This year Dr Will Jones and Dr Ibrahim Halawi are launching a new second year course, PR2460: Politics Outside the West. This course will bridge our first year general provision and our third year courses on the politics of Africa, the Middle East, China, South Asia, and – as of next year – Latin America.
Centrally, the new course is about how the non-white world got to where it is today. Starting with the discovery of silver in Potósi in 1545, which turbo-charges colonialism into a truly global phenomenon, we take the long view on half a millennium of the rise and fall of Empires, the expansion of global capitalism, anti-colonial revolts, revolutions from Haiti to Iran, and colonial wars from Bengal in 1757 to Vietnam in the 1970s. Themes will the rise of nationalism and anti-colonial resistance, the collapse of European empires, the ‘hot Cold war’ in the global South, economic development and dependency, modernisation, and the rise of new challengers to the dominance of the West. Along the way, we’ll be introducing students to a range of radical post-colonial thinkers and theorists, who give us essential perspectives into the contemporary world.
The twenty weeks are organised around 20 key events or processes in the formation of the modern post-colonial world:
1. Open Veins of Latin America: discovering Silver in Potósi
2. Civilised and Savage: The Atlantic Slave Trade
3. A fit of absent-mindedness? The Battle of Plassey, the East India Company, and the Conquest of India
4. 1793: The Black Jacobins: Revolution in Haiti
5. Catching up? the Ottoman Empire and Meiji Japan
6. Carving Up the African Cake: The Congress of Berlin
7. The Iron Wall: Israel and Palestine
8. China in Revolt: the Century of Humiliation to the Communist Revolution
9. The Souls of Black Folk: The Pan-African Congress to Decolonisation in Africa.
10. Retreat from Empire: the Suez Crisis and the Partition of India
11. The Cold War in Global Perspective
12. Every Cuban Must Know How to Shoot: Revolution in Cuba
13. The Post-Colonial State #1: Varieties of Authoritarianism
14. Resisting the Cold War: the Bandung Conference and Non-Alignment
15. The Post-Colonial State #2: Identity, Ethnicity, Faith
16. Poisoned Wells: Yom Kippur, the OPEC Embargo, and Structural Adjustment
17. The Post-Colonial State #3: Democracy’s Third Wave
18. Days of Rage: from the Arab Spring to the Refugee Crisis
19. 1997: Two Systems, One Nation: the Transfer of Hong Kong
20. 2010: Days of Rage: From the Arab Spring to the Refugee Crisis
