Political History

This course provides an introduction to the general political history of the modern world. It focuses on the conceptual and methodological framework of political history itself, as well as its place within the broader historical approach.

The main aim of the course is to familiarize students with selected most important events, developments and processes that shaped the political history of the world since the French Revolution.

In effect the course offers basic understanding of the most important trajectories of global political history in the 19th and 20th centuries.

[b]Conceptual framework of political history[/b]

- Political history versus social, economic and cultural history

- History of politics

- Historical politics

- Politics of memory

- Attempts to periodize the modern history

[b]Late 18th century and the Age of Revolutions:[/b]:

- Partitions of Poland (1772-1795)

- Decline of the Age of Discoveries (1770s-1780s)

- American Revolution (1763-1783)

- French Revolution (1789-1799)

- Hawkesbury and Nepean Wars (1794-1816) and Musket Wars (1807-1837)

- Napoleonic Wars (1799-1815)

- Congress of Vienna (1815)

- Spanish American wars of independence (1808-1833)

- Decline and modernization of the Ottoman Empire (1789-1908)

- Revolutions of the 1820s: Spain (1820-1823), Portugal (1820-1821), Kingdom of Two Sicilies (1820), Greece (1821-1829), Sardinia (1821), Russia (1825), Argentina (1828)

- Revolutions of the 1830s: France (1830), Belgium (1830-1831), Italy (1830-1831), Poland (1830-1831), Liberal Wars (1828-1834), Switzerland (1830)

- Revolutions of 1848-1849 in Europe: Italian states, German states, France, Spain, Denmark, Austrian and Hungary, Sweden, Switzerland, Poland, Romania, Belgium, United Kingdom

- Revolutions of 1840s-1850s in Latin America: turmoil in Colombia (1848-1885), Chilean revolution (1851), Praieira Revolt (1848-1852)

[b]19th/20th century and the time of new imperialism, new colonialism and nationalism:[/b]

- Texas Revolution (1835-1836) and Mexican-American War (1845-1848)

- Opium Wars (1839-1860)

- Unification of Italy (1848-1871)

- Taiping Rebellion (1850-1864)

- Modernization of Japan and Meiji Restoration (1850s-1860s)

- Indian Rebellion (1857)

- American Civil War (1861-1865)

- The American Frontier (1860s-1910s)

- French intervention in Mexico (1861-1867)

- Paraguayan War (1864-1870)

- Austro-Prussian War (1866)

- Franco-Prussian War and unification of Germany (1870-1871)

- April Uprising (1876), Russo-Turkish War (1877-1878) and the Congress of Berlin (1878)

- Scramble for Africa (1870s-1880s)

- Boer Wars (1880s-1900s)

- War of the Pacific (1879-1883)

- Cuban War for Independence (1895-1898) and Spanish-American War (1898)

- Boxer Rebellion (1899-1901)

- Thousand Days' War (1899-1903)

- Philippine Revolution (1896-1898) and Philippine-American War (1899-1902)

- Russo-Japanese War (1904-1905)

[b]Decay of the Pax Britannica and the World War I:[/b]

- Revolution in Russia (1905)

- Persian Constitutional Revolution (1905-1911)

- Mexican Revolution (1910-1920)

- Balkan Wars (1912-1913)

- World War I (1914-1918)

- March and October Revolutions in Russia (1917) and Russian Civil War (1917-1923)

- Treaty of Versailles (1919) and the League of Nations (1919-1946)

[b]Interwar period:[/b]

- Irish War of Independence (1919-1921) and the Irish Civil War (1922-1923)

- March on Rome and the power seize in Italy by fascists (1920s-1930s)

- Foundation of the communist power in Soviet Union (1920s-1930s)

- Washington Naval Conference (1921-1922)

- Rise of authoritarianism in Europe (1920s-1930s)

- Chinese Civil War (1927-1950)

- Chaco War (1932-1935)

- Power seize in Germany by Nazis (1930s)

- Spanish Civil War (1936-1939)

- Great Terror in the Soviet Union (1930s)

- Second Sino-Japanese War (1937-1945)

- Anschluss of Austria and Munich Agreement (1938)

[b]World War 2[/b]

[b]Postwar and the Cold War:[/b]

- Foundation of the United Nations (1945)

- Decolonisation (1945-1970s) and Year of Africa (1960)

- Greek Civil War (1946-1949)

- First Indochina War (1946-1954)

- Partition of India (1947) and First Indo-Pakistani War (1947-1949)

- Berlin Blockade and the beginning of the Cold War (1948)

- Arab-Israeli War (1948)

- Foundation of NATO (1949)

- Korean War (1950)

- Cuban Revolution (1952-1959)

- European integration (1952-1993)

- Civil rights movement in USA (1954-1968)

- Algerian Wars (1954-1962)

- Vietnam War (1955-1975)

- Suez Crisis (1956)

- Hungarian Uprising (1956) and Polish October (1956)

- Foundation of the French 5th Republic (1958)

- Portuguese Colonial War (1961-1974)

- Cuban Missle Crisis (1962)

- Sino-Indian War (1962)

- Second Indo-Pakistani War (1965)

- Six-Day War (1967)

- Protests of 1968 in United States, Latin America, Western and Central-Eastern Europe

- The Troubles (1960s-1998)

- Sino-Soviet border conflict (1969)

- Third Indo-Pakistani War (1971)

- Bangladesh Liberation War (1971)

- Coup d'etat in Chile (1973)

- Yom Kippur War (1973)

- Helsinki Accords (1975)

- Iranian Revolution (1979)

- Afghan Conflicts, Soviet-Afghan War and the start of the decay of Soviet Union (1970s-1989)

- "Solidarity" and martial law in Poland (1980-1981)

- Iran-Iraq war (1980-1989)

- Falklands war (1982)

- "Star Wars" and the final stage of the Cold War (1983-1990)

- Political reforms in the Soviet Union: Gorbachov, Glasnost and Perestroika (1985-1990)

- First Intifada (1987-1993)

- Revolutions of 1989 and the Autumn of Nations (1989-1990): Poland, Hungary, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, Romania, Yugoslavia, Albania

- Tiananmen Square protests and massacre (1989)

- Reunification of Germany (1990)

- Gulf War (1990-1991)

- Dissolution of the Soviet Union (1991)

Students are expected to read selected chapters of at least one of the books and/or selected articles from the basic literature listed below adequate to the topic of particular classes. All the literature is available online via the course's Google Classroom platform.

[b]Basic literature:[/b]

Jerry H. Bentley (ed.), [i]The Oxford Handbook of World History[/i], Oxford Handbooks 2012

Michael Bernhard, Jan Kubik (eds.), [i]Twenty Years After Communism: The Politics of Memory and Commemoration[/i], Oxford University Press 2014

Frank Bongiorno, [i]Dreamers and Schemers: A political history of Australia[/i], La Trobe University Press 2022

Jane Burbank, Frederick Cooper, [i]Empires in world history: Power and the politics of difference[/i], Princeton University Press 2010

Francis D. Cogliano, [i]Revolutionary Amercia 1763-1815: Political History[/i], Routledge 2009 (2nd edition)

Arthur Cotterell, [i]A History of Southeast Asia[/i], Marshall Cavendish 2014

David M. Craig, [i]'High Politics' and the 'New Political History'[/i], "The Historical Journal" 2010, vol. 53, no. 2, pp. 453-475

Gordon A. Craig, [i]Political History[/i], "Daedalus" 1971, vol. 100, no. 2, pp. 323-338

Donald T. Critchlow, [i]American political history: a very short introduction[/i], Oxford University Press 2015

Basil Davidson, [i]Modern Africa: A Social and Political History[/i], Routledge 2013 (3rd edition)

Tulio Halperin Donghi, [i]The Contemporary History of Latin America[/i], Duke University Press 2007 (7th edition)

William Doyle, [i]The French Revolution: A Very Short Introduction[/i], Oxford University Press 2001

William J. Duiker, [i]Contemporary World History[/i], Wadsworth 2010 (5th edition)

Sebastian Edwards, [i]Left Behind: Latin America and the False Promise of Populism[/i], The University of Chicago Press 2010

Michael Onyebuchi Eze, [i]The Politics of History in Contemporary Africa[/i], Palgrave Macmillan 2010

Juliet Gardiner (ed.), [i]What is history today?[/i], The Macmillan Press 1988

John A.S. Grenville, [i]A history of the world from twentieth to to the twenty-first century[/i], Routledge 2005

Daniel G. Hall, [i]A history of South-east Asia[/i], The Macmillan Press 1981 (4th edition)

Jeffrey Hebrst, [i]States and Power in Africa: Comparative Lessons in Authority and Control[/i], Princeton University Press 2014

Eric Hobsbawm, [i]The Age of Revolutions 1789-1848[/i], Orion Books 2010

Katherine Hodgkin, Susannah Radstone (eds.), [i]Contested Pasts: The politics of memory[/i], Routledge 2003

Jonathan Holslag, [i]A Political History of the World: Three Thousand Years of War and Peace[/i], Pelican Books 2018

Michael Howard, WM. Roger Louis, [i]The Oxford History of the Twentieth Century[/i], Oxford University Press 1998

Kate Kenski, Kathleen Hall Jamieson, [i]The Oxford Handbook of Political Communication[/i], Oxford University Press 2017

Peter M. Jones, [i]The French Revolution 1787-1804[/i], Routledge 2022 (4th edition)

Richard Ned Lebow, Wulf Kansteiner, Claudio Fodu (eds.), [i]The Politics of Memory in Postwar Europe[/i], Duke University Press 2006

Howard LeRoy Malchow, [i]History and International Relations: From the Ancient World to the 21st Century", Bloomsbury 2020

Katharyne Mitchell, [i]Monuments, Memorials, and the Politics of Memory[/i], "Urban Geography" 2003, vol. 24, no. 5, pp. 442-459

Milton Osborne, [i]Southeast Asia: An Introductory History[/i], Allen&Unwin 2016 (12th edition)

Jurgen Osterhammel, [i]The Transformation of the World: A Global History of the Nineteenth Century[/i], Princeton University Press 2014

Robert R. Palmer, Joel Colton, Lloyd Kramer, [i]A History of the Modern World[/i], McGraw-Hill 2007 (10th edition)

Michael Reid, [i]Forgotten continent: a history of the New Latin America[/i], Yale University Press 2009

Ronald M. Schneider, [i]Latin American Political History: Patterns and Personalities[/i], Routledge 2018

Colin Woodard, [i]American nations: a history of the eleven rival regional cultures of North America[/i], Penguin Books 2012

James D. Wright (ed.), [i]International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences[/i], Elsevier 2015

[b]Additional literature:[/b]

Chris Harman, [i]A People's History of the World[/i], Verso 2017

Howard Zinn, [i]The Politics of History[/i], Beacon Press Boston 1970

[b]Knowledge[/b]:

Students should:

- know and understand the relation between political history and general history, as well as the role of history in politics since late 18th century (K_W01)

- know and understand the human impact on the major political events and global processes since late 18th century in historical perspective and are familiar with its long lasting legacy (K_W02)

- know and understand the changing economic, social and cultural underpins of key events in global political history since late 18th century (K_W04)

[b]Skills[/b]:

Students should:

- be able to analyse the origins and effects of major events in the global political history since late 18th century in comparative manner and explain the role social, economic and cultural structures in those events (K_U01)

- be able to compare different concepts and ideas in global political history since 18th century, as well as analyse the mutual interdependence between key political events and broader social, economic and cultural processes (K_U04)

[b]Social competences[/b]:

Students should:

- be ready to critically approach different visions of global political history since late 18th century (K_K03)

The final grade of the course will result from the total number of earned points:

50 points: 5!

46-49 points: 5

41-45 points: 4+

36-40 points: 4

31-35 points: 3+

26-30 points: 3

25 points and below: 2

Total number of 0-50 points = 0-25 points for the activity assessment + 0-25 points for oral exam

[u]Activity assessment[/u]

For the purpose of the general outcome of the course, student's active participation is required. Participants of the course are expected to attend the classes prepared and ready for active discussions with thoughtful remarks and productive comments based on the literature.

Active participation of each student will be constantly monitored throughout the semester, as well as instantly evaluated and publicly announced at the end of each class. Course conductor's judgement of the student's activity is final and will not be disputed. The final evaluation of the level of performance of each students will be expressed in the following manner:

25 points: active participation in 9 or more classes

20 points: active participation in 7-8 classes

25 points: active participation in 5-6 classes

10 points: active participation in 3-4 classes

5 points: active participation in 1-2 classes

[i]Important note:[/i] Attendance throughout the semester is required. Maximum 2 absences are allowed. Every next unjustified absence results in deduction of 5 points out of the total number of earned points.

[u]Oral exam[/u]

The final oral exam is to be taken by duos or trios of the students at the same time. Each student draws a set of two different questions and delivers in-depth answers to one of their own choice. The list of possible questions contains all points mentioned in the full description of the course section as the subtopics for each main topic. Delivered answers will be graded on an academic scale (2-5!). Given grade will be transformed into points in the following manner:

Make-up exam:

Any student who fails to meet the requirements to pass the course will receive the grade of 2 in first term and will be allowed to take the make-up written exam consisting of a set of different types of questions related to the substance of the course.

The second and final grade of the course will result from the total number of earned points on the make-up exam:

5-5!: 25 points

4+: 20 points

4: 15 points

3+: 10 points

3: 5 points

2: 0 points

[u]Make-up exam[/u]

Any student who fails to meet the requirements to pass the course will receive the grade of 2 in first term and will be allowed to take the make-up written exam consisting of a set of different types of questions related to the substance of the course.

The second and final grade of the course will result from the total number of earned points on the make-up exam:

50 points: 5!

46-49 points: 5

41-45 points: 4+

36-40 points: 4

31-35 points: 3+

26-30 points: 3

25 points and below: 2