HST6766 - The First Age of Globalisation: Money, Race, and Empire 1850-1933

The period between the American Civil War and the Global Great Depression was an era of unprecedented global interconnectedness, not unlike our own. Telegraph wires, steamships, and railways crossed oceans and continental frontiers, fundamentally changing how human beings understood their relationship to each other and to their world. Students in this Special Subject will explore this period from a variety of perspectives, moving far afield - from London, Buenos Aires, and Bombay, to Chicago, Cairo, and Nanjing, from the prairies and mountains of North America to the Indian sub-continent, the Nile valley, and the hinterlands of Latin America. We will encounter a diverse cast of characters, including imperial officials, racialized labourers, department-store consumers, indigenous peoples, British financiers, industrial workers, indebted farmers, cosmopolitan intellectuals, and more.