Dr Alan Sked, E503

For MA/MSc History of International Relations, MSc Theory and History of International Relations, MSc Race, Ethnicity and Post-Colonial Studies, LSE-Columbia University Double Degree in International and World History and LSE-PKU Double Degree in MSc International Affairs.

This course is designed to enable students both to examine historical change over a much longer period than usual and to examine how human beings behave in contexts which are not exclusively-or even mainly-political. The focus of the course is the individual as a member of a race, family, or sexual group, rather than as a political animal. The subjects chosen interact at all stages of history: slavery involved the enslavement of different races and the need to justify this by inventing theories of race; sexual fears often conditioned relations between races; while the sexual exploitation of slaves has been a constant throughout history. The advent of Christianity certainly altered attitudes and practices with regard to all three; but change came at different times and at different speeds in each distinct area of study. This course examines how and why.

The course concentrates on the following themes: attitudes towards race in the classical world; Christianity and race; western attitudes to slavery; the rise and fall of the slave trade; ethnic perils and imperialism; decolonization; anti-semitism; scientific racism; fascism/nazism; racism as a contemporary problem; multi-culturalism; race relations and immigration; sexual attitudes in the classical world; sex in the Christian era; sexual revolutions; the history of women; the history of gays.

One one-hour lecture per week and one one-hour seminar per week for twenty weeks.

Four essays and some class papers during the academic year.

A detailed reading list will be distributed at the start of term. Key books include; John Boswell, Christianity, Social Tolerance and Homosexuality. Gay People in Western Europe from the beginning of the Christian Era to the Fourteenth Century; Leonie Archer (Ed), Slavery and other forms of Unfree Labour; Robin Blackwell, The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery,1776- 1848; and Michael Burleigh & Wolfgang Wippermann, The Racial State. Germany, 1939-1945.

A three-hour written exam in the ST, in which the candidates will have to answer three questions.