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The twenty-first century is emerging as a disorientating period of deep and visible fragmentation and disintegration: climate change and ecological degradation, global financial instability, normalized demagoguery, xenophobic political movements, buckling global institutional arrangements, rocketing inequality, ideological violence, failing states of various stripes, opaque confrontations between nuclear powers, poorly regulated global corporations of extraordinary reach, and attacks on reason and knowledge. The distance from 2023 to before the Brexit referendum (2016), let alone the fall of the Berlin Wall (1989), or the end of the second world war (1945) appears bewildering and disturbing, to take some mostly western examples.

How can history help?

This module will try to steady nerves by addressing four big questions. First, how can historians stop being so homocentric, when we understand better than ever that humans are not the only forces shaping history? We will think about climate, chemicals, animals, and more as historical subjects. Second, how do humans rationalize their worlds? We will think about how human rationalities work to make worlds. Third, how do humans project those rationalities out into societies as institutions? You will spend most of your lives in institutions of one sort or another, so you need to understand how they work, break, and can be remade. Fourth, how have humans responded to systemic challenges to their societies historically, and how might better understanding our past rationalities and institutions in the world help us now?

This is an extremely wide-ranging module which draws on prehistory, yesterday’s news, and much in-between globally to address these questions (we don’t go chronologically though). It is highly interdisciplinary and uses many other social and historical sciences.