HY118      One Unit
Faith, Power and Revolution: Europe and the Wider World, c.1500-c.1800

This information is for the 2025/26 session.

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In this course, students are introduced to the international history of the early modern period by studying the complex political, religious, military and economic relationships between Europe and the wider world. The period between 1500 and 1800 is a crucial period in international history. In political terms, it covers the rise of major dynastic states, with increasingly centralised institutions and concepts, such as absolutism, to promote the authority of the monarch, as well as the challenges to that authority and growing interest in political and social reform, culminating in the revolutions covered at the end of the course. Internationally, the period witnessed the gradual consolidation of leading European powers, as reflected in the Treaty of Westphalia (1648), with formerly peripheral states emerging to vie with older powers by the early eighteenth century. At the same time, the rise of major Islamic empires in Eurasia and the growing contact between Europe and the wider world give students important points of comparison between European and non-European regimes. The intellectual, religious and cultural developments of the period contextualise and rationalise the major political developments. The course discusses the influence of key movements, such as the Renaissance, the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment, which re-ignited an interest in the Classical past and fostered a culture of systemic enquiry into the natural world. Yet religion remained a vital component in the world-view of contemporaries, whether Christian, Muslim or Jewish. This worldview was subject to challenges throughout the period, as during the Reformation, and often sought to impose its own orthodoxy, whether through religiously-motivated conflicts or the persecution or conversion of certain groups. The course seeks to familiarise students with some of the most significant issues and current debates on these aspects of the period. While its scope is necessarily broad in nature, the course will help students to deal with the dynamics of continuity and change over a long stretch of time.

1 hours of classes in the Spring Term.
10 hours of lectures and 10 hours of classes in the Winter Term.
10 hours of lectures and 10 hours of classes in the Autumn Term.

This course has a reading week in Week 6 of Autumn and Winter Term.

One essay in the Autumn Term. One essay in the Winter Term. There may also be a mock exam in the Spring Term.

Euan Cameron (ed.), Early Modern Europe:  An Oxford History (2001)

K. N. Chaudhuri, Asia before Europe: Economy and Civilisation of the Indian Ocean from the Rise of Islam to 1750 (1990)

John C. Corbally and James Casey Sullivan, The Early Modern World, 1450-1750:  Seeds of Modernity (2022)

Stephen F. Dale, The Muslim Empires of the Ottomans, Safavids and Mughals (2010)

Richard M. Eaton, India in the Persianate Age, 1000-1765 (2019)

Marshall Hodgson, Rethinking World History: Essays on Europe, Islam and World History (1993)

Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict from 1500-2000 (1989)

Beat Kümin (ed.), The European World 1500-1800:  An Introduction to Early Modern History, 4th Edition (2023)

Charles Parker, Global Interactions in the Early Modern Age, 1400–1800 (2010)

John F. Richards, The Unending Frontier: An Environmental History of the Early Modern World (2005)

Merry E, Wiesner-Hanks, Early Modern Europe, 1450-1789, 3rd Edition (2023)

Merry E. Wiesner-Hanks, What is Early Modern History? (2021)

Exam (100%), duration: 180 Minutes in the Spring exam period