition of the island amidst bloody sectarian and political violence. Among the issues examined are the emergency of paramilitary armies, the impact of the Great War and Easter Rising, the nature and dynamics of revolutionary violence, and the entrenchment of divisions - intra-communal as well as inter-communal. The controversial historiography of the Irish revolution, its place in public history and its cultural representations form an important aspect of the module. Above all, the sense of what it was like to live through a revolution, as a rebel, a policeman, a soldier or a civilian, is a key unifying theme of this module.

40 credits

The National Security State, Treason, and Individual Rights during the Twentieth Century

National security scares over 'whistleblowers' such as Edward Snowden, Chelsea Manning or Kathrine Gun have catapulted the image of the 'traitor' back into public discourse. At the same time, controversies over Wikileaks' political agenda and Russian interference with the Brexit referendum and the 2016 US presidential elections were as much discussed in terms of British and US national security as a threat to the security of 'the West' as a whole. These conflicts stand at the end of a century that has seen the rise of the modern surveillance state and transnational security frameworks organized through institutions such as Interpol, NATO, and the Warsaw Pact states (until 1989/91). 

Over the course of the 20th century, more and more people saw themselves suspected of betrayal of the community. The First World War transformed older clearly defined criminal offenses of 'high treason' against the sovereign and their immediate family members to wider accusations of treason against the nation, state, and people. The rise of communism and fascism triggered the building of new domestic public security apparatuses in the interwar period. War crimes and genocide of the Second World War further complicated debates on the morality of collaboration with the enemy. In response, security agencies professionalized their work and the early Cold War saw calls for transnational bloc-wide security regimes to combat subversion by the Cold War enemy. Since then, state surveillance has come to be seen more and more as a constant everyday threat to privacy and individual rights after the digital revolution of the 1970s. 

In this special subject, we explore through rich source material the political, emotional, social, and cultural dynamics that were at play when individuals or groups from across Europe, the US and Soviet Union were accused of betraying society. We will consider how people's ethnic, gender, and class background impacted their fate of becoming 'traitors'. Taken together, their cases will provide answers to the central question of how demands for the professionalization of the national security state have impacted ordinary people's lives and rights under different forms of government and how they shape our contemporary understandings of democracy and authoritarianism.

40 credits

The Rise and Fall of the British Transatlantic Slave Trade, 1640-1807

The transatlantic slave trade is the largest forced migration in human history. Europeans transported 12 million captive Africans across the Atlantic Ocean between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries. This contributed to the development of a transatlantic economic system that linked three continents - Europe, Africa, and the Americas - and which funnelled wealth created through the exploitation of enslaved Africans into the hands of Europeans.  Britain was the pre-eminent slave trading nation of the eighteenth century. From 1640 to 1807, British vessels trafficked 3.2 million captive Africans across the Atlantic to work in the plantation economies of North America and the Caribbean. This module traces the rise and fall of Britain's participation in the transatlantic slave trade, studying developments in West Africa, the Caribbean, and Britain, and exploring the linkages between the three. It begins in the seventeenth century with the corporate activities of the London-based Royal African Company, moves into the eighteenth century when non-corporate merchants based in the outports of Liverpool and Bristol dominated the trade, and ends with Abolitionist efforts to abolish British involvement in the trade in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.  The module is fully Atlantic in scope. Using a wide range of primary and secondary sources we will analyse the process of cross-cultural exchange on the West African coast, the horrors of the Middle Passage, the exploitation of enslaved Africans in the Caribbean plantation system, and the direct and indirect impacts of the transatlantic slave trade on early modern Britain. We will make regular use of case studies to explore the history of the transatlantic slave trade 'from below', foregrounding the lived experience of enslavement for captive Africans and the vital role of African Abolitionists in precipitating the process of abolition.

40 credits

The United States and the Cold War, 1945-1975

The Cold War shaped American foreign policy as well as domestic politics and culture for much of the second half of the 20th century. But how all-encompassing was the Cold War? How did non-state actors react to and influence the course of its development? And how 'cold' was the Cold War? This module will examine the Cold War with fresh perspective. We will revisit the traditional historiography, which focuses on high policy actors and U.S. relations with the Soviet Union. But we will also gain new insight from an emerging literature that challenges such a deterministic and elite framing of what was a global conflict that involved multiple actors at all levels of society, many of whom brought with them complex motivations that existed prior to, or outside of, the rigid Cold War binary. In addition to these secondary sources, we will explore a wide range of primary source material, from declassified State Department documents to Third World assertions of sovereignty to popular films and novels.

40 credits

The Wars for Vietnam: Empire, Decolonisation and Liberation

In the middle decades of the twentieth century, Vietnam was wrenched by wars: a world war, a war of decolonisation, a civil war, the Cold War, and a war against its erstwhile communist allies. By studying these conflicts, we not only learn about modern Vietnam, but also the French empire, U.S. foreign policy, and communist internationalism in the mid-20th Century. As case studies, these wars shed light on larger global processes of imperial conquest, decolonisation and neo-colonial control, communist revolution and the limits of internationalism. As an archetype of national liberation, events in Vietnam also profoundly shaped anti-colonial struggles around the world and social movements in the United States and Europe, from Black Power to the women's liberation movement. This module explores the wars for Vietnam through the themes of empire, decolonisation, and liberation, paying close attention to Vietnamese perspectives, exploring the role of France, the United States, the Soviet Union, and China, and uncovering the global reverberations of these conflicts. We will investigate the historiography which set the broad parameters of debate, as well as newer scholarship which has challenged these orthodox interpretations, and we will examine a wide range of primary sources, from government documents, memoirs, and oral histories, to images, fiction, and film.

40 credits

The Weimar Republic - Laboratory of Modernity

The history of Weimar Germany has often focused on elements of crisis and the rise of the Nazis. But the Weimar Republic was more than just a state of permanent crisis. It was also a laboratory of modernity, a site of permanent experimentation in politics, the arts and mass media, in gender relations and in attempts to build new communities. The module will use and engage the rich primary source record of the era. More than many other eras of history, Weimar Germany prompts us to consider the potential disadvantage of hindsight for the historian: that s/he already knows the outcome.

40 credits

The West & the East in each other's eyes 1850-2000

The idea that the 'East' and the 'West' are fundamentally different in their thinking and values and are locked in a mutually antipathetic 'clash of civilizations' is an age-old one. It has been argued by European and Asian politicians and writers alike, by imperialists and anti-imperialists, 'orientalists' and their critics, and has been manifested in a range of approaches and ideologies, including 'Orientalism', 'Occidentalism', pan-Asianism, pan-Islam, and Samuel Huntington's notorious 'clash of civilizations' thesis. It has fed into both colonialist and anti-colonialist thought. This course is intended as a case study in the history of ideas. We will investigate how ideas of a division between 'West' and 'East' have been expressed and developed in the late 19th and 20th centuries and how they have been deployed by politicians in a range of different countries and contexts. We will also examine some of the more subtle, alternative formulations of East/West cultural difference, assimilation and appropriation that have been articulated in the same period. The course will encourage you to rethink how cultures relate to each other, and about what is distinctively 'Western' or 'Eastern' about political and economic organization, human rights, democracy and secularism. Can we really talk about 'East' and 'West' as meaningful categories, and if not, when and how did people start using these terms and why, and what does that tell us about how we should understand the world and write about it? In semester 1, after an initial introduction of the themes and questions of the course, the next 4 weeks ('the West looks at the East') will analyse Western accounts of the East. The second half of the first semester ('the East looks at the West') then undertakes a chronological and thematic analysis of the different ways in which Asian governments and writers have understood, analysed and critiqued the West and its values. The second semester ('the East looks at the East') concentrates on how Asian governments and thinkers have understood the East, and their views of how far it can be said to enshrine coherent non-Western values. As well as studying transnational movements (pan-Asianism, pan-Islam and the Non-aligned Movement), we will also study selected Asian writing on democracy, human rights, nationalism, and secularism up to the present day.
During the course we will be using a wide range of documents in translation - from constitutional debates, political tracts, government declarations, policy documents and educational literature, to travel accounts, speeches, letters, poetry and images.
The course is intended to help you to rethink how you understand Western and non-Western cultures and to provide you with a more informed sense of the roots and nature of current global geo-political and cultural tensions.

40 credits

The World of Intoxicants in Early Modern England

Intoxicants were a key feature of early modern societies. This is as true for 'old' world alcohols like wine, beer, ale, and other fermented drinks as it is for 'new' intoxicants like opiates, tobacco, sugar, caffeines, chocolate, and distilled liquors that began to enter European diets after 1600 from the Levant, the Americas, and Asia. Focusing on intoxicants in England, this module considers a) the ongoing importance and, indeed, increasing significance of alcohols to culture, society, and economy over the course of the seventeenth century and b) the introduction and popularisation of new intoxicants over the same period.

40 credits

Tools of Empire? Medicine, Science and Colonialism, 1800-1950

Western science and biomedicine have, for long, been seen as symbols and agents of progress. Research in the last two decades has, however, revealed their close ties with the history of colonial conquest and rule - so much so that scientific discoveries such as guns, steamboats, and quinine have been seen as 'tools of empire'. This module will, however, go beyond this fact and discuss much larger questions of equal relevance. It will, for instance, deal with the question of the 'consumption' of science in the colonies, the role of the colonies in constituting western science, the role of medicine in furthering colonial hegemony, the 'reinvention' of traditional sciences such as Unani and Ayurveda under colonial influence, the relationship between scientific centres and peripheries, and post-colonial developments with respect to medical and scientific administration. In exploring these themes, the module will not limit itself to any particular region, but will draw upon readings from South Asia, Africa, and the Americas.

40 credits

Visions and Violence: race, empire and identity in mid-nineteenth-century Britain

British expansion did not result from a single, coherent imperial strategy, or a fit of 'absence of mind'; it developed from specific cross-cultural encounters and competing colonial visions. Some saw the Empire as a place of adventure, others an opportunity for Christianisation, still others as a 'New World' in which to build a Greater Britain. These visions were always contested and challenged both overseas and in Britain. This module explores these contested visions and the impact of empire at home. It is structured around different 'visions of empire' including those of humanitarians; missionaries; settlers; travellers; scientists and the British public.

40 credits

Politics core module (choose one):

Dissertation in Politics

This module involves supervised research on an agreed topic. Students will meet with their module tutors and peers in five two-hour dissertation interactive lecture-workshops (10 hours) prepare and submit a formally assessed 1,000-word research proposal, undertake individual research and be assessed on the basis of a 8,000-word dissertation. Students will also undertake four individual supervision sessions with their dissertation supervisor at which objectives will be specified, their achievement monitored and general progress reviewed.

40 credits

Research Project 1

This module allows students to research and explore in-depth a topic studied on a semester one module. Students will meet with their supervisor individually, to undertake research and be assessed on the basis of a 5,000 word project.

20 credits

Politics option module examples:

Animals, Ethics and Politics

This unit explores the debates surrounding what we owe to animals politically. It introduces students to the main debates in animal ethics, and asks how they affect our political practices, norms, institutions and policies. Particular attention is focused on the tensions between animal welfare and other political values and goods, with students exploring such controversial policy debates as animal experimentation, animal agriculture, conservation and the use of animals for entertainment. The overall aim of the unit is to investigate the implications of taking animals seriously for current political practice.

20 credits

Britain in the Global Economy

To what extent does Britain's past development cast a shadow over its present and future?
By taking this module, you will look at British development from historical perspectives and trace the origins, the rise and the decline of Britain as a global economic power from the 18th Century to the present day. You will then focus on a number of core problems that have intensified within Britain since the 2008 global financial crisis, including Britain's dysfunctional economic model, its fraught relationship with Europe, the politics of immigration and culture, and contemporary constitutional challenges, such as the prospect of Scottish independence. It seems that Britain's status as a global economic power is entering its final years, so what comes next?

20 credits

Civilisation, Empire and Hegemony

With American power seemingly all powerful today, this unit provides a rethink of the origins of great power politics/economics. Mainstream Eurocentric theories in International Relations view great power politics/economics as having universal materialist properties. And they view America and Britain as hegemons that provide global public goods for the benefit of all. This module problematises this view by revealing the differing moral foundations and 'standards of civilisation' that inform the various directions that great power can take. It examines Britain and China in the pre-1900 era, contemporary America, Japan, and the potential role of China in the coming decades.

20 credits

Conflict, Violence and Security in Africa

Why does Africa appear to be prone to conflict? In this module, you will seek to find the answers to this much-debated question through a systematic study of conflict, violence, and security in Africa, focussing on sub-Saharan Africa.

You will gain a better understanding of the complex and distinct dynamics of violent conflict in Africa, in part through an in-depth study of specific case studies, such as the anti-colonial wars in Kenya and Zimbabwe, military coups in Burkina Faso and Mali, child soldiers in northern Uganda, conflicts in Somalia, Liberia, Sierra Leone, the Democratic Republic of Congo and northern Nigeria. In addition, you will examine broader security challenges that impact the lives of ordinary Africans as well as look at the international response to conflict, violence, and insecurity on the continent.

20 credits

Contemporary Issues in Latin American Politics

Latin America is home to only eight percent of the world's population, but its countries usually top the rankings in bad public outcomes such as criminal violence, corruption, clientelism, and democratic erosion. 

This module will offer a look at some of the most pressing contemporary issues in the region by critically combining theoretical approaches and empirical data. 

We will explore issues such as:

Forms of government: from authoritarian regimes to populism

Economic development: industrialization, commodity extraction, and informal job markets

Poverty and inequality

Clientelism: making people turn out to vote

Criminal and political violence

Corruption

Ethnicity and indigenous peoples

The battle for the expansion of rights

You will analyse how current theories help us understand the fate of Latin American nations, and also carefully review the evidence to build new empirically-grounded theory. By the end of this module, we aim to better understand some of the most acute contemporary problems, such as democratic erosion, criminal violence, and inequality.

20 credits

Corporations in Global Politics: Possibilities, Tensions, and Ambiguities

Corporations are ubiquitous, affecting everything from mundane individual consumption choices, to the investment decisions of both weak and powerful states. Importantly, their authority extends beyond the economic sphere and into political, as they shape and execute policies and activities for some of the world's most pressing problems. This module explores the multifaceted political roles of corporations, and challenges students to critically reflect on their implications. Drawing upon international relations, political economy, and global governance literatures, it analyses the corporation theoretically, but also empirically drawing upon diverse case studies ranging from environmental sustainability and development, to war-making and peacekeeping.

20 credits

Cosmopolitanism

Cosmopolitanism is the idea that the world should in some sense be understood as a single political entity. 

This module will engage with ‘cosmopolitanism’ from the perspective of normative political theory. It will start by discussing the historical origins of cosmopolitanism, from the Cynics in Ancient Greece to Immanuel Kant and will then move to a discussion of the contemporary wave of cosmopolitanism theorising that began in the latter part of the 20th century. 

There have been two core strands to this wave: 

claims about the global scope of justice

claims about the need for a global democracy

Both strands have come in for considerable criticism: 

Is justice really global in scope?

Is it an idea that belongs within the state or nation? 

Do we really need a global democracy, and is it feasible? 

Does cosmopolitanism imply a world state? 

Is the whole notion of cosmopolitanism dangerously imperialistic? 

During the module students will discuss all of these questions, and more.

20 credits

Framing Politics? Economic Ideas as Political Weapons

Throughout the history of capitalism political battlelines and agendas have been set by economic ideas and forms of knowledge being used as political weapons to frame what can be said, done and thought by whom. In this module students will learn how political actors have used economic ideas across time to construct institutions and policies, empower and advantage certain social groupings over others, create shared understandings and expectations amongst citizens, and project (implicit) conceptions of justice. Students will come to an appreciation of how economic thought has shaped politics past and present, and how and why ideas change over time.

20 credits

Global Politics of Forced Migration

Armed conflicts, persecutions, and disasters cause people to be forcibly displaced, both nationally and internationally. By the end of 2022, there were 100 million forcibly displaced people according to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). Forced displacement, particularly asylum, has also received more attention from the media and decision-makers. In this module, we will discuss the politics involved in these forced displacement situations. 

You will be provided with a comprehensive view of global forced displacement topics including asylum, refugee children, gender, family reunification, externalisation strategies, environmental displacement, and internally displaced people (IDP). Throughout this module, we will reflect on the following questions:

Who is a refugee? How do states create and employ different categories to classify forced displaced people? What are the implications of these classifications for forcibly displaced people?

Which actors and structures constitute the global governance regime of forced displacement? 

What are the power and constraints of international organisations working on forced displacement?

By studying the asylum systems in Europe, Africa, and Latin America in a comparative way, you will gain the important tools you need to understand the global forced displacement regime.

20 credits

Marx and Contemporary Marxism

This module will familiarise students with Marx's corpus and enable them to evaluate key historical processes-such as the development of capitalism and modernity, the birth of the nation-state and the international system-through a Marxist lens. The first part of the module surveys the development of Marx's thought against the background of the socio-economic and political transformations of the nineteenth century. The second part focuses on thematic issues, reviewing how Marx engaged with the questions of strategy, mobilisation, gender, culture, imperialism, and colonialism. This puts Marx and Marxism into dialogue with other critical approaches, including feminism, postcolonialism, and poststructuralism.

20 credits

Narcopolitics

Drugs are big business and politically salient, yet their production, trade, distribution and regulation are understudied in politics. Narcotics are rooted in complex webs of public, private and criminal power, with diverse consequences for growth, development, security and health. This module explores this evolving panorama: it traces the political evolution of therapeutic/psychotropic substances from the opium wars to prohibition, before analysing the 'War on Drugs', the attendant creation of mafia violence, and the emergence of 'narco-states'. Later classes address contemporary experiments in legalisation and decriminalisation, the development of licit recreational narcotics industries, and the implications for the global prohibitionist architecture.

20 credits

Pandemics and Panics: Health, Security and Global Politics

In today's globalized world, infectious diseases and other health issues have increasingly come to be seen as security threats - a shift that has challenged traditional notions of what 'Security Studies' is all about. This module seeks to provide an understanding of the contemporary politics of health and security, identifying the health issues which have been seen as security threats and the major policy responses to them. The module locates health and disease within the key approaches to Security Studies (including state-centric and human security approaches), and requires students to critically engage with the politics and ethics of securitizing health.

20 credits

Parliamentary Studies

This module focuses on how parliaments and legislatures operate and is founded on the basis of theoretically-informed but policy-relevant teaching. It therefore attempts to provide students with a sense of why cultures, traditions and informal relationships matter as much (if not more) than formal procedures. Although the House of Commons and the House of Lords provide the main institutional focus for this module students will be encouraged to adopt a comparative approach whenever possible and to situate their analysis within an appreciation of the changing role of parliament within evolving frameworks of multi-level governance.

20 credits

Party Politics: Competition, Strategies & Campaigns

This module provides an in-depth analysis of party politics. It offers a detailed exposition of the multiple issues related with parties, looking at the interactions both within and outside parties. The module covers key aspects of party politics such as the different types of parties, their organization, party membership, types of party systems, political competition and issue positioning, campaign strategies, formation of new parties, the effects of cleavages, coalition formation, party financing and the number of parties.

20 credits

Peacekeeping, State-building and International Intervention

This module looks at the way international intervention has changed in recent years. It draws on a number of different areas - humanitarian intervention, peacekeeping, development and state-building. It draws these areas together by exploring what they have in common and how there has been a shift in the way that international intervention deals with these issues. In particular, the international community has moved from direct involvement towards a form of governance that operates from a distance by encouraging local ownership, capacity building and resilience.

20 credits

Political Psychology: The Personal Side of Politics

This module covers the major theories and research paradigms in the exciting subfield of Political Psychology. Rather than reviewing what happens in politics (e.g. who wins an election) or how it happens (e.g. who votes for whom), we will look at why it happens by studying the psychology of politics at the micro level (e.g. the personality of politicians), the meso level (e.g. the ideological and moral foundations of political parties), and the macro level (e.g. motivated reasoning, racism and prejudice, mass political behaviour and the influence of the media).

20 credits

Politics and the Quality of Life

This module aims to provide students with an understanding of contemporary political debates on quality of life issues and their relation to philosophical traditions within and beyond the main British political parties. This includes analysis of how quality of life is defined and measured in different contexts and relates this debate to long-standing debates on poverty, social exclusion and social capital. Attention is paid to the quality of life aspects of public policies.

20 credits

Practical Politics: How to Make Policy and Influence People

This course will provide a practical, hands on account of how policy is formulated, implemented and why it sometimes doesn't work. Focussing on environmental politics, the course draws on the experiences of policy experts including civil servants, lobbyists and politicians. It will an assessment that mirrors tasks routinely undertaken by those within or seeking to influence government.

20 credits

Public Policy and Democratic Politics

Recent years have seen a tide of pressures impact on policy makers. Fuelling distrust and disaffection with public policy making, populist politicians have blamed civil servants for alleged corruption. Political leaders have also pushed for fundamental changes in how states operate. From the bottom up, social movements have put pressure on policy makers to revolutionise racial and gender equality, and respond to climate catastrophe. Technological innovations confront policy makers with a new and alienating future.

Amidst a plethora of global crises, and with historically tight budgets and rapidly reducing timeframes, policy makers at multiple levels, from transnational bodies to local authorities, are now under extreme pressure to deliver. They need to find solutions for sustainability, stop pandemics, end inequality and protect fundamental rights. How can they make radical change happen? This module examines precisely this question. Students will gain a nuanced understanding of the pressures everyday policy makers face and how they manage these pressures with the aim of successfully implementing radical shifts in how we respond to the most pressing policy issues of our time.

 



 

20 credits

Research Project 1

This module allows students to research and explore in-depth a topic studied on a semester one module. Students will meet with their supervisor individually, to undertake research and be assessed on the basis of a 5,000 word project.

20 credits

Research Project 2

This module allows students to research and explore in-depth a topic studies on a semester one module. Students will meet with their supervisor individually, to undertake research and be assessed on the basis of a 5,000-word project. The subject/specialised topic studied in Research Project 2 must be different to the topic studied in Research Project 1.

20 credits

Sexual Violence in Armed Conflict

This module will address when, why, and how widespread sexual violence occurs in armed conflicts. The module will
(1) examine how academics and international actors understand and research what sexual violence is and why it occurs in certain conflicts;
(2) assess the international efforts to prosecute and prevent sexual violence in armed conflict; and
(3) undertake in-depth case study analysis to assess the various long-term consequences of sexual violence in armed conflict for individuals, communities, and processes of reconciliation.
Resultantly the module will assess what can be done to address this security issue and its numerous violent consequences.

20 credits

State and Society in China

In this module, we examine relations between the party-state and society in contemporary China. You will explore this topic through a number of themes, such as resistance, 'civil society', gender, online expression, censorship and self-censorship, repression, responsiveness, and inequality. Through doing so, you will engage in important recent debates about China's political development.

20 credits

Terrorism, Violence and the State

This module aims to provide students with an understanding of the nature and legitimacy of forms of protest against the modern state. In particular the module focuses on issues of contemporary terrorism. However, in order to understand the nature and motivations of terrorism it is necessary to understand the nature of the modern state and other, non-violent forms of protest such as civil disobedience.

20 credits

The Ethics of Political Leadership

This module investigates the ethics of political leadership via an engagement with the western tradition of political thought and contemporary analytical political theory. Its overall objective is to enable students to analyse and evaluate normative arguments on the significance and function of political leaders in contemporary politics. The module examines competing theories of leadership in their historical and intellectual contexts and a number of issues of contemporary ethical significance, including the problem of 'dirty hands', the nature of political integrity, and the ethics of political compromise. The approach is theoretical and philosophical and examples of political leaders will be used to highlight strengths and weaknesses of competing theories of leadership, and to emphasise their ideological assumptions and implications.

20 credits

The Politics of Security

This module explores the changing character of security studies and global (in)security, examining the proliferation of discourses and practices of security, threat, and risk in contemporary society. It introduces a range of advanced theoretical debates about security, exploring key concepts (including discourse, practice, identity, emancipation, securitization, and risk) and how they might help us to make sense of security politics by looking at a range of cases (such as terrorism, energy security, religion, technology and development). It asks you to think critically about the function of security, and the ethical and analytical assumptions that shape how security is theorised/practiced.

20 credits

War, Peace and Justice

This module provides a practical and theoretical overview of contemporary war, peace and justice. It explores key conversations, issues and conceptual responses relating to: the challenges and ethics of researching war; the construction of ethics and notions of justice in war and peace; the politics of technology in contemporary warfare; the politics of peace, resistance and pacifism; the politics of war, memory and commemoration; embodied and emotional registers of war; and the politics of death and grievability. Students will explore the practice, experience, representation and cultural imaginary of war in the 21st century and consider implications for peace and justice.

20 credits