Masters of Art in History - Encounters and Exchanges Track

Encounters & Exchanges

Description: Students examine the themes of encounter and exchange throughout history. Cross-cultural encounters have been central to the human experience since antiquity and have sometimes manifested themselves on the large scale, as is event with the Silk Roads, the Atlantic Slave Trade, and, most recently, globalization. Trade, missionary activity, and imperialism are other avenues by which the world’s diverse peoples have interacted.

Courses:

Core

HIST 5307: Intellectual History
HIST 5338: Empires in World History
HIST 5360: African Environmental History
HIST 5370: Colonial America
HIST 5377: The American West
HIST 5381: World Historiography
HIST 5384: Texas history
HIST 5385: Latin American History
HIST 5396: Cross-Cultural Interactions

Electives

HIST 5320: Mesoamerican Civilizations
HIST 5342: The Japanese Colonial Empire
HIST 5359: The Audible Past
HIST 5375: Recent America, 1876-1933
HIST 5388: Public History
HIST 5389: Great Britain & The British Empire

Animating Questions:

The following animating questions are provided to 1) give an overview of general ideas that animate the field, and 2) demonstrate examples of the type of questions students may wish to address in their portfolio’s synthetic essay.

How does commodity chain analysis make visible the social relations that shape production, distribution, and consumption of a commodity in a given industry, region, or nation?
Recorded sound radically transformed the intangible performance of music into a new type of commodity. How did musical styles and idioms etched onto disks reverberate around the globe and provide a soundtrack to decolonization?
Considering the long-term context of the history of Mesoamerica, why might the arrival of Europeans look less unusual to historians, and not as surprising to the indigenous peoples of Mesoamerica, as we might think?
Define the “civilizing mission” and its historiographical turns.
What was the role of the Ottoman Empire within the networks of intellectual and commercial exchange that characterized the early modern world?
Were “Colonization” and “Age of Exploration” exclusively European phenomena?
What were the ways in which the early modern empires interact with each other beyond military encounters?
Is there a fundamental difference of kind, pattern, and/or intensity in cross-cultural interactions in the pre-modern and modern periods? (Consider, too, the varying definitions of modern and pre-modern).
Have Europeans and Europe always—and naturally—been at the center of long-distance cross-cultural interplay?
What is the distinction between cultural and cross-cultural?
What relationships have obtained between economic growth and the growth of governments?
How can economic growth in history be described? What are major topics in monetary history?

Readings Bibliography:

This is a non-comprehensive bibliography provided so that students can gain a sense of the type of work that represents this field.

Abu-Lughod, Janet L. Before European Hegemony: The World System A.D. 1250–1350. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1989.
Allsen, Thomas T. Culture and Conquest in Mongol Eurasia. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2004.
Aslanian, Sebouh David. From the Indian Ocean to the Mediterranean: The Global Trade Networks of Armenian Merchants from New Julfa. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011.
Attali, Jacques. Noise: the political economy of music. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985.
Barkey, Karen. Empire of Difference: The Ottomans in Comparative Perspective. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2008.
Bentley, Jerry H. Old World Encounters: Cross-Cultural Contacts and Exchanges in Pre-Modern Times. New York—Oxford: Oxford UP, 1993.
Bonfil Batalla, Guillermo. México profundo: Reclaiming a civilization. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1996.
Brook, Timothy. Vermeer’s Hat: The Seventeenth Century and the Dawn of the Global World. Bloomsbury, 2008.
Cannadine, David. Ornamentalism: How the British Saw Their Empire. Oxford University Press, 2001.
Casale, Giancarlo. The Ottoman Age of Exploration. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2011.
Constable, Olivia Remie. Trade and Traders in Muslim Spain: The Commercial Realignment of the Iberian Peninsula 900-1500. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994.
Crosby, Alfred. The Columbian Exchange. Greenwood, 1972.
Crosby, Alfred. Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900-1900. Second edition. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2015.
Davis, Mike. Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World. London—New York: Verso, 2001.
Einhorn, Robin. American Taxation, American Slavery. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006.
Elliott, J.H. Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in America 1492-1830.New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007.
Faruqui, Munis. The Princes of the Mughal Empire, 1504–1719. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2015.
Ferreira, Roquinaldo. Cross-Cultural Exchange in the Atlantic World: Angola and Brazil during the Era of the Slave Trade. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2012.
Fischer, David Hackett. Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America. Oxford University Press, 1991.
Foltz, Richard. Religions of the Silk Road: Premodern Patterns of Globalization.2n d ed. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.
Gilder, George. The Scandal of Money: Why Wall Street Recovers But the Economy Never Does. Washington: Regnery, 2016.
Hamalaimen, Pekka. The Comanche Empire. Yale University Press, 2008).
Hopkins, A. G. ed. Globalization in World History. New York—London: W.W Norton, 2002.
Gootenberg, Paul. Andean Cocaine: The Making of a Global Drug. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008.
Higgs, Robert. Crisis and Leviathan: Critical Episodes in the Growth of American Government. New York: Oxford University Press, 1987.
Hostetler, Laura. Qing Colonial Enterprise: Ethnography and Cartography in Early Modern China. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005.
Khodarkovsky, Michael. Russia's Steppe Frontier: The Making of a Colonial Empire, 1500-1800. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2004.
Landes, David S. The Unbound Prometheus: Technological Change and Industrial Development in Western Europe from 1750 to the Present. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969.
McCloskey, Deirdre N. Bourgeois Dignity: Why Economics Can’t Explain the Modern World. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011.
McCormick, Michael. Origins of the European Economy: Communications and Commerce AD 300-900. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001.
McNeill, J.R. and McNeill, William H. The Human Web: A Bird’s-eye View of World History. New York: W.W. Norton, 2003.
Morgan, David. The Mongols. 2n d edition. Oxford: Blackwell, 2007.
Morgan, Jennifer. Laboring Women: Reproduction and Gender in New World Slavery. University of Pennsylvania Penn Press, 2004.
Newitt, Malyn. Portugal in European and World History. London, UK: Reaktion Books, 2009.
Norton, Marcy. Sacred Gifts, Profane, Pleasures: A History of Tobacco and Chocolate in the Atlantic World. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2008.
Nussbaum, Felicity A., ed. The Global Eighteenth Century.Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003.
Ogborn, Miles. Global Lives: Britain and the World, 1550-1800. Cambridge University Press, 2008.
Payne, Richard E. A State of Mixture: Christians, Zoroastrians, and Iranian Political Culture in Late Antiquity. Oakland: University of California Press, 2015.
Pomeranz, Kenneth. The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy. Princeton University Press, 2000.
Pritchard, James S. In Search of Empire: The French in the Americas, 1670-1730. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004.
Restall, Matthew. Seven Myths of the Spanish Conquest. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003.
Robins, Nicholas A. Mercury, Mining, and Empire: The Human and Ecological Cost of Silver Mining in the Andes. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011.
Rozbicki, Michel Jan and George Ndege eds. Cross-Cultural History and the Domestication of Otherness. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012.
Said, Edward. Pantheon, 1978.
Scott, James C. Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997.
Streusand, Douglas. Islamic Gunpowder Empires: Ottomans, Safavids, and Mughals. New York: Routledge, 2011.
Stoler, Ann Laura and Frederick Cooper. Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World. University of California Press, 1997.
Timberlake, Richard H. Monetary Policy in the United States: An Intellectual and Institutional History. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993.
Topik, Steven, ed. From Silver to Cocaine: Latin American Commodity Chains and the Building of the World Economy, 1500–2000. Duke University Press, 2006.
Trentmann, Frank. Empire of Things: How We Became a World of Consumers. Harper, 2016.
Trivellato, Francesca, Leor Halevi, and Cátia Antunes eds. Religion and Trade: Cross-Cultural Exchanges in World History, 1000-1900. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2014.
Varlık, Nükhet. Plague and Empire in the Early Modern Mediterranean World: The Ottoman Experience. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2015.
Williamson, Jeffrey G. American Growth and the Balance of Payments. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1963.
Willis, Susan. “Learning from the Banana.” American Quarterly 39, no. 4 (1987): 586-600.