HIS 110: Globalization

Globalization is a recent idea that describes a old process, namely interconnection and integration between
world cultures. Forged by migration, politics, religion, trade, war, disease, and intellectual and scientific
exchange, global connections have been developing for centuries and have transformed societies across
the world. But globalization has also been incoherent, unexpected, unintentional, and violent. Our modern
globalized world was forged less by visionary economic thinking or utopian social ideas and more by
conquest, illness, intolerance, and serendipity.
In this course, we will explore how the world globalized in spite of itself. Across five centuries
between 1500 and the present, we will study how new connections often led to unforeseen conflicts, and
why efforts to impose cultures often led to unintended hybridization.